I wonder how much of the length cutting was just from being able to remove the ICE and all its associated components.

And it's a shuttle, not a line bus, tbf

I'll bet semi trailers contribute as well, it is rarely a single thing.

Also because everything in the US is spread out except for urban areas, mass transit just won't work well for a large part of the population. Didn't help that what transit infrastructure existed came under assault by the oil/car companies of the time, so many places went full automobile.

The abhorrently large firetrucks which increase the response times before they can get out to fires, because things are more spread out. The abhorrently large firetrucks which siphon away more and more funding, compared to smaller firetrucks, and require more manpower to operate, meaning each fire station individually eats up more funding per unit, meaning we can have less fire stations, further decreasing response times.

An increase in response times which increases the size of fires, requiring more and more abhorrently large firetrucks. The abhorrently large firetrucks which cannot respond quickly enough to wildfires and so will allow them to grow more rapidly out of control, perpetuating more wildfire based ecology, more plants which require fire to grow and will encourage further fire. The abhorrently large firetrucks which are not as cute as small firetrucks.

Those firetrucks? Those are the ones we have to build bigger roads for? some people do legitimately believe this shit, too, hoo lee, kill me

interesting thing about fire trucks… i asked a fire fighter friend from the US if he knew why their trucks were different to everywhere else in the world, and apparently it’s because US infrastructure is built for military use… if elsewhere in the world had the heavy duty roads, we might also have the heavier fire trucks

No medieval city claims that.

Its a common enough argument in the UK. I've even seen a few instances in which bus stops have been taken down because people were complaining about the traffic they created (small street with no passing lane, so when the bus stops, the dozen cars behind it are bottled up).

None of the busybodies trying to sabotage the local transit system seems to want to recognize the twelve cars behind the bus as the problem, of course.

I've seen those. In the suburbs here they often have call-ahead pickup to specific locations, like the only remaining mall or the library.

My hometown has very similar ones and they can hold up to 25 people adding up seating and standing space, don't underestimate them

They don't need to sit that many. It's not an interstate route that runs thrice a day and carries 300 people in each run. For it to be an alternative to cars you need to have lots of route and they need to be quite frequent - which means less people in each minibus.

Public transportation is cool, giant SUVs are not.

chokes en Francais