The city bus uses tires with a harder rubber and dimensions such that the pressure at the road is less, plus its normal driving patterns have less wear than typical Tesla use.
To make those sorts of calculations easy, you can ignore all the pressure/usage/etc nonsense and just do basic math on tire dimensions (including min/max tread depth and width, not just radius, though I typically ignore siping and whatnot) and typical longevity. Volume lost per mile driven is basic high-school arithmetic, and the only real questions are regarding data quality and whether the self-imposed constraints (e.g., examining real-world wear rather than wear given optimal driving or something) are reasonable.
> The city bus uses tires with a harder rubber and dimensions such that the pressure at the road is less
Harder rubber seems like it could make a difference, but then you could also put tires with harder rubber on a car.
You can get a heavier vehicle to have the same pressure at the road by using more and bigger tires, but then the problem is that the tires are bigger and there are more of them.
> plus its normal driving patterns have less wear than typical Tesla use.
Isn't a city bus constantly starting and stopping, both as a result of city traffic and picking up and dropping off passengers?
> To make those sorts of calculations easy, you can ignore all the pressure/usage/etc nonsense and just do basic math on tire dimensions (including min/max tread depth and width, not just radius, though I typically ignore siping and whatnot) and typical longevity.
I tried plugging these in and it still comes out as a 6-wheel commercial bus has several times the tire wear as a 4-wheel light truck, rather than being the same.
And I expected the difference to be even more, but I guess that goes to show how much the weight argument is motivated reasoning if ~7x the weight is only ~3x the tire wear and then people are complaining about something which is only ~1.2x the weight.
>I tried plugging these in and it still comes out as a 6-wheel commercial bus has several times the tire wear as a 4-wheel light truck, rather than being the same.
Pardon me if I ask the obvious question, but did you divide your result by the average number of people moved? Because that's the actual utility of mass vs. individual transport. I would find it rather surprising if tire wear was the one measure were buses didn't win out.
A typical city bus has something like 2500 cubic inches of tread that it burns through, compared to 650 for a Model Y. Tires typically last 500k miles, vs 50k, generously, for a Model Y. I'd said "comparable," but that was just to avoid argument. From a tire wear perspective, you're better driving a bus even if you're the only person on it.
I saw this one and figured out where it came from. Google's AI thing says bus tires can last up to 500,000 miles. You follow the link and it says that buses can last up to 500,000 miles, with no implication that they do so on a single set of tires.
Ehh you can't really just put harder tires on a car and leave it at that. Harder tires means less grip, and that is a serious setback and much less safe in a car than the typical bus that runs city routes at lower speeds and less adverse road conditions.
Tire temperature also will play a big roll in tire wear, and I wouldn't expect bus tires to get very hot only rolling half the time and at a lower speed than the typical car.
And of course you also gotta factor in passenger count. Buses generally have more than just 1 or 2 people, while the vast majority of cars will have 1 or 2 people most of the time. And even if a bus tires were to wear out twice as fast as a car's tire, that is still less wear per person than a car.
That's true, but it is all relative. 70k+ mile tires for cars and suvs are fairly common. They sacrifice some ride quality and performance, but not so much as to be unsafe.
