> Buses perturb traffic
Counterpoint: buses do not perturb traffic. Buses remove large numbers of cars from the road, and occupy roughly the same space as between 1 (minibus) and 4 (bendy-busses) cars do on the road while in motion at 30mph (ie including gaps between vehicles, etc.)
Buses are exceptionally efficient. Are they as fun and comfortable as trains? No, but trains don't have stations within quarter of a mile of your home or your office, and it would be impractical to build a train network that did unless you removed all regular roads and replaced them with a narrow gauge railway system using trains that run at maybe 10-15mph (because stopping distance would be a problem given there's typically quarter-to-half a mile between each stop.)
Do you ride buses out of interest, or are you one of these carosexuals who just complains about public transport and bases your views on 1970s movies about New York City (which didn't even describe NYC in the 1970s particularly well)?
I recall one of the most unhinged experiences of my life being when I described what I had done to a bunch of Americans once when I rode a bus from Hartford airport to the center of Hartford so I could catch a taxi home. It was, as you'd expect, an uneventful ride on a regular city bus, nothing to write home about in terms of comfort, well lit, easy to pay the fare, no problem with a long wait, that just went from A to B without any issues. Had a wide range of people in it, mostly lower income I suspect. But alas, my American friends acted as if I'd decided to walk through the roughest neighborhood in an episode of Starsky and Hutch, wearing a short skirt and heels, for a few hours while yelling "I HAZ MONEY! I'm RICH!!!"
Why? Because they were a bunch of drinkypoos, suburbanites who have literally no experience of buses who'd heard anecdotes about people being shanked or flashed that weren't really anecdotes, and do not really make sense, because if you do any of those things, THERE'S WITNESSES. If a gang tries to terrorize a bus full of passengers, the driver will stop them, and it'll make the fucking news. 99%+ of regular bus passengers will never see anything remotely violent or any actual crime beyond maybe a passenger lighting up a doobie - you know, like you see other drivers do. Except when car drivers do it THEY PUT YOU IN FUCKING DANGER. But you forget all of that. And you forget that drunks are more of a problem when they're driving than when they're passed out in the corner on a bus. You forget that people with anger issues are normally more likely to kill you when they are in a 3,000lb motor vehicle than when they're seething in their seat surrounded by other passengers likely to clock 'em.
But that doesn't stop your imagination going wild. And so my friends went crazy about me telling them I caught the bus from the airport.
Buses are great. Wish I lived in a place that actually had a practical bus system. And you'd wish that too, given they reduce traffic. And provide an option for those days you really would rather just read a book than drive to fucking work.