The buses are not the problem, just a convenient thing to attack. Each bus ride keeps a great number of cars off the roads for that day.
This is good for the environment and reduces the number of vehicles on the road. This seems obvious, but from reading the comments in this thread it seems like this whole kerfuffle is about the buses themselves.
For two trips a day; they're effectively charter buses. And a lot of them take very long, circuitous journeys; my kid's bus comes at 6:45 AM, long before school starts!
Now make them run every 10-15 minutes so anyone can get anywhere any time, also add a bunch of transfer points and intermodal nodes...
The problem with buses isn't that you can't use the ones that exist, it's that the ones you need don't always exist. The bus goes where it goes but not everywhere.
Then you have to go places the bus doesn't go often enough that you need a car, and once you've already paid for a car and taxes and insurance, it costs more to take the bus than the incremental cost of driving everywhere.
The buses likely aren't loaded to maximum capacity are they? They also have to drive slightly extra. A car driver would go in a straight line to work, whereas the bus has to travel to all the different bus stops first.
A large part of my issue with busses is that where I am they stop literally every block. It makes them miss every light (since if there's any traffic, they can only get to their stop during a green light), which just makes them too slow to be very useful.
They have to slalom around badly parked cars, delivery vehicles, roadblocks, take alternative routes, &c. dozens of time per day
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