What a strange and spite-filled view of urban transportation. In common with a lot of people I mostly take the bus when the weather is bad. An extra 5 minutes walk uphill from the bus stop to the nearest tram stop isn't going to cut it. For the many people who can't do that extra walk at all it's completely useless, but you think they don't matter because (you assume) they aren't productive members of society.
Just awful
If you're mostly using the bus when it's raining then I can assume you would otherwise walk or cycle, and that's good! As a cyclist or pedestrian you have exactly the right incentive structure for the city to thrive. Density and high quality urban environments make life as a cyclist or pedestrian pleasant.
Cyclists and pedestrians are not, however, the main group of people that we need to worry about when designing the transport network. Instead we need to design something that can compete with the private car, which people will use regardless of the weather. While a door to door experience is generally a hallmark of private motoring, for journeys into the city centre it's cost and overall journey time which really make the difference. Public transport, by virtue of being higher density, can justify bus lanes and other things that allow it to bypass inevitable traffic congestion during peak hours. This means that it has a good chance of being faster than the car when most people are travelling. And, when people travel into the city, most people are headed to a small number of high-profile destinations like shopping areas. Private car use falls down a bit here, as parking becomes expensive and/or in short supply, while public transport can get you right to where you need to go. Even somewhere like Fort Kinnaird, the average distance from each shop to your parked car isn't that different to the average distance to the bus stop, so unless you're driving from one shop to another it isn't really any worse for walking distances.
If you design for pensioners and other people who want to absolutely minimise walking distances, at the expense of overall speed and indeed efficiency (how many buses and drivers do you need to move 1000 passengers an hour?), then you make public transport fare worse against private cars. If the bus stops every few hundred metres, then it can never build up speed against other traffic even if it has a bus lane. Stopping more often in the busy city centre can really slow down cross-city journeys, as every bus will then have to compete for stopping space. Meeting passenger demand for more seated spaces means not being able to have more doors to speed up boarding and unloading; they hate the idea of the second door on the 400XLBs because it's further from the kerb and the bus can't crouch down so much.
The end result of essentially pandering to pensioners when designing a bus network is a bus network that isn't actually sustainable. Pensioners, by virtue of having free bus passes, are totally immune to the costs of all of the inefficiencies they want. It doesn't matter that the bus company now needs to spend 30% more on drivers and buses and so fares go up by 30%, because they're free. That is, until the government (the ones actually paying for their fares) notice that it's a bad use of money, and route subsidises get cut back. So, rather than getting the perfect bus network they've always dreamed of, they get nothing. Not even the marginally unsuitable bus service they had before, but
nothing. If they don't want services to be cut back because of the inefficiencies they introduce, then someone is going to need to spend more in taxes for it. If pensioners would go up in arms about the idea of paying only even a little bit each year for a bus pass, then why do you think they'd be willing to pay? No, it would all be paid for by the people who are currently working, who then don't benefit much at all from any of the bus service they created. If it takes 2 hours rather than 30 mins to get to the hospital because no one can possibly ever under any circumstances be expected to walk 300m to the nearest main road, then that bus won't do any good for the nurse needing to get home after a 2am shift change.
In the end the way we tell how useful something is economically is by how much and how many people are willing to pay for it. If a pensioner-friendly bus service is really that good, then changing the network to suit them would result in more revenue. Of course, that really just means more pensioners using it, given that the fares are paid by government. Would the government pay more for pensioners to get somewhere in 30 mins rather than 1 hour? No. Are pensioners time-sensitive, so that many more of them will travel only because it's 30 mins rather than 1 hour journey time? Not really - they don't work any more, so their time is inherently less valuable. But all the people choosing whether to pay for their season ticket or sign up for that shiny PCP deal on a new Corsa will be thinking about this. Give them a better bus service and they will come, because they just want to be able to get to work as quickly and cheaply as possible. If changing the bus network to suit them is really causing that many problems, then we'd see the revenue from pensioner fares dropping by more than the increase in fares by working people, and we'd know we need to change.
Getting rid of car journeys by working people would make the city work so much more effectively that you could then have a better shot of affording better solutions for the people who really do need those door-to-door journeys. Maybe the solution for mobility-restricted people making awkward journeys is just to pay for taxis to take them whenever they're not able to use the high frequency bus/tram (you'd end up building level boarding and plenty of wheelchair movement space to improve dwell times for everyone anyway) network. That's not an option today for most people.
