If a crush of messy, noisy, shoving, coughing, backpack-swinging-in-your-face crowds wasn't in them, buses would be fine.
I once lived in a small town where the bus was often almost empty, or even totally empty (that was bliss, like having a private chauffeur), because most people living there used cars. They could do that because streets were quiet and spacious, and parking plentiful and free. No problem getting right to the shop or business you needed, which was great for the businesses.
The town enjoyed these civilized circumstances because it had a low population -- and that largely senior or retired, which meant a population with a certain calm tolerant seen-it-all, just-calm-down mentality not frequently seen in growing, thrusting, densely populated urban centres.
What quality exists in a life spent in a high-rise shoe-box, coming and going via crowded elevators to catch a crowded bus to a crowded workplace? Might the "quiet quitting" phenomenon and the preference for working from home really be not about quitting, but about avoiding too much human proximity? Is it about a Hardy-esque desire to get farther from the madding crowd? Against a background of rising world population that need will only get stronger.
Overcrowding is a predictor of violence and aggressive behaviour. Among rats in labs, scientists have documented more aggression when a certain ratio of space to individual is reduced, regardless of food supply. The resource the rats are competing for is private space.
In human society too, privacy is becoming scarce. In London and other European capitals with fast-growing populations in the 18th and 19th centuries this was understood, and large tracks of land were put aside as park space whether by the Crown or conservation societies. Perhaps, being closer to a rural past, the city-designers of the time were used to the lingering longing for natural spaces. Today in parts of Canada, we seem to be filling open spaces in, in a futile quest to make housing affordable by making it denser. Yet, the less space available, the higher its price and the greater a developer's investment will cost. It seems that affordability will only come when population control comes, i.e. not when supply goes up (and only the wealthy can access the supply) but when demand goes down. Should that ever happen the supply of mental and physical health-giving privacy will also go up.
We need to change more than Earth's atmospheric climate; the crisis starts with the climate of urban overcrowding. An end to meat-farming, forest destruction and fossil fuel burning would help, but ultimately Earth's resources are only saved by not drawing them down through the over-consumption which over-population causes.
It's ironic that by allotting less space per person (as world population grows), we consume more nature per bio-region.
The planetary bus is full.
