The cost of building a highway compared to the cost of running even a "once daily" bus service may not be exactly the ratio you think it is, especially if the bus would normally run empty.
A highway is a one-time cost, amortized over many uses, a bus is an ongoing cost.
It would be much easier to "stick a seat" on some government vehicle that already does the trip regularly, allowing a passenger or two to ride along with the mail truck.
a lot of the more remote Swiss bus services are "PostAuto" and got started exactly like this -- giving passengers a ride on existing mail carriages. Now they run actual buses along the same routes (which are still bright yellow like the mail trucks).
Highways require significant ongoing maintenance - I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the cost of maintenance over the lifetime of the road exceeds the cost to build it in the first place. Particularly if the country in question relies heavily on road freight.
If this highway is so 'heavily used' then there is clearly enough population around that asking for a bus isn't that big of a deal. You act like I asked for high speed rail connections ever 15min to some remote village northern BC.
We are talking about 200km distance from Vancouver, the major city in Western Canada.
Highways are more important to business than passengers. That government bus isn't going to be hauling the logs, gravel, and any other resources that are the lifeblood of BCs economy.
In Switzerland we often have bus service to tiny mountain villages where the bus has to drive incredibly complex snake roads up a mountain. These buses are often not all that full. And somehow we have not gone bankrupt as a country in the 100 years this has been going on.
> A highway is a one-time cost
That is just totally false.
> a bus is an ongoing cost
Bus has an Initial acquisition cost and an ongoing maintenance, literally exactly like a highway.
The difference is that you have to pay a bus driver.
> It would be much easier to "stick a seat" on some government vehicle that already does the trip regularly, allowing a passenger or two to ride along with the mail truck.
Yes. And that exactly how it started in Switzerland. The Mail company operates the buses. But that doesn't change the fact that they are proper buses with reliable schedules.
Today these buses don't usually deliver the mail anymore anyway. The waste majority are just normal bus routes, just painted in a cool color.
Here you see a modern Post Bus station that is above the local railway station. There are 10+ Post platforms, going into all the surrounding vallies and then to all the different mountain villages. They are all synchronized and scheduled with train arrival times.
The city where this bus station is located has only 35k people, it the capital of that whole mountain region. The next large town has 10k people. Many of the villages in the valley, often with population with 1000-2000 are of course connected by rail. Its only once you have to go up that you need the buses. And this city is 100km away from Zürich, a much smaller city then Vancouver.
That is much smaller then even many of the small cities in the greater area we are talking about. There are many cities of 100k+ around, and many other small cities of 10k-50k range.
So I really can't see how connecting any of village in that area can be such a hard burden.
We are talking about a pretty populated region with lots of population. And we are not in the 1920 anymore. Just do fucking run real bus service.
A highway is a one-time cost, amortized over many uses, a bus is an ongoing cost.
It would be much easier to "stick a seat" on some government vehicle that already does the trip regularly, allowing a passenger or two to ride along with the mail truck.