A bus is a large automobile
intended to carry numerous persons in addition to the driver and
sometimes a conductor. The name is a shortened version of Latin
omnibus, which means "for everyone".
History
The omnibus, the first organized public transit system, may have
originated in Nantes, France in 1826, when Stanislas Baudry, a
retired army officer who had built public baths (run from the
surplus heat from his flour mill) on the city's edge, set up a
short stage line between the center of town and his baths. The
service started on the Place du Commerce, outside the hat shop
of M. Omnès, who displayed the motto Omnès Omnibus ("Omnès for
all") on his shopfront. When Baudry discovered that passengers
were just as interested in getting off at intermediate points as
in patronizing his baths, he shifted the stage line's focus. His
new voiture omnibus ("carriage for all") combined the functions
of the hired hackney carriage with the stagecoach that travelled
a predetermined route from inn to inn, carrying passengers and
mail. His omnibus featured wooden benches that ran down the
sides of the vehicle; entry was from the rear.
There is also a claim from the UK where in 1824 the first "bus
route" is claimed to have run from Market Street in Manchester
to Salford.[citation needed]
Whether by direct emulation, or because the idea was in the air,
by 1832 the idea had been copied in Paris, Bordeaux and Lyons. A
London newspaper reported in July 4, 1829 that "the new vehicle,
called the omnibus, commenced running this morning from
Paddington to the City". This bus service was operated by George
Shillibeer.
In New York, omnibus service began in the same year, when
Abraham Brower, an entrepreneur who had organized volunteer fire
companies, established a route along Broadway starting at
Bowling Green. Other American cities soon followed suit:
Philadelphia in 1831, Boston in 1835 and Baltimore in 1844. In
most cases, the city governments granted a private
company—generally a small stableman already in the livery or
freight-hauling business—an exclusive franchise to operate
public coaches along a specified route. In return, the company
agreed to maintain certain minimum levels of service—though one
of these standards was not upholstery. The New York omnibus
quickly moved into the urban consciousness. In 1831, New Yorker
Washington Irving remarked of Britain's Reform Act (finally
passed in 1832): "The great reform omnibus moves but slowly."
The omnibus had many repercussions for society, particularly in
that it encouraged urbanization. Socially, the omnibus put
city-dwellers, even if for only half an hour, into
previously-unheard-of physical intimacy with strangers,
squeezing them together knee-to-knee (illustration, left). Only
the very poor remained excluded. A new division in urban society
now came to the fore, dividing those who kept carriages from
those who did not. The idea of the "carriage trade", the folk
who never set foot in the streets, who had goods brought out
from the shops for their appraisal, has its origins in the
omnibus crush.
The omnibus also extended the reach of the North Atlantic
post-Georgian, post-Federal city. The walk from the former
village of Paddington to the business heart of London in the
"City" was a brisk one for a young man in good condition. The
omnibus offered the nearer suburbs more access to the inner
city.
More intense urbanization was to follow. Within a very few
years, the New York omnibus had a rival in the streetcar: the
first streetcar ran along The Bowery, which offered the
excellent improvement in amenity of riding on smooth iron rails
rather than clattering over granite setts, called "Belgian
blocks". The new streetcars were financed by John Mason, a
wealthy banker, and built by an Irish contractor, John
Stephenson. The streetcars would become even more centrally
important than the omnibus in the future of urbanization.
