A bus (archaically also omnibus or autobus) is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. A bus can generally seat a maximum of anywhere from 8 to 300 passengers.[1] Buses are the most widely used form of public transportation,[citation needed] although they are also used in tourism and as private transport.

The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses. A more luxurious version of the bus is the coach. Buses are usually powered by a diesel engine, although early buses were horse drawn and there were experiments with steam propulsion. Trolleybuses use power drawn from overhead power lines. In common with the car industry bus manufacturing is increasingly a globalised activity, with the same design of bus appearing on roads around the world.

Bus is a derivation of Omnibus Vehicle meaning "vehicle for all", where omnibus means "for all" in Latin (omnes meaning "all"), reflecting its early usage for public transport. When motorized transport replaced horse-drawn transport starting around 1905, a motorized omnibus was for a time sometimes called an autobus, a term still used in French and other languages, and in some varieties of English.

 Pronunciation

Since motorisation, the traditional configuration of a bus was an engine in the front and an entrance at the rear. Since the 1960s, with the transition to one man operation, buses in the developed world have taken the form of mid or rear-engined designs, with a single door at the front, or multiple doors, depending on need. Front-engined buses still persist for niche markets such as American school buses, some minibuses, and buses in less developed countries, which may be derived from truck chassis, rather than purpose built bus designs.

A bus may have an open platform so that passengers can join and alight without for the driver to open doors, but in many countries this is considered dangerous and is discouraged or indeed illegal.[citation needed] On the other hand, in some countries bus use is so heavy that passengers will cling to the outside of the vehicle if it is full