US cities pay too much for buses

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-26/us-cities-are-paying-too-much-for-new-transit-buses

by pavel_lishin • 10 months ago

355 578 10 months ago

lenerdenator3• 10 months ago

"A new paper argues that lack of competition, demand for custom features and “Buy America” rules have driven up costs for transit agencies in the US."

If that's not the most NYC finance-centered headline ever, I don't know what is.

"If we just offload our bus-building industry to somewhere else, we could save $x on taxes each year. Yeah, it eliminates jobs and is another blow against strategically-important heavy industry, but please, think of my balance sheet!"

sidewndr462• 10 months ago

imagine how much money the government could save by just continuing to collect taxes and not providing any services! we could privatize everything!

red_rech2• 10 months ago

Yes! we can even distribute political and military power to selected individuals who can rule over small portions maintaining security and collecting taxes.

After all, it was divine right (Darwinian evolution, AI schizobabble, etc) that made them men of might.

mschuster9110• 10 months ago

That's ... decently close to what the current political course of action is, a strategy called "starve the beast" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

supertrope2• 10 months ago

That's running the government like a business!

namdnay• 10 months ago

it's not a question of "offloading" it, it's a question of reaping the benefits of global competition

Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived? Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy?

mschuster9110• 10 months ago

There's a difference between private companies and state-run companies / authorities.

When a US airline thinks it's better for them to switch over to Airbus, by all means do so, that's competition.

But taxpayer money should not be used to prop up other countries' economies unless explicitly designated that way (e.g. contributions to international agencies, economic aid), and certainly not if that replaces domestic union labor.

lenerdenator3• 10 months ago

it's not a question of "offloading" it, it's a question of reaping the benefits of global competition

_What benefits_?

Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived?

Been through Flint, MI lately?

How about Gary, IN? Camden, NJ? East St. Louis, IL?

Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy?

They already do have to compete with Airbus for pretty much everything that doesn't involve the US Government as a customer. That's the majority of the global aircraft market. How's that working out? The incumbent still got "lazy", not so much from entitlement but from a "need" to constantly reduce costs while simultaneously increasing revenues for the benefit of shareholders. You can only make aircraft building (or anything else) so profitable before you hit a ceiling. Boeing hit that ceiling, but of course, that doesn't matter. Number must go up.

People in postindustrial economies cannot work as cheaply as people in developing economies because they must pay local prices for goods and services required for them to live. Going with the global competition because "it's cheaper" doesn't address the hundreds of thousands of people in the US who now don't have the ability to earn a living in the way that they did before while still being forced to consume using the value of their labor. Worse yet, it enriches people who don't have our national best interests in mind.

This kind of "globalization benefits Americans" mindset is why we're in the mess we're in now with a tyrant in office and people having no faith in the economy or the future. It's not 1990 anymore. The experiment's over, it failed. Horribly.

infecto2• 10 months ago

One of the worst takes I have ever seen. It’s not about offloading an industry but if another geography has a comparative advantage everyone benefits.

I would also argue that customizations are indeed a total waste of money for systems that already cash strapped.

Mountain_Skies• 10 months ago

What geography allows for worker oppression and environmental degradation as a competitive advantage?

bsder• 10 months ago

if another geography has a comparative advantage everyone benefits.

I don't necessarily agree. Outsourcing has a cost in that you also lose the knowledge of the entire engineering chain.

That engineering chain has a LOT of value to us as a society. However, it has negative value to a single CEO looking at his quarterly bonus.

mschuster9110• 10 months ago

A lot of fluff (although I do appreciate the hard numbers and reasons - thirteen shades of grey for flooring is utterly ridiculous) for essentially these two points:

- low lot size combined with a lot of customization demands leads to high per-unit costs

- "Buy American" is expensive. D'uh. Unfortunately the article doesn't dig down deeper into why BYD and other Chinese manufacturers are cheaper - 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability not just against American companies but against other Chinese companies.

red_rech2• 10 months ago

996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability not just against American companies but against other Chinese companies.

Silicon Valley CEOs saw this and thought it should be their playbook. So hell, maybe made in America will eventually get cheaper as this innovative economic and social system sees adoption by brave pioneers.

pm90• 10 months ago

More likely that the companies that institute this will hemorrhage talent that is offered a better deal by competitors. 996 works because the supply of Engineers is quite high in China.

JKCalhoun• 10 months ago

Not calling you out on BYD, but a lack of competition in the U.S. means we'll never know what the price for "Buy American" could be.

To your point though, even at a much higher price, the "Buy American" is putting that money back into the U.S. economy (we hope).

myrmidon12• 10 months ago

I think labor cost alone is most plausible, especially combined with higher quantities. Average yearly salary in urban China is <$20k.

Getting parity with subsidies, worker/environmental protection and regulation overhead would not even come close to make the US price-competitive for labor intensive work like this right now, IMO.

PaulHoule8• 10 months ago

Chinese manufacturers use more advanced processes, not just cheap labor. For instance they built a mushroom factory in Shanghai where they only touch the mushrooms with a forklift -- contrast that to the "big" indoor mushroom farms in Pennsylvania that make those Agaricus white button mushrooms where somebody has to cut each mushroom with a knife. They just opened one in Texas.

BYD constructs cars with radically different methods than Western manufacturers, who can close much of the gap when they catch up in technique

https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1mnel0i/f...

AngryData4• 10 months ago

I don't believe labor is that much of the cost of a bus, unless you are talking about the "labor" of investors and high level administrators. Ive worked in many many different manufacturing jobs, and labor of building things has always been the lowest cost of concern despite managers trying to harp on about it. Labor costs are the easiest to control, which is why they get the most attention, but material procurement, administrative bloat and bureaucracy, and marketing or bribes always top the scale above the workers actually producing what is being sold.

SoftTalker11• 10 months ago

Transit agencies (at least the big ones) normally do their maintenance and repair in-house. So they will want to buy one make/model of bus as much as possible so that they don't have to train mechanics on many different manufacturer's products and stock parts for many different models. Once those decisions are made, any competitors will have that weighing against them. That will tend to reduce the number of viable competitors.

Same with municipal vehicles, most towns will buy all Ford or all Chevrolet and as few different models as possible.

bluGill15• 10 months ago

Sure, but a bus lasts 12 years in service (depending on use slightly different, but 12 is a reasonable number for discussion). You should be buying them on a longer contract to deliver 1/12 of your total fleet every year for several years. This means that you only need to ask what to train the mechanics on at the end of the contract and in turns there are not that many different buses you need to train on. Keeping the same manufacture does reduce training costs some, but it isn't like every bus is different.

Even ignoring the above, all but the smallest agencies can dedicate mechanics to each make. A mechanic can maintain so many buses per year - lets say 10 for discussion (I have no idea what the real number is), so if you have 100 buses you need 10 mechanics. if you have 4 trained on brand A, 4 on brand B, and 2 on both you are fine.

ajross• 10 months ago

Economy of scale is basically all of it, honestly. The lede is that Denver pays ~60% more than Singapore[1] per bus. Because Singapore ordered 24x as many buses.

[1] There's an even worse number for Cincinatti.

bikelang• 10 months ago

the article doesn't dig down deeper into why BYD and other Chinese manufacturers are cheaper - 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability

I’m not sure that this is accurate. My understanding is that BYD invested heavily into automation. Their factories have few human employees left. They do almost all their automation robotics design and manufacturing in house to boot. That’s a huge advantage

SoftTalker11• 10 months ago

Not sure why transit agencies are still paying for custom paint schemes or colors when they just turn around and wrap the whole bus with advertising. Just buy a plain white bus.

The article didn't mention corruption but I would not rule it out. Follow the money. Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus.

altcognito• 10 months ago

Since they are often adorned with ads, I'm not sure why they pay for anything at all.

michaelt• 10 months ago

Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus.

I mean, that could just be normal, routine failure to negotiate effectively. If every bus vendor says "call for pricing" and your organisation has "always" paid $940k per bus, when you're told to buy some more buses, you might not even know you can get them for half or a third of that price by getting competing quotes from other vendors.

And if you're an ambitious, hard-nosed type that can really turn the screws on vendors, leaving no stone unturned in your search for savings - would you be working in the purchasing department of a municipal bus company?

SoftTalker11• 10 months ago

OK I agree... add "incompetence" along with "corruption" as a potential reason. Though corruption is easier to get away with if it appears as incompetence.

garciasn• 10 months ago

I have a degree in Public Administration. This is basically an MBA for the public sector; but, the difference between the two largely lies in an MBA looking for opportunities to maximize the business and its shareholders vs an MPA looking to implement policies that best serve the public good.

Government employees are NOT well-equipped to compete with private sector ones; they don't think like them and they don't act like them. Why? Because the public sector is driven by a completely different model: bottoms-up management, led by the citizenry, not led top-down to maximize shareholder value. In addition, because private sector jobs pay 2x+ what the same level in a public sector organization will pay and thus the candidate pool is simply not at the level that you would expect at a similarly sized private sector organization. Because of this flip-flopped model of operation (bottoms-up vs top-down) Public/Private partnerships are NOT equal arrangements and the private sector companies know exactly how to leverage these differences in their favor.

In this instance, a public sector employee may feel that paying more for a bus will better serve the public good because it /may/ be better engineered, have a longer lifetime, and offer value to the public that's above and beyond what a less expensive model will do. But! Even if the support staff look for multiple quotes from a variety of vendors, all of which may be at the cost level a private sector company may prefer, that public sector staff member may very well be directly overruled by the elected officials; who, for reasons that can only be hypothesized (take your pick: corruption, brand/personal preference, whatever) may prefer the more expensive vendors that were not included in the research and bidding process.

While I have laid out that the public sector is not well-equipped for public/private partnerships and business dealings, there are MANY reasons for this including: candidate pool, different underlying model of operation, and elected official decisioning.

xnx5• 10 months ago

And if you're an ambitious, hard-nosed type that can really turn the screws on vendors,

Absolutely not. Cost savings is career suicide in the public sector. The goal is to spend all budget and then beg for more. Regardless of ridership, the ironclad rule is "budget must go up".

gjsman-10005• 10 months ago

That already exists in MetroTransit in Minnesota. The only company that was seriously interested for several years was Planned Parenthood.

https://www.startribune.com/the-drive-birth-control-bus-ad-s...

This did not improve public sympathies for bus service broadly speaking.

PaulHoule8• 10 months ago

It's a pet peeve of mine that buses in my city have wrap-around ads for a car dealer an hour's drive away. (Turns out all the car dealers in this area are owned by the same people) Then there was that bus which had a supergraphic that made the whole bus look like an MRI machine advertising the medical center.

crazygringo8• 10 months ago

still paying for custom paint schemes or colors

Because you need to be able to recognize from a distance, hey that's a city bus. Not a charter bus. Not a school bus. Not a long distance bus.

And buses aren't usually wrapped with advertising. It's usually just a banner on the sides below the windows.

Some ad campaigns pay much more money to extend it over the windows with that mesh material. But that's generally a small minority. But even then the colors on front and top and often borders still clearly identify it. E.g. these are still very clearly public transit if you live there, which is what's important:

https://contravisionoutlook.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads...

SoftTalker11• 10 months ago

School buses are a distinctive bright yellow, there's no mistaking them for anything else. Charter and long distance buses don't stop at the city bus stops. City buses will still have a sign/screen displaying the route number/name.

stackskipton2• 10 months ago

Because you need to be able to recognize from a distance, hey that's a city bus.

Sure, but fix here seems to be that DOT Regulations state that transit buses are painted "Lime Green" (example) and other companies should not use said color. People would quickly learn that Lime Green = transit bus in same way School Bus Yellow means school bus.

conductr6• 10 months ago

Buses typically have lit signage indicating their route number or next stop, it’s kind of a dead giveaway and paint job can be ignored

bluGill15• 10 months ago

I hate those advertising wraps. Most of them cover the windows that I as a rider want to look out of (you can see out, but they are not clear). If I don't want to look out give me a window shade, but when I want to look out I want to be able to see.

stronglikedan• 10 months ago

get your own bus and you can do what you want with it! /s

myrmidon12• 10 months ago

I think this shows one of the downsides of trade barriers very well: You get stuck with undesirable industries (diesel bus manufacturing), binding capital and labor better used elsewhere (and you easily end up with underperforming, overpriced solutions, too).

But I'm curious how much this actually affects transport costs. If such a bus is used 12h/day, then even overpaying 100% for the vehicle should get outscaled by labor + maintenance pretty quickly, long before the vehicle is replaced...

mrits• 10 months ago

What is wrong with diesel bus manufacturing? Just the exhaust pedestrians have to breath in? It seems near the bottom of the list for things we'd need to solve for carbon emissions.

uxp100• 10 months ago

My experience is tainted by the fact that the battery electric busses are new and the diesel busses are (comparatively) old, but our battery electric busses are far more comfortable to ride. Diesels are uh, jerky. Maybe the drivers fault, but that’s how it is.

mschuster9110• 10 months ago

It's not just pedestrians, but residents who gotta breathe in the particulate and other exhaust emissions. That, in turn, significantly affects poorer parts of the population who have no other choice than to live and rent near heavily trafficed roads.

myrmidon12• 10 months ago

I honestly don't think there is any future for them longer term (>10y). Long distance, diesel vehicles might hold out for a bit longer than a decade, but the situation looks kinda inevitable even there to me.

CO2 wise, electrifying a bus like this should pay off much quicker than replacing individual vehicles, because utilization is higher (not a lot of people drive 12h a day).

hx8• 10 months ago

There is nothing wrong with diesel bus manufacturing, but if you were to generate a list of the 1000 most desirable products to manufacture I don't think diesel bus would be on the list. We have companies and manufacturing expertise tied up in building buses when they could be building {X}.

melling• 10 months ago

Yes, the exhaust that people have to breathe.

I realize they have improved but aren’t natural gas buses better?

dgacmu• 10 months ago

It's a backwards-facing business. It would seen better to be investing in the success of the segment of the industry that's by this point obviously going to dominate in the not so far future (electric buses).

(At least, globally. China and Europe are all in on electric buses; I doubt any of us have a good crystal ball for what's going to happen in the US.)

supertrope2• 10 months ago

2/3 of public transit budgets in wealthy countries is hiring employees. Vehicle costs are not the headline cost. However this cost does needs to be managed. Transit agencies are running on shoe string budgets.

Until recently the US Federal Government funded capital expenses but never operating expenses. This lead to outcomes such as the feds distributing grant money with the requirement that buses must last at least 12 years and transit agencies refreshing their buses on the 12 year mark. Buying a natural gas bus or battery electric bus lowers OPEX and the increased CAPEX is picked up by the feds.

kccqzy3• 10 months ago

I'm sorry but aren't these outcomes good? 12-year old buses should probably be replaced, and a natural gas bus or electric bus will be better than a diesel bus? I do not understand your point.

kjkjadksj7• 10 months ago

Aren’t most busses CNG these days?

comte70922• 10 months ago

Most buses are diesel, and are transitioning to either battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell. Almost no fleets in the US are running majority CNG.

toast02• 10 months ago

Depends on fuel availability. Diesel is available everywhere. CNG has limited availability. In my county, we do have propane powered busses.

CNG and propane have much better emissions profiles, and vehicle lifetime and compressed tank lifetime are a good match for transit, as opposed to personal vehicles where when the compressed fuel tank ages out, the otherwise servicable vehicle turns into a pumpkin.

However, CNG ends up being expensive and may not save much versus diesel... The natural gas is usually not expensive, but compression requires a lot of energy input which is expensive.

namibj6• 10 months ago

Imagine if they could just order from vendors like "Solaris Bus & Coach sp z o.o."... They're even running some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Urbino_12_hydrogen over here that I at least hope have their hydrogen premium costs paid for by the EU grant the decals claim. Riding them I can't note a difference between what I would expect from a battery only version. But I can't imagine it's cheaper to take the hit of hydrogen roundtripping and the cost of hydrogen infrastructure just to avoid some 400 kW DC fast chargers at some strategic extended-stay bus stops where they take their lunch break (kick the last passenger out, walk outside, plug it in, lock the door and take a walk or go back inside and read the newspaper, and at the end unplug and hang it back on the electricity-vending-machine).

Unless it's different for bus drivers than for truck drivers, there is plenty mandatory break time under German rules to allow fast charging of such style to give enough range. And it's easy to set up by just fitting route-after-route with the charging spots and keeping a few diesel busses in reserve to handle broken chargers until there are enough chargers to maintain bus schedules even if some of them go offline.

jmyeet4• 10 months ago

As people should know by now, in the last few decades China has built a massive amount of public transit infrastructure, both within cities and regional [1]. Some of the subway systems are pretty amazing (eg Chongqing [2]). I'm interested in how they did this and I think it comes down to a few major factors:

1. They standardize rolling stock. The same stuff is used across the country. I think this is really important. If you think about how the US does things, every city will have its own procurement process. This is wasteful but is just more opportunity for corruption;

2. China had a long term strategy to building its own trains (and, I assume, buses). They first imported high speed trains from Japan and Germany but ultimately wanted to build their own; and

3. Streamlined permitting. China has private property but the way private property works in the US is as a huge barrier to any change or planning whatsoever. China just doesn't allow this to happen.

I keep coming back to the extortionate cost of the Second Avenue Subway in NYC. It's like ~$2.5 billion per mile (Phase 2 is estimated at $4 billion per mile). You may be tempted to say that China isn't a good comparison here because of cheap labor or whatever. Fine. But let's compare it to the UK's Crossrail, which was still expensive but way cheaper than the SEcond Avenue Subway.

California's HSR is hitting huge roadblocks from permitting, planning and political interests across the Central Valley, forcing a line designed to cut the travel time from LA to SF to divert to tiny towns along the way.

There is a concerted effort in the US to kill public transit projects across the country (eg [3]). You don't just do this by blocking projects. You also make things take much longer and make the processes so much more expensive. In California, for example, we've seen the weaponization of the otherwise well-intentioned CEQA [4].

I feel like China's command economy is going to eat us alive over the next century.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_hig...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7gvr_U4R4w

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...

[4] https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/s...

rangestransform2• 10 months ago

They standardize rolling stock.

re: buses, we have the same rickety ass new flyers essentially everywhere in the US, that doesn't make them any cheaper

kube-system2• 10 months ago

I think the gist of the article is that we don't have the same busses across the US. Yes there are only two major manufacturers, but they're all being procured in different ways, in different custom configurations, all across the country.

hamdingers3• 10 months ago

Not all New Flyer buses are the same in the same way not all Toyotas are the same.

bryanlarsen• 10 months ago

The "nail house" phenomenon in China is counter-evidence to your point 3.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...

jmyeet4• 10 months ago

Actually I think it makes my point: a common attack on China's infrastructure development is to say that the government will just seize your land and that's just not true (eg [1]).

China just doesn't let private property owners effectively delay and block everything.

[1] https://www.the-independent.com/asia/china/china-grandfather...

kjkjadksj7• 10 months ago

The “tiny towns” like merced where the HSR will stop are some of the fastest growing cities in California.

jmyeet4• 10 months ago

There's a whole host of concessions and project redesigns that occurred for essentially political reasons.

Just look at the currently proposed route map [1]. It deviates to the east side of the valley because that's where these towns are vs the west side, which is more direct.

Deviating a supposedly high speed route for small towns doesn't make a ton of sense. Not only does it increase the cost and travel time directly, but extra stops slow the overall travel time. This could've just as easily beeen on the west side of the Central Valley and had feeder lines and stations into a smaller number of stations.

Look at any high speed rail route in Europe or China and you'll see fairly limited stops for this reason.

The biggest and easiest win for a high speed rail should've been LA to Las Vegas. It's a shorter distance and through mostly desert and other uninhabited land. Ideally LAX would've been one of these stops but I'm not sure how viable that is. Then you add a spur that goes north to SF so you avoid building through LA county twice, which is going to be one of your most expensive parts.

Instead we have a private company (Brightline) building a LA to Vegas route.

As an aside, Vegas desperately needed to build a subway plus light rail from the airport up the strip. The stupid Teslas in tunnels under the strip was another of those efforts of billionaires proposing and doing projects to derail public transit. Like the Hyperloop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_of_California_High-Speed...

rootusrootus10• 10 months ago

3a. The government in China does not accept no as an answer.

We could move a lot faster here if we removed or severely limited the ability for individuals and small organizations to completely stall progress on major societal efforts. I think this is not at all unique to the US, either, it is a problem to varying degrees in most modern democracies.

kccqzy3• 10 months ago

As for the second avenue subway, you should take a look at the stations built. They are large, cathedral-like with full-length mezzanines full of grandeur. I'm not saying it's money well spent, but it's definitely a case where aesthetics is prioritized. In comparison most other subway stations are just overly utilitarian. Or take a look at the WTC Oculus station; that station alone cost $4 billion to build and is now so pleasing to look at that it's a tourist attraction on its own.

rsynnott12• 10 months ago

China had a long term strategy to building its own trains (and, I assume, buses). They first imported high speed trains from Japan and Germany but ultimately wanted to build their own

Interestingly, this process has now somewhat gone into reverse. Alexander Dennis, say, built their first-gen electric buses on BYD tech (China was the leader in this space), but their second-gen on their own design.

PaulHoule8• 10 months ago

Tompkins County bought Proterra buses, they had some serious problems. When they jacked one up to work on it the axle came off and they immediately took all our electric buses out of the fleet -- and Proterra was bankrupt and not able to make it right.

TCAT is still scrambling to find diesel buses to replace those and older diesel buses that are aging out. Lately they've added some ugly-looking buses which are the wrong color which I guess they didn't customize but it means they can run the routes.

taeric4• 10 months ago

This is something I would honestly expect if you try and get cheaper from market pressure.

PaulHoule8• 10 months ago

Some of it is that "legacy" products often involve more difficult engineering than people think. Circa 1980 this bus design was a notorious failure in NYC:

https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php/Grumman_Flxible_870

Buses get shaken really hard.

rsynnott12• 10 months ago

Something that strikes me as a bit odd is that most US electric buses seem to come from companies who just make electric buses. The electric buses here are made by conventional bus companies who've been making buses for, in one case, 80 years an in another over a century. Do none of the traditional US bus companies make electric ones?

coryrc• 10 months ago

That was just Proterra; all of Seattle's buses are from the usual suspects.

tdeck2• 10 months ago

Our buses are also less comfortable and "rattle" more that busses I've ridden in many other first world countries. I'm not sure if this is an economics thing but the standard New Flyer buses feel a bit dated.

roryirvine2• 10 months ago

What's causing the rattle?

In the UK, there were always a few buses in any given fleet that rattled more than others, especially when idling or at low revs - something to do with resonance with the body panels, I think. But that was back when diesel engines were universal, so hasn't really been a thing since hybrids and (more recently) BEVs took over.

Looks like New Flyer hybrids use BAE Systems' Hybridrive, which was fairly common in London during the 2010s but didn't produce noticeably excessive vibration as far as I remember. Is there something different about how the engines are mounted in US buses, I wonder?

tdeck2• 10 months ago

I'm not sure? Perhaps the shocks are different, or the seats are just harder, or perhaps I'm imagining it.

notatoad2• 10 months ago

in my experience the rattle is usually from the fittings inside the bus, not the bus itself - mounting brackets for information screens or advertising panels, seatbelts on the accessible seating, that sort of thing. and part of the rattle is just down to under-use - a bus with all the seats filled shakes less, because the suspension is tuned for a full bus not an empty one.

one of the buses i ride frequently has a ski rack installed in it that looks like a homemade contraption, and it rattles like crazy.

Symbiote6• 10 months ago

I once complained to Transport for London when a bus I was using regularly was rattling so much it made me feel ill.

They said the driver can change gear (put it in neutral?) which reduces the rattle, and they are supposed to do this, but some drivers don't bother.

xnx5• 10 months ago

Ultimately due to a lack of transit competition. Municipal transit will be bloated and inefficient on every level because no amount of failure will put them out of business. Indeed, most agencies' main goal is to increase budget (any increase in service or customer satisfaction is incidental) because more budget equals bigger projects and more staff which is more prestigious and higher paying.

savanaly• 10 months ago

I'm with you at heart, but experience says government owned transit works just fine and even great in other countries. What's their secret sauce?

rootusrootus10• 10 months ago

Perception, maybe? My local transit agency seems to do pretty well. There will always be critics, but they don't seem unnecessarily bloated, the vehicles are well maintained and clean, etc. Not any different than a typical bus in, for example, UK. And I would caution that if you think everybody other than the US does government-owned transit very well, you may be focusing in a small subset of wealthy first world countries.

hamdingers3• 10 months ago

Other countries provide transit as a transportation service for all. US politicians and voters view it as a charity for the temporarily carless.

All the other issues are downstream of this mindset.

xnx5• 10 months ago

Historically denser cities.

frollogaston9• 10 months ago

I'm guessing that unlike here, some of those places need buses, and they simply can't afford any waste.

taeric4• 10 months ago

The idea that you can leverage competition to build public infrastructure things feels dubious, to me. Will try to take a dive on some of that literature.

At face value, though, public infrastructure is largely the sort of thing that enables many things with no obvious stakeholder that could have done it themselves. Certainly not in a way that would have an easy path to profits for the infrastructure.

bluGill15• 10 months ago

Don't be fooled, paying less won't help much since the cost of a bus is a small part of the costs of running a bus route. about half your costs are the bus driver. The most expensive bus is still only 1/3rd of your hourly cost of running the bus. If a more expensive bus is more reliable that could more than make up for a more expensive bus (I don't have any numbers to do math on though).

Half the costs of running a bus route are the driver's labor. The other half needs to pay for maintenance, the cost of the bus, and all the other overhead.

esafak• 10 months ago

I'm hearing you say we should have self-driving buses... which is feasible since their route is fixed.

kjkjadksj7• 10 months ago

Bus driver also does things like trigger ramp for handicapped people, strap in wheelchairs securely, answer questions about the route, and security surveillance.

cyberax8• 10 months ago

Once you have self-driving, you don't _need_ buses.

Large buses are fundamentally inefficient, they can never be made competitive compared to cars. And the main source of inefficiency is the number of stops and fixed routes.

You can easily solve all the transportation problems with mild car-pooling. Switching buses and personal cars to something like 8-person minibuses will result in less congestion and about 2-3 times faster commutes than the status quo. Only large dense hellscapes like Manhattan will be an exception.

wat10000• 10 months ago

And since the route is fixed, maybe we could install guides rather than needing a complicated steering mechanism. Then replace inefficient tires with much more efficient metal wheels rolling on the guides....

whimsicalism4• 10 months ago

e: after looking at the numbers again, i was wrong.

burkaman2• 10 months ago

It is absolutely not feasible (yet), most of the job of the bus driver is knowing when to break the "rules", because someone is parked in the bus stop, or traffic is backed up so it make sense to stop a bit before the stop to let people off, or when to stop for longer than usual because someone needs to use the bike rack on the front, or when to use the bus kneeling feature because someone with mobility issues needs to get on or off, or when to skip a stop because your bus is too full and there's another right behind you, etc.

This is ignoring payment issues (hopefully it would be free anyway), answering riders' questions, being nice and letting someone off halfway between stops because it's 2am and pouring and they're the only one on the bus, and so on. I guess the general theme is that unlike Waymo where everything is ordered and planned out ahead of time and the car just needs to go from A to B, a self-driving bus will need to be constantly updating its plan in real time based on the conditions outside and what people on the bus need. It's not like a train where it can always stop in the exact same place and open the doors for a pre-defined amount of time.

It's obviously not impossible, but bus driving is much more complex than taxi driving despite the predictable route.

dzhiurgis4• 10 months ago

Or buy 10 Teslas for the same price and offer superior service.

rsynnott12• 10 months ago

Driving a city bus is much, much, _much_ harder than driving a car. Shuttle bus in an airport or something, sure, maybe. But (with the exception of BRT systems with mostly/all segregated routes), I'd expect city buses to be about the most difficult form of transport to automate.

brailsafe• 10 months ago

Probably true, but those are accounted for differently, and (I'd speculate) that public transit labor costs convert tax dollars into economic activity as efficiently as the route can possibly operate given the constraints on the rest of the system. The lower the overhead to buying busses and the more reliably you can run them, along with making them more usable by your regional population, the more efficiently you're moving people to their jobs and the more of the tax dollars allocated to transit can into the pool that's going into the economy.

All the busses and tools required for maintenance are capital assets amortized and expensed over years, while the roads and the other infrastructure are hugely expensive and are rarely used as efficiently as they can be.

mcflubbins• 10 months ago

I wonder if they take into account the fact that if there are no bus routes (or less of them) there is a certain population of people that won't be able to work, and those worker pay taxes and put money back into the economy. Probably impossible to know what the effect is in total and I wouldn't be surprised if its not part of the TCO formula.

logifail3• 10 months ago

about half your costs are the bus driver

(Genuine question) is this true around the globe, or is that US-specific?

We were in Portugal over the summer and travelled with Flixbus (for the first time ever) to get from Porto to Lisbon. Were impressed by the high-quality service and great value for money. Wonder how much the driver makes per hour?

rootusrootus10• 10 months ago

We were in Portugal

Notably, Portugal has the lowest income, by far, of any Western European country. I would expect their bus drivers make considerably less than equivalent bus drivers in the US.

bluGill15• 10 months ago

US - though richer countries arounde the world have wages close to the us. Portugal as the other reply said will have different numbers. Still labor is going to be a large factor.

marcosdumay2• 10 months ago

It's true in developed and developing countries, it's probably not true in all poor countries. I'd guess the driver makes for a larger share of the cost in Portugal than in the US.

But the one most important factor defining the total cost by trip is the number of passengers by trip. If 60 people all show up to pay the driver's daily salary, it gets quite cheap.

lazyasciiart2• 10 months ago

Those services are pretty different to local bus routes - people book ahead, tickets aren’t covered by student passes or subsidized by employers, people care a lot more about comfort and are much less likely to be daily riders, etc.

whimsicalism4• 10 months ago

snip

balozi• 10 months ago

Federal subsidies don't stop at paying for much of the bus purchase costs, they are also paying for much of the roads and bridges the busses run on. Subsides cover of the operating costs, especially labor and energy. And at the very end, the reason most localities are able to offer free rides or very low cost rides is because federal dollars are subsidizing the final ride fares.

zbentley3• 10 months ago

Yes, and?

The outcome of that approach is that an important service has uniform low costs to direct consumers, many of whom rely on the service for their quality of life, and many of whom would be unable to afford the service if its costs were passed along to them instead of subsidized via government debt and taxes.

In other words, a public service. That’s a good thing.

dzhiurgis4• 10 months ago

Crazy diesel busses are still legal to begin with. Thats basically some form of money laundering at this point.

jlhawn• 10 months ago

One of the issues that AC Transit (SF East Bay bus agency) has is that it purchased a lot of Hydrogen Fuel Cell busses which have issues which dramatically impact their reliability. It's also very expensive technology. There's a decent argument that public agencies _should_ invest in early emerging technologies like that but the costs should not be borne by the transit agency alone, at the cost of poor service for its riders.

namibj6• 10 months ago

Make the argument why the bus company that provides bus-based transportation near one's home/work should spend marginal income on fancy emerging technologies instead of on higher-quality service (or lowering ticket prices if somehow service quality has reached an upper limit)? Sure if the state or feds want to pay the extra costs to get such technology out there into production, make them an offer as the local bus company how much they'd have to chip in for you to deploy that.

dayvid2• 10 months ago

Worth watching Modern MBA on the inefficiencies of transit in USA. Detailed analysis and comparison against Asian, European and Latin American systems along with private and government run operations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ3LSNXwZ2Y

bryceacc• 10 months ago

unbelievably in depth channel, love all of the local business interviews (from other videos with restaurants and such)

rootusrootus10• 10 months ago

Repeating the oft-cited but questionable assertion that car companies dismantled city rail systems makes me uncertain about how trustworthy the rest of their claims are. Though they did mention that the US is the most wealthy nation in the world -- did they later offer an opinion whether that would still be true had we approached public transit and health care subsidies the same way European countries did?

Aunche2• 10 months ago

Modern MBA videos are like ChatGPT. They sound reasonable when he's talking about something you don't know, but you'll notice him getting basic facts wrong in topics that you're familiar with. For example, he diagnoses the growth of public storage as people from single family homes to apartments in big cities and having no place to store their things, citing that America's urbanization rate has increased. However, the increased urbanization was actually driven by the growth of suburbs and actually, home sizes actually significantly increased during that period.

zbentley3• 10 months ago

whether that would still be true had we approached public transit and health care subsidies the same way European countries did?

Why wouldn’t it? I’ve heard many different explanations for the US’s wealth, but never that it’s wealthy because it saves on expenditures. There is also a solid case to be made that healthcare specifically would, if socialized, drive up productivity, earning power, and reduce fiscal risk (and risk aversion) for many demographics, all of which are good for GDP and other measures of a country’s wealth.

As for mass transit? It has costs and benefits too, but they’re a drop in the bucket compared to healthcare costs.

stocksinsmocks2• 10 months ago

I would also love to know the real reason why US manufacturing seems to be so much more costly than it is anywhere else, even after adjusting for wage differences.

johnnyanmac6• 10 months ago

It's not that drastic after wage differences, but bringing manufacturing costs down requires efficient, reliable supply lines. Nothing in the US has been that way for decades given the incentive structure of corporate America.

klooney• 10 months ago

The purchasers for buses, trainsets, etc., are bad- lots of unnecessary customization, last minute changes, low volume, etc. This drives down efficiency across the system.

AngryData4• 10 months ago

Because US manufacturers/investors demand high profit margins and expect it to increase every year, if not every quarter. If a company makes the same profits year after year, US investors consider it a dead end if not a complete failure, despite the fact that everybody involved in the business is making money

isthispermanent2• 10 months ago

So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production. As if that doesn’t carry any negative side effects.

This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing. Everyone is now fully aware that offshoring for a cheap sticker price comes with higher, harder to price costs elsewhere.

rootusrootus10• 10 months ago

This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against

Hardly. Less than two thirds of Americans actually bothered to vote. And a slight minority of those voted for the current government.

In any case, why does this need to be about identity politics? And if so, why are you suggesting that only the left is committed to an open, free market? Isn't that more traditionally a right-wing position?

jvanderbot• 10 months ago

All fun and games to point out seeming contradictions! Especially here.

Unfortunately GP is right - optics matters more than factual correctness, and the optics here is mixed - yes gov is overspending, but the solution is to offshore more jobs.

isthispermanent2• 10 months ago

China is neither an open or free market. Opening the door to China and their industrial policy is exactly what distorts traditionally free and open markets.

twoodfin• 10 months ago

The side effects of “Buy American” rules do not include a dynamic, competitive domestic bus manufacturing industry. Just the opposite.

If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them? Are busses really critical national security concerns?

If we needed the existing NA producers to build military busses it sounds like we’d be screwed!

kccqzy3• 10 months ago

It's primarily a jobs program. We do not really care about a competitive domestic bus manufacturing industry, but we care more than this uncompetitive industry is hiring workers.

jibe• 10 months ago

A literal bus factory may not be critical for national security, but the ability to manufacture a vehicle is. So the know-how, the supply lines, and the manufacturing facility are important. The ability to manufacture a fuel injector, a transmission, a windshield is going going to apply to a bus, a plane, a tank..

9rx• 10 months ago

If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them?

The contention is always around the debt that is created when you let them. If China never calls the debt, that's a huge win — you just got something for free! You'd be crazy not to take that deal. But others are concerned about what happens if they do call the debt. You might not like what you have to give up in return (e.g. houses, farmland, etc.). Just ask Canada.

Of course, there is always the option to stonewall their attempts to collect on the debt, but that creates all kinds of other negative effects when the USA can no longer be trusted to make good on its promises.

Tradeoffs, as always.

toast02• 10 months ago

If we needed the existing NA producers to build military busses it sounds like we’d be screwed!

I only really skimmed the article, and didn't even load the underlying paper. But it seems like a big issue was custom orders. If we need wartime vehicle production, like in WWII, there would most likely be a single or small number of designs that a facility would produce. I would expect a lot more coordination between ordering, production, and supply chain as well --- if we need mass production, tradeoffs change.

If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them? Are busses really critical national security concerns?

Busses are likely not really the national security concern, the concern would be having large vehicle manufacturing. It may be easier to retool a bus factory line to build large military vehicles than a compact car factory.

I'd imagine this is something like the Jones Act, where if it works, we keep the doors open for rapid changeover to military production. That's not really working for ships... the market has chosen alternate transportation rather than building large vessels for domestic transport, and so we don't really have large shipyards that could be pressed into building military vessels if needed --- the shipyards that can are the ones that build them in peace time and they don't have much excess capacity.

rfrey2• 10 months ago

Blaming this on the amorphous "left" is extraordinary, when offshoring has been a 40 year project of corporate America and "shareholder returns at any cost". A neoliberal global order has been the traditional Republican platform.

everdrive• 10 months ago

It's also just not advisable. It's better to attack policies rather than groups.

gosub1003• 10 months ago

The left serves corporations at least as much as it claims to represent the people. That is why they are blamed.

TrainedMonkey• 10 months ago

So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production.

No, their recommendation are transit subsidies with strings attached aimed at driving domestic economies of scale. Of course, depending on how a model is defined, 100 offshore unit cap can absolutely be gamed by making a "custom" model for each city or year.

Finally, they recommend that foreign bus manufacturers be allowed to sell up to 100 vehicles of a given model, at which point they would need to establish a US manufacturing facility to expand sales further.
To reduce costs, the researchers suggest that the federal reimbursements for bus purchases be capped at the 25th percentile cost of similar vehicles

scythe• 10 months ago

There's more than one way to accomplish the goals of protectionists, and the different options are usually not created equal. Some economic policies have worse side effects than others to accomplish similar tasks.

In this case, I think that placing a tax on imports (tariff) is always preferable to an inflexible ban on imports. This is not an unusual approach in economics; it is in fact very common that economists recommend replacing bans with taxes. In fact, even the current administration, which is radical by modern standards, basically always prefers tariffs to bans.

gruez• 10 months ago

So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production. As if that doesn’t carry any negative side effects.

How's American shipbuilding faring, after companies were forced to "buy american" for domestic shipping?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920

AngryData4• 10 months ago

The left? The US doesn't have a leftist party. Any time a leftist starts looking like they are gaining both parties do everything possible to shut them down.

reverius42• 10 months ago

In American parlance, Joe Biden is "the left" and Nancy Pelosi is "the far left". I'm guessing both are probably considered center-right from an international perspective?

watwut• 10 months ago

This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing.

They voted against trans rights and they voted to cause harm to people they dislike. It had absolutely nothing with buss prices or generic this. The vote for conservatives and Trump is ideological, about wish to wage culture war. It is about cruelty being the goal.

And I mean this 100% seriously. It is absurd to pretend it was about something like this.

Spooky233• 10 months ago

There's also a bunch of PE money in the space for specialized vehicles, leading to the usual consequences. Fire trucks are the canonical example. Shittier trucks that take 3x longer to get and are dramatically less reliable.

potato37328423• 10 months ago

There are about as many concrete trucks as there are fire trucks in the US (and like fire trucks some of the fleet is purpose built and some of the fleet is specialty bodies on normal-ish trucks) and they don't have comparable problems with PE buying the manufacturing up.

I think there's more to it than just evil PE

Spooky233• 10 months ago

I’m on a city e&a board. A couple of PE groups have rolled up the remaining fire truck manufacturers. 3 companies own 75% of the market. This is a well known issue… Google away and there’s lots to read about. I know nothing about cement mixers.

A rig that was $500k in 2010 is $2-2.5M now. That’s “cheap” —- volunteer fire companies tend to pimp up the trucks (usually they are paid via grant), cities are cheap on capital spend.

It’s a squeeze play as if you don’t keep the trucks up to date with modern gear, insurers will raise homeowners premiums. Bad look for the mayor.

ecshafer• 10 months ago

I think that the authors solution, outsourcing production is not quite right, they gloss over other issues.

In a large country like the US, some variation in bus design is inevitable due to differences in conditions like weather and topography. But Silverberg said that many customizations are cosmetic, reflecting agency preferences or color schemes but not affecting vehicle performance.

This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.

Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each.

The issue here appears to be: Why is SORTA's purchasing so incompetent that they are buying 17 busses for the price of 35? They are over double the price of RTD.

That same year, Singapore’s Land Transport Authority also bought buses. Their order called for 240 fully electric vehicles — which are typically twice as expensive as diesel ones in the US. List price: Just $333,000 each.

Singapore has a very efficient, highly trained, highly educated, highly paid administrative staff, and their competency is what is being shown here. They thought to get a reduction in price because of the large number of busses they are ordering.

One solution the author doesn't point out is that Federal funds often come coupled with a large amount of bureaucratic red tape. It could be cheaper in the long run to have more tax collection and expenditure at the local level, and not rely as much on federal grants.

itopaloglu834• 10 months ago

We also don't know much about these so called purchasing contracts either.

For example. do they contain sustainment services, maintenance equipment, storage facilities, or other sourcing requirements?

When using federal funds, you're generally required to purchase all American products, I remember trying to furnish an office with just two desks and four chairs (nothing fancy), and the initial cost estimates were over six thousand dollars. When we acquired private funding, we were able to get everything under two thousand, you can see the same pricing with Zoom hardware as a service leasing prices as well, they're leasing some equipment almost at twice the cost due (as far as I know) to all American sourcing.

I'm not questioning the sourcing restrictions, but trying to point out that it's a little more than the education level of the staff only.

citizenpaul• 10 months ago

All the contract stuff is too muddled to even consider debating online.

I'd start with one HUGE obvious waste. Why don't the buses anywhere have some sort of uber style pickup. My point. I see countless buses running empty all the time through the day where I live outside of busy hours. It is so depressing to watch 3 empty busses pull up to an empty stop to not pick anyone up then do it again and again and again.. I was once told it cost something like $250+ every time an empty bus drives one direction on its empty route. And there are hundreds of busses that do this for hours each day. Just so in case someone is there they can be picked up.

It seems like a dynamic system for determining where where people that need the bus are would be a massive saving. Or really just changing to a taxi style system only using buses during rush hours. I think some cities are actually experimenting with this.

Someone is gonna come at me about the reliability scheduling of transport for underprividged. But they have never actually rode a bus route so they don't know that the buses are as reliably late as they are on time in 90% of cities. This change would likely improve scheduling for people that need it.

ojbyrne• 10 months ago

One of the interesting things I read in the article is that the industry is a duopoly, and one of the companies is a Canadian company, New Flyer Industries. I went on a tour of their factory many years ago, and they told us they do most of the assembly of the busses there, then ship them to Minnesota where the engine was installed. They did that in order to meet US content requirements.

inferiorhuman5• 10 months ago

  We also don't know much about these so called purchasing contracts either.

https://www.go-metro.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Planning...

Something from this article doesn't add up. In 2023 the SORTA board approved purchase of buses with a base price of $530,000.

  Gillig LLC was the sole responding vendor and is recommended for award.

  The contract will be a firm fixed price contract with a 5-year term
  beginning immediately upon contract execution and ending on June 30, 2028.

Back in 2012 SORTA estimated that hybrid buses would cost an additional $240,000.

https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/oes/mobility1/public-transport...

Assuming that $530,000 is for diesel only buses you'd have to more than double the premium to get to Bloomberg's figure as not all of the order was for hybrid buses.

SpicyUme4• 10 months ago

But a bus isn't just a bus, there are differences in what is needed in different cities. Some need heat, some need AC, some need both. In Utah there are buses that go up the canyons and they have gearboxes focused on climbing steep hills, while a bus in the valley might never need that ratio and can be optimized for efficiency on the flats.

Seattle has buses with electric trolley lines above, and buses that were designed to go through the tunnel under downtown on battery power to avoid causing air quality issues in a confined space. https://bsky.app/profile/noahsbwilliams.com/post/3lx4hqvf5q2...

Maybe SORTA wanted more customization on the interior of their buses? I'm not sure but in the last year I've been riding buses to work much more than before and I've been interested in the different seating configurations on buses from the same service and route. That shouldn't explain $8 million in differnce but I'm sure that semi custom work isn't cheap. A friend worked on airline interiors which might be reasonably analogous, I wonder what the cost for say Lufthansa seats/upholstery is vs Southwest?

cenamus• 10 months ago

But they all basically come with AC and heating? At least in basically any semi-modern bus I've ever been in in Europe. No matter if it's -20 or +35 celsius, as long as they turn the AC actually on it's tolerable.

And we also have some mountains here, so there's some buses for that (still stock from the factory)

psunavy032• 10 months ago

Seattle has buses with electric trolley lines above, and buses that were designed to go through the tunnel under downtown on battery power to avoid causing air quality issues in a confined space.

And then the city government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to shut the tunnel down and make it light rail-only, forcing the buses up onto the surface and clogging up the street grid.

danpalmer2• 10 months ago

But a bus isn't just a bus, there are differences in what is needed in different cities

That's sometimes true but often not. Utah might need buses to go up the canyons, but might have passed some requirement at some point that said that all the buses need to be able to do this because someone got burnt once by not having enough of those buses. Or some well-meaning (or vote seeking?) city councillor might have put through a bill to put USB-A chargers in all the seats, which will stick around far longer than those coming as standard making them an expensive custom option.

What you end up with is requirements that make the buses custom purchases, which massively inflates their costs, when any reasonable person would say that such custom attributes aren't (always) needed. By having a strong opinion about something, the city will pay far more than if they bought an off-the-shelf solution.

Much of "the west" is particularly affected by this sort of attitude. Everywhere and everyone is convinced that they are special in some way and need something specific, but end up paying for it. This is part of why India can send a probe to Mars for $72m, or why Singapore can buy busses at $300k instead of $1m. And to be clear, I say this having grown up in the UK and moved to Australia, both places with a certain amount of this attitude.

AtlasBarfed• 10 months ago

PHEV drivetrain with a 50 mile all electric range: would handle virtually all of the situations.

Climbing a steep hill? EV drivetrains don't care and provide great torque. Start/stop? perfect. Regenerative braking? There you go. Need all-electric for a spell? Gas to extend range? Gas for AC/Heat? ok ok ok. Smooth operation? Low noise? Low/no emissions? yes yes yes Less wear? Less gas? Lower operating costs? Simpler drivetrains? Simpler repairs? yes to all of it.

Every bus should have been forced to be a PHEV drivetrain within a decade of the Prius/Insight being released in 1997. The USPS should have been all PHEV by then too.

DiogenesKynikos• 10 months ago

One way that China keeps the cost of subways down is by standardizing the train sets.

They have three types of trains (A, B, C) that are used in almost all subway systems across the country. You need a high-capacity train? A. You have a smaller line with fewer passengers? C. Something in-between? B.

There are a few variants for cities with special circumstances. Chongqing uses variants that can handle steeper slopes, because the city is incredibly hilly (like San Francisco).

By standardizing, prices can be kept down. Cities don't have to come up with custom solutions. Just define your needs and pick the standard variant that matches them.

Something similar could be done with buses.

cwmma• 10 months ago

< This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.

Off the top of my head, road salt, used in the northern areas of America to melt snow can cause corrosion of metal pieces on the underside of the bus. So Chicago or Boston might need to take that into account but Miami probably doesn't.

bradfa• 10 months ago

Yearly fluid film or woolwax treatment solves the rust concern in salt states. Roughly $1k/year/bus in operating expense. Schools do this to their buses already, it’s totally common.

closeparen• 10 months ago

San Francisco continues to use trolleybuses (powered by overhead wires) after the most of the country has moved onto hybrid and battery-electric vehicles because the energy demands from climbing hills are beyond at least the earlier generations of batteries.

bee_rider• 10 months ago

This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.

I don’t know much about bus procurement, but I’m not sure I believe you just based on the fact that you’ve ridden on lots of busses.

I’d expect that things like tire choice, engine, and transmission choices could be dependent on weather and geography. I’d expect any expensive differences to show up there, and I don’t really see how a passenger would gain much insight.

numpad04• 10 months ago

Singapore has a very efficient, highly trained, highly educated, highly paid administrative staff,

Or it's just literal economy of scale. 10 buses, 17 buses, vs 240, that difference changes economics completely.

You will be buying 500 of headlights, little under 1k tyres and wheels, couple thousands of seats, etc. Those are all whole lot numbers. That will save tons of overheads.

crote3• 10 months ago

Yes, but that's exactly the point the article is making: stop doing expensive one-off purchases! Rather than having 20 cities each buy their own set of 10 custom buses, have them place a shared order of 200 identical buses.

freeopinion2• 10 months ago

Your excerpts don't divulge whether one of the bus manufacturers is required by law to pay health insurance, social security, and other labor costs. Are they required by law to treat the water from their cooling towers before they dump it in the river? Do they have to pay a 50% tariff on imported parts?

I'm sure there is a lot of slop in different purchasing departments. They can probably all tighten things up. But there are legitimate reasons for one product to cost more than its twin. The U.S. should not allow twin products to be sold on the same shelf if one was not manufactured under the same rules as the domestic product. If all three of these products played under the same rules, then we can point fingers. Without that you are just ridiculing the company who knowingly takes a hit for purchasing from responsible vendors. If that is what you are doing, shame on you.

maxerickson4• 10 months ago

The 2 bus contracts were with the same manufacturer, which is headquartered in California.

russdill• 10 months ago

A very common problem in Metro Phoenix involves government or corporate procurement. They just purchase whatever is used everywhere else and end up with something that lasts well under is rated life time or doesn't even make it though a single summer.

inferiorhuman5• 10 months ago

Federal funds for transit vehicles come with an expected lifetime.

inferiorhuman5• 10 months ago

  The issue here appears to be: Why is SORTA's purchasing so incompetent that
  they are buying 17 busses for the price of 35? They are over double the
  price of RTD.

As far as I can tell the author is making a bad faith argument. SORTA's purchase was about one third diesel-electric hybrids, while RTD's was almost certainly diesel only. AFAICT the RTD buses don't have air conditioning while the SORTA buses do.

SG vs the US? Economies of scale, simpler drivetrains (hybrid vs non), and less expensive smog equipment.

gucci-on-fleek• 10 months ago

This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.

It definitely depends. The traditional yellow school buses here (Canada) use diesel, so they need things like glow plugs [0] and block heaters [1] to be able to run in the winter. But even that only helps so much, so when the nighttime lows are below –40°C, they cancel the busses since they know that they won't run.

Most of the city busses here use natural gas, and they're considerably more reliable in the cold weather but if they're parked for too long on a really cold day (even while running), the brakes will freeze up and they won't be able to move [2].

Similarly, the busses need a fairly powerful heating system, since it's tricky to heat a large space when it's really cold and the front door is open half the time. But conversely, most of the busses have no A/C.

Adding glow plugs, and block heaters, and brake dryers shouldn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a more reliable natural gas bus might be double the price of an unreliable diesel one.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glow_plug

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_brake_(road_vehicle)#Disad...

4MOAisgoodenuf3• 10 months ago

This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.

That’s because your job was passenger.

From the drivers perspective: configuration should absolutely match the terrain and the expected route. For example: an Allison AT545 transmission without a lockup torque converter will be hell in the mountain and hill climbs of Colorado, possibly even dangerous. Whereas it may serve perfectly fine in Nebraska.

rsynnott12• 10 months ago

This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.

Hmm, not sure about that. I live in Dublin, which is, generally, very flat, and where the temperature rarely goes far outside the 0 to 20 degrees C range. The buses can be fairly unpleasant on rare very hot days (no air conditioning), the electric ones can be unpleasantly cold on rare extremely cold days (heating not specced for it; this isn't an issue for the diesel ones as those produce so much waste heat anyway), and when I was a kid I lived in one of the few hilly parts of Dublin, and bus breakdowns going uphill were somewhat common (in fairness I think this is less of a thing now). Geography absolutely matters; Dublin's buses would be basically unusable anywhere very hot or cold.

There's other stuff, too. Buses here are almost always double-decker, but one specific new bus route requires single-decker buses, because the double-deckers won't fit under some of the older railway bridges. This will also require modifications to some road infra, which won't currently take long buses (to have a decent capacity single-deckers need to be longer; the single-deckers will be about 13m long vs 11m for the normal buses). Some cities use articulated buses; those wouldn't work here at all.

saalweachter• 10 months ago

It could be cheaper in the long run to have more tax collection and expenditure at the local level, and not rely as much on federal grants.

There's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma here in that even if a city decides to go this route, their citizens are still paying Federal taxes and contributing to the programs used to buy busses.

So you're not going to save your citizens any money unless everyone stops using the programs. From an incremental standpoint, where everyone has already defected, you want your local governments to be grabbing every grant they can.

snthd2• 10 months ago

Similar data on police vehicles could be interesting.

hamdingers3• 10 months ago

Firefighting vehicles too, more expensive than European counterparts by a factor of 10.

snthd2• 10 months ago

Started googling and found this:

https://www.newsweek.com/americas-new-police-cars-are-taxpay...

...features specifically designed for policing come standard including Police Perimeter Alert, a technology that detects moving treats around a vehicle and automatically activates the rear camera, sounds a chime...

Anyway...

potato37328423• 10 months ago

They're protecting and serving so well they're worried about getting jumped.

logifail3• 10 months ago

Ever since I first looked at the Oshkosh NGDV for the USPS I couldn't help but wonder WHY there was a need for a custom vehicle?*

European parcel delivery firms and postal systems (Deutsche Post DHL, La Poste, Royal Mail, PostNL and all the non-legacy competitors) generally do not commission purpose-built vehicles, they buy off the shelf small vans and light commercial vehicles.

* of course I do know why, "because jobs and politics"...

pkaye2• 10 months ago

The USPS is an US federal agency. At one time it even had a cabinet level position though not so any more. Its not private like in most countries. At the scale they buy these vehicles, it probably makes sense to get a custom one. Even Amazon has custom EVs built for them.

wolrah3• 10 months ago

Even Amazon has custom EVs built for them.

Eh, sort of. Amazon partnered with Rivian to help design the EDV and had an initial exclusivity agreement as long as they ordered a certain number of them, but this agreement has since been terminated so anyone can buy them now. The USPS actually tested one in early 2024.

wolrah3• 10 months ago

How common are individual streetside mailboxes elsewhere in the world. That's really the only thing where I could see a real need for specialized vehicles for, otherwise for neighborhoods that have on-foot delivery or centralized boxes I totally agree any ordinary delivery van should be just as good for USPS as it is for UPS, FedEx, Amazon, etc.

p_l4• 10 months ago

USPS has drastically different approach to mail deliver and pickup than most countries. Including as mentioned street-level mailboxes for both pickup and delivery, and general idea that really rural mail gets delivered direct still.

In comparison, polish postal system although it's pretty much standard european approach:

- postal trucks deliver mail between post offices

- in cities and more built-up rural areas, on-foot postman delivers mail from post office

- in very sparse rural areas or for households far from village center, mailboxes are placed in centralized location and you have to go to pick up them on your own.

Mail pickup is done from dedicated sending boxes usually on outside of post offices, sometimes one might be placed further away in rural areas. No curb-side pickup.

Such differences mean that normal cargo vehicles can be easily used between post offices, and even for rural areas you arrive, park once, handle unloading, and drive again, instead of constantly starting and stopping to access road-side mailboxes.

AngryData4• 10 months ago

I don't know how it is done in the rest of the US, but in my state rural mail services are 95% of the time delivered using the mail carrier's personal vehicle, not the custom mail trucks. I usually only see them inside towns or moving between post offices.

logifail3• 10 months ago

instead of constantly starting and stopping to access road-side mailboxes

Q: What's the (average) distance between deliveries to road-side mailboxes?

I'm thinking of the average driving time between them, compared with the time to get out of a vehicle, put mail in a mailbox, and get back in the a vehicle...

I know "mounted delivery routes" sound and feel more efficient, but just how much more efficient are they actually?

We should note that USPS letter volumes are falling (just like everywhere else in the world) and somehow parcel/packet delivery services do not need to have "mounted routes", the delivery crew appear to be able to just get out of their vehicles(?)

maxerickson4• 10 months ago

The frame and overall design of these buses is not custom (and often changes little year to year). The drivetrain, accessories, and so on are selected from options.

RobKohr• 10 months ago

"Federal funding typically covers 80% of bus purchases, with agencies responsible for the remainder."

Well, there is your answer. The one making the purchase isn't the one primarily paying for the purchase. This makes them less sensitive to pricing.

Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance.

Or how you don't care how much you put on your plate or what you choose to eat at an all you can eat buffet.

The second you detach the consumer from the price of something, even through an intermediary such as health insurance, that is when they stop caring about how much something costs, and so the price jumps.

frollogaston9• 10 months ago

Shouldn't insurance care about the pricing though? I get why federal govt isn't sensitive, given 0 competition.

SoftTalker11• 10 months ago

Insurance profit is limited to a percentage of what they pay out. So the more they pay, the more money they make.

sleepybrett• 10 months ago

If the feds are mandating USA manufacture in order to secure the funding for the muni.. then it just really amounts to welfare for the bus manufacturer.

Which is probably the right way to support american manufacturing.

whimsicalism4• 10 months ago

massive proportions of utilization come from govt subsidized plans

foolswisdom• 10 months ago

As noted by sibling comments, the arm of the Healthcare company that wons the doctor's office wants to collect as much as possible, while the insurance arms are anyway capped at how much they can make. Incentives (conflict of interest) are towards paying more.

nicoburns• 10 months ago

Governments of countries that have public health care generally are price sensitive. The competition is from other governmental functions that need the budget.

cyanydeez• 10 months ago

Or how government bailouts go to corporations

Fade_Dance• 10 months ago

I actually don't see how that follows from OP.

Y_Y• 10 months ago

And congratulations to any of today's lucky ten thousand who are just learning of the Principal-Agent Problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

airstrike3• 10 months ago

How about the ten thousand learning about "today's lucky ten thousand"?

phil21• 10 months ago

I'm convinced that a great majority of problems in the US these days fundamentally boils down to principal agent problems. The 2008 financial crisis is a great example. Once banks no longer kept mortgages on their own books, it just became a matter of time until that was going to blow up. The incentives change.

theologic3• 10 months ago

Throw in confirmation bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias and you have a lot of inertia from changing. Not only do they not have the right info, but because they have invested in the ongoing solution, it is difficult to get any change going because humans tend to simply see everything as supporting their current viewpoint.

trollbridge2• 10 months ago

And watch out for troublesome agents who often propose themselves as the answer to the principal-agent problem they created in the first place.

hackernewds• 10 months ago

there's no reason to be patronizing or condescending

pyaamb• 10 months ago

You've got me wondering about if and to what extent AI could alter the dynamic

cptnapalm• 10 months ago

I didn't know this had a name! Thank you!

ericmcer• 10 months ago

It's even worse, I will use my healthcare just because it is free. I would feel like a moron not get my free physical, bloodwork and other labs every year. If it was $20 I wouldn't bother but its almost obligatory to take something "because its free".

Once I learn something is free it is like I already own it, so now I don't get it if I take it, I lose it if I don't.

tehjoker3• 10 months ago

Preventative care is free because it saves a tremendous amount of money for the insurance company and physical and emotional hardship for yourself by catching bad things early.

hdgvhicv• 10 months ago

It’s not fee though is it. How many hours does it take do go somewhere and have a checkup? Almost certainly more than $20 worth.

NoahZuniga• 10 months ago

These free things are preventative. If you take them, the insurance company expects you to need less healthcare in the future, so actually this is a good thing (and not a problem as in the op)!

thegreatpeter• 10 months ago

Posts like these on Hacker News are quite interesting bc if this scenario comes up in any "left vs right" debate, it's always shot down as a terrible concept and idea to keep the government out of it.

marbro• 10 months ago

We need to shut down the government until buses and other wasteful borrowing and spending is eliminated. Local governments should pay for 100% of their buses rather than 20%.

avar2• 10 months ago

    > The second you detach the consumer from the
    > price of something, even through an
    > intermediary such as health insurance, that
    > is when they stop caring about how much
    > something costs, and so the price jumps.

In reality, this claim doesn't survive a cursory glance at the OECD's numbers for health expenditure per capita[1].

You'll find that (even ignoring the outlier that is the US health care system) that in some countries where consumers bear at least some of the cost directly via mandatory insurance and deductibles, the spending per capita (and which survives a comparison with overall life expectancy etc.) is higher than in some countries where the consumer is even further detached from spending, via single-payer universal healthcare systems.

Or, the other way around, it's almost like it's a very complex issue that resists reducing the problem to an Econ 101 parable.

1. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-gla...

trollbridge2• 10 months ago

If consumers actually directly paid the whole cost for health services (as opposed to a fixed price, like a $20 copay, etc.), the prices charged would become far more regular.

An easy way to examine this is to compare the price of over-the-counter versus pharmaceuticals. If a third party weren't paying for them, the price would have to either come down to something affordable to the average person, or else the market for it would shrink to only the wealthy.

kortilla2• 10 months ago

Markets with prices fixed by the government have fixed prices. This isn’t interesting for markets

lucumo• 10 months ago

OECD's numbers for health expenditure per capita[1].

Interesting that the graphs use PPP, but that the age-adjusted graph still shows the richer OECD countries spend more than the poorer ones. I wonder what's up with that.

reliabilityguy• 10 months ago

These reports tend to ignore how fast you can get a specific service or test done. There is plenty of anecdotal data out there that in US you can get CT or MeI the next day, while in many countries in the EU you have to wait months.

I think looking only on the spending per capita tells us nothing about accessibility of service, and its quality. Once you start to consider those things, imo, the whole thing is not as a clear cut as it looks.

barchar3• 10 months ago

I mean if it's a strict 80/20 split the incentives are the same as a 0/100 split no?

salmonellaeater• 10 months ago

The transit agency will choose more expensive features that do not meet a 1x ROI but do meet a 5x ROI.

WalterBright• 10 months ago

It's not just about not caring. It's a system that is wide open for grift. For example, the mayor awards the contract to X, and X in return donates to his campaign reelection.

sam345• 10 months ago

Exactly. Same for Universities. Thank you.

qgin2• 10 months ago

I have a $6500 deductible. I definitely care what things cost because my insurance almost never actually helps pay for anything unless I have an unbelievably bad year.

The problem is that literally nobody can tell me how much anything is going to cost until I get the bill in a month. Not even because they don't want to tell me. Nobody at the desk even knows what my price is going to be because it's all numberwang.

ethagknight• 10 months ago

You are the best customer, thinking you’re a smart customer!

moduspol• 10 months ago

Not defending insurance but theoretically you do also get a better rate than the uninsured rate just by having it go through the health insurance.

I say “theoretically” because I’ve also heard they’re often willing to cut some pretty good deals if you don’t have insurance and pay cash. And I mean “good” relative to the initially billed amount, not “good” relative to what it should actually cost.

kortilla2• 10 months ago

You care about small costs but not the large ones. Even with a relatively large deductible it’s irrelevant to you if your hospital charges $50k or $90k for a surgery.

$6500 is nothing once surgery, radiation, and/or anesthesiology enters the picture.

BobbyTables24• 10 months ago

The funny thing is there are only a few insurance companies (BCBS, Aetna, United, …) and types of plans (PPO, HMO, EPO).

I could be misinformed but I feel like there are only a few possible combinations of one’s actual coverage.

A simple spreadsheet could easily track everything. The providers even know how much they get from each company, so they know the allowed in-network cost for a patient.

It’s just utter laziness and stupidity.

throwawayqqq11• 10 months ago

Isnt it a little onesided to put blame on the payers for price insensitivity?

The second you detach the consumer from the price of something, that is when they stop caring about how much something costs, and so the price jumps.

Why should nobody care about prices? The customer gets subsidizes by another payer, in this case governments that have to authorize budgets.

The reverse could be true too, companies raise their prices in lock step because they want to 'detach' more profits off of production and so, the government steps in to subsidize. So what is the causality chain here? Still the government not caring?

IMO you are putting blame onesidedly on payers and not on the ones in charge of price policy, which would include companies too. I dont understand why people dont apply their critizism of large organisations, like a government, to other large organisations, like a company.

simianwords3• 10 months ago

Companies are incentivised to keep costs low and the feedback loop for this incentive is much smaller. What I mean by feedback loop is: the cost of running the company directly affects the stake-holders in a meaningful way. The CEO is probably has stock options and has to hit a target so that they can be paid well. To do so they need to be more sensitive with prices or shareholders or the board will be on the CEO’s behind. There is a direct monetary incentive relation here.

There is one for the government too but the feedback loop is much bigger. If some one in the government makes a suboptimal decision, what incentives exist to penalise them?

Ygg2• 10 months ago

The second you detach the consumer from the price of something, even through an intermediary such as health insurance, that is when they stop caring about how much something costs, and so the price jumps.

That's not the only problem with health. It's a very inelastic resource.

If you and your neighbor's have cancer, and I promise to treat whoever pays most, I can safely assume I'm going to be filthy rich. After all, money is pointless if you die, so barring money for descendants, the logical thing is to give me as much money as you can.

cowsandmilk• 10 months ago

You’re assuming the federal government rubber stamps their 80%

gottorf• 10 months ago

Fairly accurate assumption to make in this case. Incentives around government spending are structured against close scrutiny of how much gets spent on what and why.

Politicians love splashing their names on papers on how they got a bill passed to spend $X on $GOOD_SOUNDING_PROJECT, and the bigger the X, the better. Government employees are strongly incentivized against the reduction of their own employment should that spending go away. Lobbyists and service providers obviously have a direct interest in ensuring those contracts continue.

Nobody but the taxpayer has any interest at all in ensuring that money gets spent on things worth spending on and, moreover, that the spent money actually achieves the outcomes desired and intended behind those projects. And how much influence does the average taxpayer have on any of that? It rounds to zero.

rollcat• 10 months ago

I don't know. I live in a country with excellent healthcare, excellent public transport, overall excellent quality of life - yeah, and so much of it is funded from our taxes. Granted, the country was rich to begin with, but it seems to be perfectly sustainable.

Just my €0.03.

grafmax2• 10 months ago

Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance.

If your argument were correct, socialized medicine would lead to higher costs, but it usually does the opposite. Insurance profit margins are a small portion of the overall cost in the US. In inelastic markets, when profit is removed, often you can see lower costs because profit by itself is purely extractive and in an inelastic market competitive forces are weaker.

jeroenhd• 10 months ago

One of the controlling factors for socialized healthcare is that prices are negotiated down by the people paying for the medicine. In countries where private healthcare is extremely rare, pharmaceutical companies can choose between "less profit" or "no sales in that country at all". Sometimes they bluff and in rare cases that means public healthcare has to go without certain medication or certain vendors, but on the whole the price is kept under control (until corruption kicks in, at least).

When the people handing out cheques don't get a chance or don't bother to demand lower prices, things become incredibly expensive. Even if a party like a private insurer tries to negotiate the price down, the healthcare provider can always say "tough shit, guess your customers aren't insured then" as long as there's at least one insurance company willing to pay the full price.

You also see this with electric vehicle incentives. Governments incentivising people to buy electric cars by giving money directly to the consumer just end up with electric vehicles rising in cost because the money is essentially free anyway.

analog31• 10 months ago

It could also be like health care, where the cost goes down when the government is paying for it. In fact my knee jerk reaction to the title of the thread was: Let the government buy generic buses in volume and give them to the localities.

smath• 10 months ago

Also (I think?):

- Govt beaureucreats spending taxpayer money - Availability of cheap credit for the US govt (the spender is other countries buying the debt) - Availabiulity of cheap student loans

throwaway8943453• 10 months ago

Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance.

This seems different. A healthcare consumer (in the US) is overpaying in large part because (1) they need the coverage (2) they lack the expertise to distinguish between offerings and (3) there simply aren't more affordable offerings.

Single payer healthcare systems feature significantly lower costs and better quality despite that the payer is not the consumer.

1024core2• 10 months ago

This reminds me of the "trash can fiasco" that went down in San Fracnsico.

https://sfpublicworks.org/trashcanredesign

TL;DR: San Francisco government decided to go with custom-designed, bespoke, artisanal public trash cans. Each can ended up coming in at around $20K.

When, in fact, if you buy a typical run-of-the-mill public trash can that most other cities do, it would cost them less than $1000.

avree• 10 months ago

You are conflating two things with that story. The prototypes cost $20,000. The designed can cost $3,000. Higher than your "$1,000" can, but it also had a bunch of "features". If you've ever worked at a hardware company, you probably know that the price of DVT units, or any prototype, ends up being significantly higher than the production unit.

1024core2• 10 months ago

So you're saying the designed can cost 3X the COTS one. Similar idea to the story, no?

Exoristos• 10 months ago

Isn't this kind of thing always tacitly by design? Federal and local funding streams diffuse throughout the economy.

silexia• 10 months ago

Outsourcing is not a good solution, we should support our local manufacturers who have to follow our ethical rules on labor treatment, safety, and environmental damage. Outsourcing just allows the worst abuses to happen elsewhere. We should get rid of labor and environmental rules if we want to allow outsourcing.

tclover• 10 months ago

Well, what did you expect? if competition is banned, they can churn out whatever, charge whatever they want, and it'll still get bought with tax money.

ge96• 10 months ago

One day when I needed to take the bus I realized it was free, you used to have to pay for the rides. I thought that was great to help people out in need, but then they reverted it...

bgnn• 10 months ago

I see a lot of people saying this is due to lack of competition. I hate to break this to you but it isn't that. A lot of European countries thinking the competition will drive the costs down, including on the supply side, and liberalizing the market realized not long after that this did nothing to reduce the cost. More often than not it drove the cost up.

The problem is that the public transportation is never truly free market, as they are always heavily subsidized. More companies relying on subsidies to do business doesn't change the fact. On the supply side, bus manufacturers have the same. US federal govrhas strict requirements to buy American made busses. I think NAFTA might be ok too, but not sure. In any case, what the US government paying for is manufacturing jobs and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Or let's put it another way. Those busses can be produced in China or Japan for much cheaper. But then you will let go of this industry, and have more dead towns and small cities without jobs.

balderdash• 10 months ago

They probably pay too much for everything - and in many cases that’s by design (e.g. ever increasing public sector pay packages).

If municipalities had to disclose the deferred maintenance capex cost on infrastructure and capital assets, I’d hazard most places are in a pretty dicey situation (80 year old water or sewer systems that need replacing, aging buses, etc) - and towns saying they balanced the budget or in a good fiscal position is a joke.

sweeter• 10 months ago

Who could've guessed that the "public private partnership" was extremely ineffective and only serves to funnel tax payer dollars to private owners while giving kick backs to politicians. Wow. Who knew.

tonyhart7• 10 months ago

bulk price

200 buses equal cheaper buses, nothing surprise here

iamcalledrob• 10 months ago

The article focuses on purchase price -- and buying from BYD in China will be a lot cheaper.

But I'm curious of the downstream effects of forcing cities to buy local, even at a higher price. After all, that money will get taxed many times over and could potentially change the equation?

QuantumNoodle• 10 months ago

Whatever solution to increase competition and bring down prices - great. The solution should also either increase bus capacity and/or bus routes to more desirable locations so people would _want_ and _need_ to take the bus.

Are 40 foot buses the right option when ridership is so low in the states? Europe has small van-like busses but more of them. Sure less people fit on one sitting, but routes are tighter, more frequent, and transferring between bus lines doesn't require going waaay out of the way to a hub to transfer. 40 ft busses are great once riders are dependant on it... Seems like a classic case of over optimization.

jagged-chisel• 10 months ago

More things should be like the Interstate System when federal money is involved: locally budget, appropriate, source, build/implement, and when it meets federal guidelines, you get reimbursed.

bashmelek• 10 months ago

I think a bigger problem is that, with urban sprawl, it makes it hard to service enough people with public transportation.

ksynwa• 10 months ago

This is true for every public utility vehicle. For example, firetrucks: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

It's a feature of the economic setup.

xbmcuser• 10 months ago

This problem is not unique to buses it's in almost all markets or industries in the US. Almost every industry has monopolies or virtual monopolies. Incubants pay/finance politicians to make rules that make it harder for new entrants to get into the market or use false free market narrative to hamper community inniatives. The attack on wind and solar by the current administration is part of the same play.

rsynnott12• 10 months ago

Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each.

Huh. TFI, the Irish transport authority, currently has a deal to pay 400 million euro for 800 electric buses, mostly double deckers (so a lot bigger than these ones). Diesel double deckers cost them significantly less (about 250-350k IIRC), but obviously cost more to operate. That's for custom jobs (in particular TFI has weird beliefs about what shape windscreens should be).

I wonder if part of it is just that these US transit agencies are buying them on such a small scale; a state-level agency responsible for sourcing the buses might be more effective.

ainiriand• 10 months ago

But each State and County wants their say on what vehicles they want, and for sure a lot of them do not want those woke electric buses...

rsynnott12• 10 months ago

So give them a choice of two or three.

ThinkBeat• 10 months ago

The biggest killer are all the specific changes each city decides they need. If a standard feature set could be achieved mass production would be easier to arrange.

Perhaps with a module system to remove or add some subset of feature that are easily to adapt to it.

The 80% of federal funding¹ should be based on a "universal common standard", and cities pay 20% plus the city pays 100% for various customisations they need.

¹ I have not made any effort to verify this data but it's in hte article. It seems more generous than the federal government tend to be.

m101• 10 months ago

Similar to another comment here: the principle agent issue here is the person designing the spec for busses is not the person paying for the buses. If it was the case then the market would settle on a common standard as everyone seeks the lowest price.

iamtheworstdev• 10 months ago

Article leaves out how Private Equity has moved hard into the supply chains for buses and fire trucks and started taking advantage of their positions.

notmyjob• 10 months ago

Public transit is intersectional. It helps poor and elderly people while also being climate friendly (assuming enough ridership). It’s often not used enough to satisfy either goal. California’s high speed rail boondoggle comes to mind as a great example.

BobbyTables24• 10 months ago

I’m all for mass transportation m, but city buses blocking a busy two-lane road for several minutes waiting at a stop has got to end. Even when not stopped, they do a pretty good job at impeding traffic.

The bus system has one set of costs. But it has another set of external costs on the rest of society.

In contrast, I’ve seen British short trains arrive + unload + load + depart in far less than 5 minutes total, and that involves a far greater number of passengers than a crawling bus.

Yeah, trains require more infrastructure, but I think the public could grow to like them.

ranadomo• 10 months ago

Transit violence is not limited to outlier cases like the nyc immolation or Iryna's horrific slaughter. Women in particular may never feel safe on public transit and avoid it entirely at night and alone. Daily harassment, stalking, threats and verbal abuse are "facts of life" for the majority of female passengers in metro areas. They will all move up or out to safer environments and take their car or private transportation everywhere. Pretending like Americans are instinctually averse to public transit is an absurd contention when they've been behaviorally conditioned by the insanely dangerous environment and a justice system that works to inflict it upon them until they give up or die.

DudeOpotomus2• 10 months ago

In many municipalities, it would be cheaper to run on demand van service for people than run busses. Not only would it get people to and from their actual homes and work, vans are cheap and readily available. Paying more drivers is cheaper than buying and maintaining multi million dollar busses that are empty a lot of the time.

In most of CA, most homes are far from bus lines. Making their use prohibitive for all but those who must use them. I know they do something like this in LA. People love it.

kjkjadksj7• 10 months ago

Metro micro doesn’t scale at all. It is still limited to pilot study areas. Cost per trip is absurd compared to traditional bussing. One of the stated goals of the next gen bus plan in LA was to get a bus stop in a 10 min walk of 85% of the workers in LA county and this was achieved.

The real trouble with transit is people choose where they live based on car convenience rather than transit convenience. So they open an app and go “gee I can drive to work in 30 mins but I have to take two or three busses and three times the time on transit.” And write it off forever, rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work. The way LA county is developed is that there are apartments basically in every neighborhood anyhow without very strong neighborhood specific effects on pricing. Housing a little more neighborhood specific but that changes as townhomes and other sort of not-detached-sfh buying opportunities come to bear generally in neighborhoods with demand for a song compared to detached housing.

rootusrootus10• 10 months ago

rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work

In many places I've lived, this optimization would need to be re-done every job change and you would probably need to move, because it's as much about where the job is as where your house is.

The thing about optimizing for a good commute in a car is that you're way more likely to be at least average or better even if your job location changes.

DudeOpotomus2• 10 months ago

Hard to figure this one with busses costing millions to purchase and tens of thousands a year to maintain. Not too mention drivers, bus stops, paint, etc.

No way that using cheaply available vans and part time drivers would ever cost more over time.

In my city in SoCal, busses are mostly empty. They are rarely full, and only at special events.

US cities pay too much for buses

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