"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.
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.
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.
Your view is a commonly-held one, and makes a lot of sense; unfortunately there is very little support for it. One data point to the contrary is the Oregon Health Care Study, which showed that 'free' preventative care increased healthcare spending, but did not improve lifespan or reduce long-term cost.
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.
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.
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?
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)
> 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.
I go back and forth on that, the bus tunnel was useful. But a tunnel with 3(4?) stops seems like a good place for a train of some sort. I guess the buses are why there are no center stops in there? It seems like a missed opportunity. Not sure about the history of the tunnel but there were tracks there years ago so they must have planned to put trains in eventually.
Given the choice between clogging up the city grid for car commuters, and clogging up the rail grid because buses are pushed to share rail lines, I'm going to pull the trigger on the first option, every day of the week.
Clogging up the rail grid was somewhat acceptable when it was a few end-of-line terminal stops, but now those tunnels are in the middle of the rail network. A bus breaking down and blocking the tunnel was bad enough when it affected end-of-line service, but would be an absolute nightmare when it affects middle-of-line service.
Sorry, downtown single-occupant vehicle drivers, you're just going to have to deal with the consequences of spending tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars on your choice of the least space-efficient, gridlock-inducing form of transportation.
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.
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.
The few flex areas are small and I've never tried the electric rentals.
Every once in awhile I do use the bus system to check out how things are going and I get how depressive an empty bus is... I was just on an empty bus to the airport (which I have to take two routes to get there, another tough negative to solve).
Yes, they're empty, but it's also a catch 22 because it takes urbanization, frequent bus services, and a lot of time for people to adjust to it. Anyone who spent enough time in Europe can tell you about how efficient, convenient, and efficient a bus network can get. Also, most people go to work, so buses tend to be very busy in the morning and at shift changes etc.
It's not magic though, there are a lot of places where buses simply will not work and we need to find better ways to improve mobility. I don't have the slightest idea how, it's a generational effort.
Traffic jams are solved by congestion pricing. Parking lot congestion can be solved the same way with pay-parking lots. I don't know what cars have to do with "lost third places".
Congestion pricing works when there are alternatives. If you have both no public transport and congestion pricing, what you have is only increased tax collection with no behavioral change.
>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.
So your justification for not having reliably scheduling comes down to "well we never had reliable scheduling", and your solution is to make the schedule more chaotic?
Why do we just accept and the broken windows in order to try and make new buildings, instead of fixing the windows?
Because buses are shared and follow a fixed-route and can't support an on-demand model. It may take a bus over an hour to complete the entire route.
Would you rather have to call for a bus that might take an hour (or might take 2 minutes) to get to your stop when you call it, or would you like to know that it comes at 4:45, 5:45 and 6:45 so you can plan ahead to know when to get to your stop.
(failing to run on schedule is a separate issue, but on-demand rides won't solve that). In cities, one solution to that problem is to run at such frequent headways that a late bus doesn't matter -- when I lived in SF, I had 2 busy bus routes that could take me to work, during peak hours a bus ran every 6 minutes, so even if they weren't on schedule I didn't care since I knew another would be along soon.
If you want me to ride the bus to work every morning and home every evening, you still have to have buses in mid-day so I can go home early if I need to. Even if those buses are mostly empty.
I've thought about this a lot, and wonder if the last mile problem could be lessened with an uber style pickup you suggest. I have a civil engineer relative who follows this stuff better than I do, and he says all the pilot programs he's seen (in the US) tend to be wildly unprofitable.
That said, I think that some program like this is essential to bootstrapping a really good transit system. The last mile problem really does stop a lot of would be commuters and is a huge, largely hidden cost, in regional transit planning. You could have fewer, more reliable trunks, that can run less reliably after core commuting hours, all because you have ways of alleviating the pain associated with difficulty getting to out of the way places. This allows people to make life decisions that they might not otherwise be able to make. And once you have a solid core, you can continue to grow it, by continuing to encourage long term ridership. Couple this with increasingly aggressive zoning changes to allow for density, and I think you could really grow out a transit system in 10-20 years.
But this is a fantasy of mine. It would likely be wildly unpopular to run an unprofitable program long enough to make all of this possible, and would probably only work in regions that have the potential for good transit anyways. You'd also need a large cohort of YIMBYs, that while currently growing in many regions, aren't guaranteed to still vote that way in a decade when they have more to lose.
Most bus systems in the US are wildly unprofitable and quite costly. My local system is just under $10 per unlinked trip (i.e. get one on bus). That makes getting from point A to point B not much cheaper to provide than Uber because it will usually involve a transfer.
Everyone would be better off in an Uber type system but there's no appetite or budget to subsidize rides at the level people would use it
There are some variable pickup transit services, but you may not see them because of when/where they go. I know around me there are zones where you can call for pickup and they use small shuttle buses. I think they drop of within the zone or at other bus stops, but I haven't used the service so I'm not sure.
My preferred way to solve bus lane reliability would be to shut down streets or lanes to only allow buses.
> 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.
> 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.
< 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
And with that, we can scale it up and have multiple chains of these buses used for mass transport. Heck, in some fantasy land we can really speed up the bus and have it trek across the the continent in a few hours!
Bus driver also does things like trigger ramp for handicapped people, strap in wheelchairs securely, answer questions about the route, and security surveillance.
Every bus in Copenhagen has a button next to the door to lower the wheelchair ramp, but I have never seen anyone use it. I've never seen a wheelchair on a bus.
The metro and suburban trains have level boarding (the platform is at exactly the same level as the floor of the train so it's very easy for a wheelchair user to wheel themselves in). I've still only seen wheelchairs users on these trains once or twice.
I suspect wheelchair users prefer to call the disability taxi service. It's free for wheelchair users and blind people [1]. I don't know if this service is more or less expensive to provide than adapting buses and trains, but it is probably easier for everyone.
That's relatively similar to how my local (US) municipality handles disabled passengers. All of the big infrastructure supports wheelchairs, but it is only occasionally used. Disabled people are served by mini-buses which operate point-to-point and charge them the same fare they'd pay for the big bus.
Wheelchairs, sometimes multiple, are on Chicago buses all the time. Also rolling grocery trolleys, walkers (especially for dialysis patients where they have a medical functions) and also old people whose legs don't work so good and need the bus lowered.
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.
Yeah I remember once doing the math, and it takes a relatively high level of ridership before a bus (or train) reaches the per-passenger efficiency of something like a Civic Hybrid carrying three passengers. We have a number of routes in my local area that I think could be more quickly and economically served by replacing the full size bus with something much smaller.
general rule of thumb is 5 passangers for a but to break even. Now a civic is a smaller car so it will be better, and you specified 3 passanges whes single occupant is by far more likely - even with those unrealistic assumption a typical bus will do well overall.
I don't disagree, the typical use case isn't great for the car, this was just a thought experiment for what it would look like to use an efficient, reliable passenger car as an alternative to buses.
> general rule of thumb is 5 passangers for a but to break even.
"Break even" how? A bus has a road footprint of about 15 cars (it's more than the physical bus length because it also occupies the road during stops and is less maneuverable).
15 cars have the occupancy of about 25 people.
> even with those unrealistic assumption a typical bus will do well overall.
Nope. Buses absolutely fail in efficiency. They pollute WAY more than cars, and they have fundamental limitations like the frequency.
They also contribute to pollution when they are stopped and you have 10 cars idling behind them because there's no room to pass. Repeat every 2 blocks.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
It is amusing/depressing to consider this as getting punished for having expensive engineering to avoid failures. If you do put in more engineering to get a more robust solution, you wind up not hitting the expensive failures and people start to assume you just spent more money in engineering than you needed to.
Coincidentally, it was just a couple weeks ago that a (non-technical, relatively younger) family member made a point me that Y2K was completely overblown.
It worked back then because labor was expensive, because unions were waning, but still strong in the 80's. If labor is expensive, you make sure to do it right once.
Nowadays with spending power way down, it may in fact be more "efficient" to get something out quick, and have frequent repairs. If you hit the expensive failure... welp, just throw it out and make a new one.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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}.
A bus - because of the issues with shipping is something worth building not "too far" from where used. There is value in scale manufacturing so it won't be every city, but making buses for a different continent probably isn't right either.
Note that engineering can be done in one location for multiple factories.
Sure, but if those $10k shipping costs get you labor at a quarter of the price, I don't think the financials ever become favorable for high-wage countries like the US (average salary in urban China is <$20k/year).
Even in much more highly automated industries you have a shift towards lower wage regions (see eastern europe automotive industry as an example) because you still need labor to build and maintain the factories at the very least.
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.
It's probably more the brakes than the engine. Diesel engines don't provide much of an engine braking effect (unless fitted with additional mechanisms a/k/a "Jake Brake" to provide this) so the vehicles use friction brakes any time they need to slow down, which can be jerky especially with air brakes. Electric buses would have regenerative braking which is probably smoother.
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).
Even more damning, diesel is objectively, inarguably more expensive to run, costing more than four times as much as [Vancouver's] battery-electric busses in fuel/electricity.
Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.
Diesel’s last remaining benefits are of no value for a bus (locomotive-class horsepower possibilities and rapid refueling) as a bus never weighs much and goes in a circle.
Yep - and, in urban areas, buses are pretty much the best possible use case for BEVs, aren't they? Short distance, high utilisation, predictable routes with far more stop/start than normal traffic.
Consider also that bus depots are the perfect site for big battery banks hooked up to their charging stations, and tend to have plenty of room for solar panels on the roof. So electrification is good for the grid too.
It's one of those rare situations where everyone benefits.
> in urban areas, buses are pretty much the best possible use case for BEVs, aren't they?
I'd argue that mail delivery is an even better use case - it starts and stops even more frequently than a bus, practically never needs to travel at high speeds, and only needs to make one run a day.
But it's not a competition - they're both good use cases.
I think existing electric locomotives are more powerful than existing diesel locomotives.
The "most powerful diesel–electric locomotive model ever built on a single frame", the EMD DDA40X, provides 5MW.
The EURO9000, "currently the most powerful locomotive on the European market" provides 9MW under electric power.
USA-made locomotives are so far down the list on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_powerful_locomoti... that I suspect there's some other reason they're not needed, e.g. spreading the braking force across multiple locomotives throughout the train.
> On the other hand, he told us that without subsidies, the life cycle costs would be "diesel buses, followed by hybrids, and then with a huge difference, EV buses and then fuel cell buses." He asserts that, as things stand, "neither EV buses nor fuel cell buses would be profitable in terms of life cycle costs without subsidies."
> Tai said, "Relying on subsidies to introduce EV buses and fuel cell buses cannot be considered a healthy business situation," and added, "I strongly hope that technological innovation and price competition will progress throughout the zero-emission bus market."
"EV too cheap to meter ICE dead" is just hype. The realoty is it's not much more than another subsidy milking, yet. Cleaner air in the city is nice, though.
Life cycles costs are not what is being argued here, but operating costs of a battery electric bus compared to a diesel one.
The electric variant is clearly significantly cheaper to operate (like my linked source shows) even taking charging infrastructure and maintenance into account.
Battery electric busses becoming CAPEX competitive with diesel ones is also just a matter of time in my view (case in point: singapore already gets those for less than the US currently pays for diesel ones).
Yes, walking close to the exhaust of a CNG bus is like walking a bit too close to a gas grill/barbecue — hot and a rather chemical, but not noxious and choking like a diesel bus.
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.
> The older ones yes, but few are still on the road in public transit service
If only that were true in my major US city. The public buses are probably the most filthy vehicles on the road. Every fourth one lets out a cloud of acrid black smoke every time it accelerates. I have to assume they are officially or informally exempt from emissions testing.
I assume those are older busses in fleets that don't have the money to buy new cleaner busses. This is what I observe out on Long Island. You see maybe one or two people on a bus ant any given time because LI is dominated by the car. The busses are a total loss so there's no money to upgrade.
Completely false, buses are way louder than multiple cars. Buses make tons of noise when accelerating and many have obnoxious added sounds at stops for security reasons. As a full cyclist I would gladly prefer no bus and more cars. Moreover the bus are more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians.
> Moreover the bus are more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians.
Avid cyclist myself, personally I'd rather see the stiff necked 80 year olds in cars as old as them (so barely any safety features) with tiny tiny mirrors gone off the road.
Bus drivers are at least regularly examined for their health, the buses themselves have a lot better maintenance done on them than the average private person, they got more mirrors than a disco ball, and at least here in Germany, the bus fleets are routinely updated to have allllll the bells and whistles. Lane keeps, dead-spot alerts, object tracking/warning and collision avoidance...
As for the noise: yes a bus is louder, but (IMHO, having lived on a busy road that was suddenly not so busy at all during Covid) I can handle the occasional bus every 5 minutes way better than the constant car noises.
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.
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’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.
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.
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?
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.
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"...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its not clear what your point is? Both USPS and Amazon got heavily customized vehicles made for them. In the US the USPS is a government agency so any kind of government contracts get heavily securitized by the public but nobody cares what Fedex and Amazon might by just like in countries where the mail service is privatized.
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.
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.
>...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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's exactly what the person above was getting at.
> 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.
Having everything ordered piecemeal in smaller custom orders is more expensive and gives cities a disadvantage in negotiation power
"standardizing" doesn't just mean ending up with the same stuff. it means making an up-front committment to a supplier that you will buy the same stuff, and getting a better deal in exchange for that committment.
if you end up buying a whole bunch of units of the same stuff without planning to, you're wasting all that potential efficiency.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Yeah but the point is you want to look down the street and see if there's a city bus a few blocks away or not. If so, hurry up and walk the block to the bus stop. If not, quickly grab a coffee or decide to grab a Citibike or whatever else that depends on that information.
Spotting buses a few blocks away is a crucial skill in cities.
So you're telling me I shouldn't bother to take a split-second to glance down the street, but instead...
...grab my phone, unlock it, navigate to the app, wait for it to load, wait for it to figure out my location, wait for it to make an API call, try to figure out which of the two "34th and 7th" stops is the one going in the direction I want (since it's a two-way street with bus stops on both side of the intersection), click on one randomly, confirm from the first bus destination listed that I did click on the correct direction, otherwise go back and click on the other one, and then look at its ETA?
Sometimes it really is just better to use your eyes, to figure out that the bus is going to reach the bus stop in about 30 seconds, and that it'll take you 30 seconds of brisk walking to reach it in time, so you'd better start making a beeline now.
When they're further away you can't read the signage, and long-distance buses have signage too.
The paint job really is important because it's vastly more visible. It also often does things like distinguish between local buses and commuter buses, depending on your city.
You see a city bus 4 blocks away, and the bus stop is 1 block away, and if you walk fast you can make it to the bus stop in time to catch it. If you didn't look and just walked at normal speed you'd end up having to wait 20 more minutes for the next bus.
>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.
> 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?
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.
> 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".
It funny because having worked both in private industry and public (transit!) service, my experience is the exact opposite. In private anytime my department were coming in under budget on anything, there was always the end of the year pressure to spend it on something lest accounting take it away. Meanwhile in the public sector my team went to great lengths to get rid of vendor services that weren't providing value.
In my fantasy world where I run things as a benevolent dictator, people would get bonuses for finishing the year under budget while still achieving all their objectives. I suppose that would just incent them to inflate the budgets to begin with though.
Good example. That budget behavior is common. Fortunately, if that has true negative effects, the market corrects by putting one company out of business.
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.
It’s a matter of procurement process and personnel. They simply aren’t always concerned with cost as the primary decision point and thus tend to not negotiate as hard as you might like. I’m in a finance role, company’s money is my responsibility so I very frequently have to tell procurement people that think a product “ticks all the boxes of the RFP” or similar, that the runner up product only missed on items we can live without so paying 2x isn’t worth it. I does come off as lacking critical thinking, but I’ve come to learn they just go off the requirement and don’t really know which things are critical versus nice to have. Those kinds of things, so I’d blame this entirely on whoever is supposed to have financial oversight over the bureaucracy. Do they have CFOs or similar, idk honestly, but that’s a reason most for profit companies do. They are monitoring large financial decisions for reasonableness.
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.
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.
Personally, I'm not opposed to bus service; quite the opposite. Especially if I could bring an eBike.
However, buses can and should feel safe for everyone, whether you're 5 years old or 95 years old, a US citizen or a visitor from Japan, whether it's 2 PM or 2 AM. In the United States, they absolutely don't. This can be fixed, but nobody has the political will to be perceived as a little mean.
In my town all the buses have a bus rack in the front that fits up to two bikes or e-bikes.
I perceive buses in my town be very safe. I definitely see emotionally disturbed people downtown and near the homeless colony behind Wal-Mart, but I don't see them on the bus.
I hate those racks. 2 bikes capacity means the transit agency needs to ensure they are not well used since they will fill up fast if people actually use them. Also the time it takes to put a bike on/off them is time robbed from everyone else on the bus who is now 30 seconds latter to where they want to be. They just are not worth it, and cannot be. Either take the bike on the bus (good luck even getting it to fit, much less doing this in a reasonable amount of time for reasonable effort), or lock them up at your stop.
I find buses are safe too. I don't understand the worry myself. However buses in the US normally run terrible routes that make them useless for getting around and so people who want to seem "green" need to find some excuse and not understanding the real problem blame safety and not that the route is useless.
In Ithaca we have crazy hills so it is a good plan to take the bus up and then ride down although E-bikes change that equation.
In Ithaca we have great bus service between the Ithaca Commons, Cornell and the Pyramid Mall. Before the pandemic we had a bus every 15 minutes at the mall which was great -- it's still pretty good. There are 5 buses a day during weekdays to the rural area where I live. These are well timed for the 9-5 worker at Cornell and I'm going to be taking the late one back today because I'm going to go photograph a Field Hockey game over in Barton Hall and the timing is right -- it's OK but we did have more buses during the pandemic.
Bus service is not so good to Ithaca College. When I've tried to make the connection with my bus I've concluded that I might as well walk up the hill the IC rather than wait for the bus.
In Minnesota, we built light rail... with an honor system for boarding.
It got so bad, especially on the middle cars (the "party cars") after COVID, that the middle car was retired and they are now in Year 3 of a security improvement plan.
Honor system with regular fare inspection is a good best practice. However it only works when the fines for not having a fare are high enough that everyone knows it isn't worth the risk. If you are checked once a month the fine should be the costs of 3 months pass, though you can work the math in many different ways, just make sure paying for a ticket (preferably a monthly pass!) is cheapest and everyone believe that.
The problem with fining the homeless is that they don't pay, followed by being onboard the next day. This can't be solved without being a little mean.
In 2023, Democratic lawmakers changed it from being a misdemeanor to being an administrative citation, with... get this... $35 for first offense, scaling up to $100 + 120 day ban by 4th offense. More merciful than going through a court system inconsistently, at least in theory. Huge surprise it's not working out.
Many of the emotionally disturbed and criminal people aren't actually homeless, and many homeless people are basically law abiding and not so crazy.
About a year ago I went to NYC and it was a bit surreal. It didn't really seem unsafe but boy I saw a lot of people (mostly white) propping open the emergency exits so other people could sneak in just around the corner from New York Guard troops supporting the NYPD. Video ads on the subway were oddly calibrated: "Don't sleep on the subway because it makes you vulnerable to crime", "Don't jump the turnstile because we have roughly 30 programs that could get you free or reduced fares" together with ads for deodorant.
The New York Guard is not the New York Army National Guard (which were the personnel actually deployed). The New York Guard is less then 1000 personnel. The entire operation was a transparent psyop when some brainwashed tv news views saw a crime on the 6 o'clock news. The governor of New York might as well be from another planet when it comes to understanding New York City.
Homeless should be on a different program that gives them a free pass anyway. The pass should be paid for by the service that deals with the homeless not the transit agency (note that I just forced a lot of budget changes!). The service wants to hand out those passes because it is a chance for them to see what else they can do for those people (who often don't want help and so they need to be careful what they offer vs force)
There should be passes for disabled vets, children, and other poor people as well.
Believe me, visit Reddit for Minneapolis, the most transit-optimist place you can find, and see what they think about their light rail. Full grown adult women won't ride it. Children? That's almost child endangerment by itself.
I have no problem with homeless people getting free transit if they need it. However, the subset of homeless that are consistently riding for free and making nuisances, they may need to be forcibly kept off the train. It doesn't even need to be police action - install physical barriers, requiring cash or pass, and hand out passes to the homeless like candy with revocation for repeated misbehavior.
i lived in minneapolis until 15 years ago. Transit is getting better but it is still useless for the majority. Even those who live near light rail often findiit useless because it doesn't 'go where you want to go, when you want to go, for a reasonable price, in a reasonable amount of time'. (there might be more in that list?) Priceiis reasonable but the others are too often lacking.
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.
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.
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
I'm just saying that the "China cheaper because dirty, bad quality copycat products" is in my view mostly an incorrect excuse; cheap labor and (sometimes) larger scale are (for now!) Chinese advantages that people love to ignore.
Being price-competitive with Chinese production then means either driving down local wages or inflating product costs, and there is absolutely no way around this (until you have heavy industry that literally builds itself).
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> "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!"
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?
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.
Taxpayer subsidies to domestic entities should also be explicit.
Public sector organizations should focus on their operational requirements when deciding what to buy. When a transit agency wants to buy buses, it should not pay extra due to unrelated policy goals. If the best option is foreign, and there is an equivalent but more expensive domestic option, the price the agency pays should be the price of the foreign option. If politicians want to subsidize domestic labor, they can tell the transit agency to choose the domestic option and pay the rest from an appropriate budget.
The thing is the public sector does have competition. We have a surplus of houses with XXL master bedroom suites in Arizona and a deficit of high speed rail. If they used union labor to build houses in Arizona and non-union labor to build high speed rail it would be the other way around.
If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as the private sector people are going to turn against the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
> If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as the private sector people are going to turn against the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
Given the encroachment of enshittification on the private sector, I'm not sure it's any more efficient than the public sector on the whole.
And in the cases where it is more efficient, that's because there's either less at stake, or people care less. I don't care what Jim at Jim's Quik Lube does with my money after I pay him for an oil change. I do care what the Feds do with my tax dollars after I file my return, and so does everyone else, so we create regulations and policies to keep government agents from blowing taxpayer dollars. Or, at least, we used to.
Now, we've bought into this "the private sector is always more efficient" BS and put a private sector guy in charge, and it's a disaster. I don't want the mechanisms of the state being treated like a company where the guy in charge has his name on the building and always gets what he wants, because the mechanisms of the state are that of force. People get arrested, assaulted, imprisoned, and killed. It has to be more deliberate and take longer.
The problem with rail isn't just labor, it's land acquisition. For the old freight lines that was done centuries ago, now that virtually all land has been claimed by someone it's much more expensive by default. On top of that, California got Musk disrupting everything with Hyperloop.
You need to use eminent domain on straight lines as much as possible for HSR, both to keep costs low and to allow for actually high speeds, but that's risky for legal challenges and even then, horribly expensive at US scales.
Yes, China has larger scales and still gets it done, but they a) just throw money at the problem and b) just do what the CCP wants.
> Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant.
That's not made easier by the fact that many cities just hand one way bus tickets to local homeless and nutjobs that bus them off to somewhere else [1], often to Democrat-run cities. In addition to that, there are almost no asylums left to take care of the nutjobs because a lot of them had been forced to shut down for sometimes atrocious violations of human rights many decades ago. Some areas now (ab)use jails and prisons to punish homeless people for being homeless, a practice that has also come under fire for creating the same abusive conditions, on top of scandals like "Kids for cash" [2].
The obvious solution to a lot of the problems with nutjobs, homeless and drug addicts would be a sensible drug policy combined with a "housing first" policy. Both of that has been tried in the US and in other countries worldwide to a sometimes massively positive effect, the problem is it has to be done federally - otherwise you end up like Frankfurt here in Germany, where Frankfurt pays the bill for drug addiction treatments and somewhat safe consumption facilities, but ended up having to pay that for people from almost across the whole of Europe.
> If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
It could be at least pleasant and responsive, the problem is you need (a lot) of money to pay for it, and no one likes paying taxes. It's a chicken and egg problem across Western countries - ever since up to the 80s, when neoliberal politics, trickle-down and lean-state ideology took over, public service has been cut and cut and cut. People don't believe any more that paying higher taxes would yield a net benefit because they lost all trust in politicians, and I don't see any way of fixing that - not without a stint of a good-willing dictator at least, and I don't see that on the horizon at all.
You are basically asking taxpayers to fund an uncompetitive (i.e. wasteful) local industry.
I think that's justifiable when you have high local unemployment (making the thing a job program, really), or when you really need the industry for strategic reasons (food and weapon manufacturing), but when that is not the case, doing this raises labor costs in general and hurts your actually useful and globally competitive industries, too.
The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank. A big ass diesel engine and literal tons of steel. And in war time, you can convert the bus and truck manufacturing facilities into making tanks and airplanes.
That is why even something as manufacturing cars, trucks and airplanes is vital to be resilient. And in addition, it's bad enough how much of a grip China has on our balls with rare-earth metals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the threat of snacking a piece of Taiwan. India isn't much better, they keep buying up Russian oil despite sanctions. We don't need to hand them more economic power.
And yes, resilience costs money. We need to explain that to our populations - and most importantly, we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!
> The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank.
I can see your point, but I'm not buying this argument for multiple reasons.
First, if you do blanket-protectionism like this, the actual strategic gain per "wasted" tax-dollar is abysmal. You could have just bought those singaporean busses, and spent the money on skunkworks and lithium mine subsidies instead if you actually needed that resilience and military capability.
But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What kind of war are you even anticipating where you would need massively scaled up tank production of all things? The US, currently, could fight an offensive land war against the whole continent pretty much (regardless of foreign support), and for anything else tank production capabilities are more than sufficient.
Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks.
> we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!
100% agree with that, but I think this is a (tax) policy failure most of all: my take is that in a capitalist society capital inevitably accumulates at the top, and regulatory backpressure (progressive taxation and antitrust law) is needed to keep the wealth/income distribution somewhat stable; the US has been shitting the bed in that regard for more than half a century now with predictable outcomes for wealth/income distribution (similar for other industrialized nations). Redistribution/balancing dynamics ("poor people getting paid for labor") are also getting weaker because unskilled labor lost lots of relative value.
this is the kind of domestic union labour you're up against. american union labour should absolutely at least be subject to competition from union labour elsewhere, including european bus manufacturers.
> 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.
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.
>Yes! we can even distribute political and military power to selected individuals who can rule over small portions maintaining security and collecting taxes.
That's basically what states and municipalities are.
The very first sentence in that sayes "cutting taxes". I'm explicitly proposing that taxes be maintained or raised while reducing or eliminating government services.
"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.
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...
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.
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.
Your view is a commonly-held one, and makes a lot of sense; unfortunately there is very little support for it. One data point to the contrary is the Oregon Health Care Study, which showed that 'free' preventative care increased healthcare spending, but did not improve lifespan or reduce long-term cost.
Shouldn't insurance care about the pricing though? I get why federal govt isn't sensitive, given 0 competition.
Insurance profit is limited to a percentage of what they pay out. So the more they pay, the more money they make.
Also the largest insurers increasingly own the doctors you’re seeing too.
Also the pharmacy you get your drugs from.
Also the entity that negotiates prices between pharma companies and your insurer.
More healthcare consumption = better, across the board
Oh, that's important info. Also such a rule suggests that health insurance isn't a competitive market.
There's no such thing as a “competitive market” in the real world.
Yes there is.
massive proportions of utilization come from govt subsidized plans
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.
Or how government bailouts go to corporations
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.
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?
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)
No, they certainly don’t all come with AC and heat.
I haven't seen a non-AC bus in ages, even in developing countries.
My public school buses in a decent Midwestern suburb had no AC as recently as a decade ago. I wouldn't expect them to today.
Buses you pay directly to ride may be a bit different, but I'd also expect AC isn't ubiquitous, or wasn't until very recently.
> 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.
I go back and forth on that, the bus tunnel was useful. But a tunnel with 3(4?) stops seems like a good place for a train of some sort. I guess the buses are why there are no center stops in there? It seems like a missed opportunity. Not sure about the history of the tunnel but there were tracks there years ago so they must have planned to put trains in eventually.
Given the choice between clogging up the city grid for car commuters, and clogging up the rail grid because buses are pushed to share rail lines, I'm going to pull the trigger on the first option, every day of the week.
Clogging up the rail grid was somewhat acceptable when it was a few end-of-line terminal stops, but now those tunnels are in the middle of the rail network. A bus breaking down and blocking the tunnel was bad enough when it affected end-of-line service, but would be an absolute nightmare when it affects middle-of-line service.
Sorry, downtown single-occupant vehicle drivers, you're just going to have to deal with the consequences of spending tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars on your choice of the least space-efficient, gridlock-inducing form of transportation.
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.
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.
So in my area, believe it or not, there is experiments with uber-style point-to-point pickup/dropoff and electric car short term "rentals".
https://www.cdta.org/flex https://drivecdta.org/
The few flex areas are small and I've never tried the electric rentals.
Every once in awhile I do use the bus system to check out how things are going and I get how depressive an empty bus is... I was just on an empty bus to the airport (which I have to take two routes to get there, another tough negative to solve).
Yes, they're empty, but it's also a catch 22 because it takes urbanization, frequent bus services, and a lot of time for people to adjust to it. Anyone who spent enough time in Europe can tell you about how efficient, convenient, and efficient a bus network can get. Also, most people go to work, so buses tend to be very busy in the morning and at shift changes etc.
It's not magic though, there are a lot of places where buses simply will not work and we need to find better ways to improve mobility. I don't have the slightest idea how, it's a generational effort.
We solved that several generations ago with cars.
Considering the amount of traffic jams, wasted space due to parking lots, and lost third places, I'd argue "solved" isn't exactly accurate.
Traffic jams are solved by congestion pricing. Parking lot congestion can be solved the same way with pay-parking lots. I don't know what cars have to do with "lost third places".
Congestion pricing works when there are alternatives. If you have both no public transport and congestion pricing, what you have is only increased tax collection with no behavioral change.
That's false because everyone has alternatives (you can stay home, for example). Raising the price will always on margin reduce trips.
>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.
So your justification for not having reliably scheduling comes down to "well we never had reliable scheduling", and your solution is to make the schedule more chaotic?
Why do we just accept and the broken windows in order to try and make new buildings, instead of fixing the windows?
Because buses are shared and follow a fixed-route and can't support an on-demand model. It may take a bus over an hour to complete the entire route.
Would you rather have to call for a bus that might take an hour (or might take 2 minutes) to get to your stop when you call it, or would you like to know that it comes at 4:45, 5:45 and 6:45 so you can plan ahead to know when to get to your stop.
(failing to run on schedule is a separate issue, but on-demand rides won't solve that). In cities, one solution to that problem is to run at such frequent headways that a late bus doesn't matter -- when I lived in SF, I had 2 busy bus routes that could take me to work, during peak hours a bus ran every 6 minutes, so even if they weren't on schedule I didn't care since I knew another would be along soon.
If you want me to ride the bus to work every morning and home every evening, you still have to have buses in mid-day so I can go home early if I need to. Even if those buses are mostly empty.
I've thought about this a lot, and wonder if the last mile problem could be lessened with an uber style pickup you suggest. I have a civil engineer relative who follows this stuff better than I do, and he says all the pilot programs he's seen (in the US) tend to be wildly unprofitable.
That said, I think that some program like this is essential to bootstrapping a really good transit system. The last mile problem really does stop a lot of would be commuters and is a huge, largely hidden cost, in regional transit planning. You could have fewer, more reliable trunks, that can run less reliably after core commuting hours, all because you have ways of alleviating the pain associated with difficulty getting to out of the way places. This allows people to make life decisions that they might not otherwise be able to make. And once you have a solid core, you can continue to grow it, by continuing to encourage long term ridership. Couple this with increasingly aggressive zoning changes to allow for density, and I think you could really grow out a transit system in 10-20 years.
But this is a fantasy of mine. It would likely be wildly unpopular to run an unprofitable program long enough to make all of this possible, and would probably only work in regions that have the potential for good transit anyways. You'd also need a large cohort of YIMBYs, that while currently growing in many regions, aren't guaranteed to still vote that way in a decade when they have more to lose.
Most bus systems in the US are wildly unprofitable and quite costly. My local system is just under $10 per unlinked trip (i.e. get one on bus). That makes getting from point A to point B not much cheaper to provide than Uber because it will usually involve a transfer.
Everyone would be better off in an Uber type system but there's no appetite or budget to subsidize rides at the level people would use it
> Why don't the buses anywhere have some sort of uber style pickup.
They do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-responsive_transport
There are some variable pickup transit services, but you may not see them because of when/where they go. I know around me there are zones where you can call for pickup and they use small shuttle buses. I think they drop of within the zone or at other bus stops, but I haven't used the service so I'm not sure.
My preferred way to solve bus lane reliability would be to shut down streets or lanes to only allow buses.
> 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.
> 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.
< 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
flixbus is a private company. public bus systems will pay a lot more because of how the public sector works (or doesn’t) in the US
> 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.
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.
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.
I'm hearing you say we should have self-driving buses... which is feasible since their route is fixed.
this is a political problem more than an engineering problem, public bus systems generally pay well above market clearing wage
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....
And then we need to make a change to the route.... oops.
No we don’t. Put another one in if need arises.
And with that, we can scale it up and have multiple chains of these buses used for mass transport. Heck, in some fantasy land we can really speed up the bus and have it trek across the the continent in a few hours!
Bus driver also does things like trigger ramp for handicapped people, strap in wheelchairs securely, answer questions about the route, and security surveillance.
You can have a fleet of specialized self-driving taxis for people with disabilities. They can have articulated ramps or other special accommodations.
None of those should be needed. Get more people riding and they take care of security.
wheelchairs are hard - but the driver strapping them in is robbing everyone else of their valuable time so we need a better soultion anyway
Every bus in Copenhagen has a button next to the door to lower the wheelchair ramp, but I have never seen anyone use it. I've never seen a wheelchair on a bus.
The metro and suburban trains have level boarding (the platform is at exactly the same level as the floor of the train so it's very easy for a wheelchair user to wheel themselves in). I've still only seen wheelchairs users on these trains once or twice.
I suspect wheelchair users prefer to call the disability taxi service. It's free for wheelchair users and blind people [1]. I don't know if this service is more or less expensive to provide than adapting buses and trains, but it is probably easier for everyone.
[1, in Danish] https://www.moviatrafik.dk/flexkunde/flexhandicap
That's relatively similar to how my local (US) municipality handles disabled passengers. All of the big infrastructure supports wheelchairs, but it is only occasionally used. Disabled people are served by mini-buses which operate point-to-point and charge them the same fare they'd pay for the big bus.
Wheelchairs, sometimes multiple, are on Chicago buses all the time. Also rolling grocery trolleys, walkers (especially for dialysis patients where they have a medical functions) and also old people whose legs don't work so good and need the bus lowered.
>the driver strapping them in is robbing everyone else of their valuable time
Oh so we're now fine putting more of our tax dollars into specialized disability services? If our time is more valuable, this is a steal.
It's paying either way. I'd rather pay with money.
Taking a look at NYC or SF bus, are you sure that more riders solve security issues?
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.
Yeah I remember once doing the math, and it takes a relatively high level of ridership before a bus (or train) reaches the per-passenger efficiency of something like a Civic Hybrid carrying three passengers. We have a number of routes in my local area that I think could be more quickly and economically served by replacing the full size bus with something much smaller.
general rule of thumb is 5 passangers for a but to break even. Now a civic is a smaller car so it will be better, and you specified 3 passanges whes single occupant is by far more likely - even with those unrealistic assumption a typical bus will do well overall.
I don't disagree, the typical use case isn't great for the car, this was just a thought experiment for what it would look like to use an efficient, reliable passenger car as an alternative to buses.
> general rule of thumb is 5 passangers for a but to break even.
"Break even" how? A bus has a road footprint of about 15 cars (it's more than the physical bus length because it also occupies the road during stops and is less maneuverable).
15 cars have the occupancy of about 25 people.
> even with those unrealistic assumption a typical bus will do well overall.
Nope. Buses absolutely fail in efficiency. They pollute WAY more than cars, and they have fundamental limitations like the frequency.
They also contribute to pollution when they are stopped and you have 10 cars idling behind them because there's no room to pass. Repeat every 2 blocks.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
unbelievably in depth channel, love all of the local business interviews (from other videos with restaurants and such)
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.
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.
This is something I would honestly expect if you try and get cheaper from market pressure.
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.
> Buses get shaken really hard.
In America they do, since we don't take care of our roads.
It is amusing/depressing to consider this as getting punished for having expensive engineering to avoid failures. If you do put in more engineering to get a more robust solution, you wind up not hitting the expensive failures and people start to assume you just spent more money in engineering than you needed to.
Coincidentally, it was just a couple weeks ago that a (non-technical, relatively younger) family member made a point me that Y2K was completely overblown.
Sigh.
It worked back then because labor was expensive, because unions were waning, but still strong in the 80's. If labor is expensive, you make sure to do it right once.
Nowadays with spending power way down, it may in fact be more "efficient" to get something out quick, and have frequent repairs. If you hit the expensive failure... welp, just throw it out and make a new one.
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...
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.
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.
Aren’t most busses CNG these days?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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}.
A bus - because of the issues with shipping is something worth building not "too far" from where used. There is value in scale manufacturing so it won't be every city, but making buses for a different continent probably isn't right either.
Note that engineering can be done in one location for multiple factories.
The cost to ship a bus anywhere in the world approaches the cost of shipping a container - $2 to 10k probably. A tiny fraction of the price.
That is still a lot of money. There is only so much scale before you want a seperate factory anyway and shipping is a consideration then.
Sure, but if those $10k shipping costs get you labor at a quarter of the price, I don't think the financials ever become favorable for high-wage countries like the US (average salary in urban China is <$20k/year).
Even in much more highly automated industries you have a shift towards lower wage regions (see eastern europe automotive industry as an example) because you still need labor to build and maintain the factories at the very least.
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.
It's probably more the brakes than the engine. Diesel engines don't provide much of an engine braking effect (unless fitted with additional mechanisms a/k/a "Jake Brake" to provide this) so the vehicles use friction brakes any time they need to slow down, which can be jerky especially with air brakes. Electric buses would have regenerative braking which is probably smoother.
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).
Even more damning, diesel is objectively, inarguably more expensive to run, costing more than four times as much as [Vancouver's] battery-electric busses in fuel/electricity.
Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.
Diesel’s last remaining benefits are of no value for a bus (locomotive-class horsepower possibilities and rapid refueling) as a bus never weighs much and goes in a circle.
Yep - and, in urban areas, buses are pretty much the best possible use case for BEVs, aren't they? Short distance, high utilisation, predictable routes with far more stop/start than normal traffic.
Consider also that bus depots are the perfect site for big battery banks hooked up to their charging stations, and tend to have plenty of room for solar panels on the roof. So electrification is good for the grid too.
It's one of those rare situations where everyone benefits.
> in urban areas, buses are pretty much the best possible use case for BEVs, aren't they?
I'd argue that mail delivery is an even better use case - it starts and stops even more frequently than a bus, practically never needs to travel at high speeds, and only needs to make one run a day.
But it's not a competition - they're both good use cases.
I think existing electric locomotives are more powerful than existing diesel locomotives.
The "most powerful diesel–electric locomotive model ever built on a single frame", the EMD DDA40X, provides 5MW.
The EURO9000, "currently the most powerful locomotive on the European market" provides 9MW under electric power.
USA-made locomotives are so far down the list on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_powerful_locomoti... that I suspect there's some other reason they're not needed, e.g. spreading the braking force across multiple locomotives throughout the train.
That electric locomotive has a really long cord attached to it - it only has about 2MW under diesel.
Once you allow attaching an extension cord, electric wins ever time; there's zero competition.
citation needed.
Here you go: https://afdc.energy.gov/files/u/publication/financial_analys...
My takeaway: No reasonable assumption exists that would make operating battery electric busses more expensive than diesel ones.
1: https://trafficnews-jp.translate.goog/post/587367/3
Life cycles costs are not what is being argued here, but operating costs of a battery electric bus compared to a diesel one.
The electric variant is clearly significantly cheaper to operate (like my linked source shows) even taking charging infrastructure and maintenance into account.
Battery electric busses becoming CAPEX competitive with diesel ones is also just a matter of time in my view (case in point: singapore already gets those for less than the US currently pays for diesel ones).
Yes, the exhaust that people have to breathe.
I realize they have improved but aren’t natural gas buses better?
Yes, walking close to the exhaust of a CNG bus is like walking a bit too close to a gas grill/barbecue — hot and a rather chemical, but not noxious and choking like a diesel bus.
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.
Modern diesels emit almost no particulates. The older ones yes, but few are still on the road in public transit service.
> The older ones yes, but few are still on the road in public transit service
If only that were true in my major US city. The public buses are probably the most filthy vehicles on the road. Every fourth one lets out a cloud of acrid black smoke every time it accelerates. I have to assume they are officially or informally exempt from emissions testing.
I assume those are older busses in fleets that don't have the money to buy new cleaner busses. This is what I observe out on Long Island. You see maybe one or two people on a bus ant any given time because LI is dominated by the car. The busses are a total loss so there's no money to upgrade.
Busses are loud, but not nearly as load and polluting as cars in aggregate
Completely false, buses are way louder than multiple cars. Buses make tons of noise when accelerating and many have obnoxious added sounds at stops for security reasons. As a full cyclist I would gladly prefer no bus and more cars. Moreover the bus are more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians.
> Moreover the bus are more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians.
Avid cyclist myself, personally I'd rather see the stiff necked 80 year olds in cars as old as them (so barely any safety features) with tiny tiny mirrors gone off the road.
Bus drivers are at least regularly examined for their health, the buses themselves have a lot better maintenance done on them than the average private person, they got more mirrors than a disco ball, and at least here in Germany, the bus fleets are routinely updated to have allllll the bells and whistles. Lane keeps, dead-spot alerts, object tracking/warning and collision avoidance...
As for the noise: yes a bus is louder, but (IMHO, having lived on a busy road that was suddenly not so busy at all during Covid) I can handle the occasional bus every 5 minutes way better than the constant car noises.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm not sure? Perhaps the shocks are different, or the seats are just harder, or perhaps I'm imagining it.
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.
The rattling I find on my TfL route is whilst it is moving. However I do think they are nearly the oldest busses in London 2008
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"...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Its not clear what your point is? Both USPS and Amazon got heavily customized vehicles made for them. In the US the USPS is a government agency so any kind of government contracts get heavily securitized by the public but nobody cares what Fedex and Amazon might by just like in countries where the mail service is privatized.
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.
Isn't this kind of thing always tacitly by design? Federal and local funding streams diffuse throughout the economy.
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.
Similar data on police vehicles could be interesting.
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...
They're protecting and serving so well they're worried about getting jumped.
Firefighting vehicles too, more expensive than European counterparts by a factor of 10.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm guessing that unlike here, some of those places need buses, and they simply can't afford any waste.
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.
Historically denser cities.
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...
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.
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.
The "nail house" phenomenon in China is counter-evidence to your point 3.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...
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...
> 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
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.
We do. What is different is the options. The bus itself is the same, but you can put options on the bus that drive up the price.
That's exactly what the person above was getting at.
> 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.
Having everything ordered piecemeal in smaller custom orders is more expensive and gives cities a disadvantage in negotiation power
"standardizing" doesn't just mean ending up with the same stuff. it means making an up-front committment to a supplier that you will buy the same stuff, and getting a better deal in exchange for that committment.
if you end up buying a whole bunch of units of the same stuff without planning to, you're wasting all that potential efficiency.
Not all New Flyer buses are the same in the same way not all Toyotas are the same.
The “tiny towns” like merced where the HSR will stop are some of the fastest growing cities in California.
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...
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.
> 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...
https://contravisionoutlook.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads...
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.
Yeah but the point is you want to look down the street and see if there's a city bus a few blocks away or not. If so, hurry up and walk the block to the bus stop. If not, quickly grab a coffee or decide to grab a Citibike or whatever else that depends on that information.
Spotting buses a few blocks away is a crucial skill in cities.
It really isn't when many cities have apps that give you real-time information as to when to expect the next bus.
So you're telling me I shouldn't bother to take a split-second to glance down the street, but instead...
...grab my phone, unlock it, navigate to the app, wait for it to load, wait for it to figure out my location, wait for it to make an API call, try to figure out which of the two "34th and 7th" stops is the one going in the direction I want (since it's a two-way street with bus stops on both side of the intersection), click on one randomly, confirm from the first bus destination listed that I did click on the correct direction, otherwise go back and click on the other one, and then look at its ETA?
Sometimes it really is just better to use your eyes, to figure out that the bus is going to reach the bus stop in about 30 seconds, and that it'll take you 30 seconds of brisk walking to reach it in time, so you'd better start making a beeline now.
There’s a difference between spotting a bus at the stop and distance away and the actions you will take accordingly.
You want the bus to be identifiable as possible.
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
When they're further away you can't read the signage, and long-distance buses have signage too.
The paint job really is important because it's vastly more visible. It also often does things like distinguish between local buses and commuter buses, depending on your city.
I really don’t understand why long distance visibility/visual identification is such an important feature. Care to elaborate?
You see a city bus 4 blocks away, and the bus stop is 1 block away, and if you walk fast you can make it to the bus stop in time to catch it. If you didn't look and just walked at normal speed you'd end up having to wait 20 more minutes for the next bus.
>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.
People already recognize their city bus colors just fine.
I don't see any reason why it would need to be standardized to the same color in every city nationwide.
School buses are the only ones that do that because it's a safety issue as opposed to a convenience isuse.
Since they are often adorned with ads, I'm not sure why they pay for anything at all.
> 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?
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.
> 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".
It funny because having worked both in private industry and public (transit!) service, my experience is the exact opposite. In private anytime my department were coming in under budget on anything, there was always the end of the year pressure to spend it on something lest accounting take it away. Meanwhile in the public sector my team went to great lengths to get rid of vendor services that weren't providing value.
In my fantasy world where I run things as a benevolent dictator, people would get bonuses for finishing the year under budget while still achieving all their objectives. I suppose that would just incent them to inflate the budgets to begin with though.
Good example. That budget behavior is common. Fortunately, if that has true negative effects, the market corrects by putting one company out of business.
Let me know when the market gets around to that. At this time it's ignored all the ones I've worked for.
Is it "ignoring" it, or is it priced in to the company's valuation?
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.
It’s a matter of procurement process and personnel. They simply aren’t always concerned with cost as the primary decision point and thus tend to not negotiate as hard as you might like. I’m in a finance role, company’s money is my responsibility so I very frequently have to tell procurement people that think a product “ticks all the boxes of the RFP” or similar, that the runner up product only missed on items we can live without so paying 2x isn’t worth it. I does come off as lacking critical thinking, but I’ve come to learn they just go off the requirement and don’t really know which things are critical versus nice to have. Those kinds of things, so I’d blame this entirely on whoever is supposed to have financial oversight over the bureaucracy. Do they have CFOs or similar, idk honestly, but that’s a reason most for profit companies do. They are monitoring large financial decisions for reasonableness.
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.
get your own bus and you can do what you want with it! /s
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.
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.
Personally, I'm not opposed to bus service; quite the opposite. Especially if I could bring an eBike.
However, buses can and should feel safe for everyone, whether you're 5 years old or 95 years old, a US citizen or a visitor from Japan, whether it's 2 PM or 2 AM. In the United States, they absolutely don't. This can be fixed, but nobody has the political will to be perceived as a little mean.
In my town all the buses have a bus rack in the front that fits up to two bikes or e-bikes.
I perceive buses in my town be very safe. I definitely see emotionally disturbed people downtown and near the homeless colony behind Wal-Mart, but I don't see them on the bus.
I hate those racks. 2 bikes capacity means the transit agency needs to ensure they are not well used since they will fill up fast if people actually use them. Also the time it takes to put a bike on/off them is time robbed from everyone else on the bus who is now 30 seconds latter to where they want to be. They just are not worth it, and cannot be. Either take the bike on the bus (good luck even getting it to fit, much less doing this in a reasonable amount of time for reasonable effort), or lock them up at your stop.
I find buses are safe too. I don't understand the worry myself. However buses in the US normally run terrible routes that make them useless for getting around and so people who want to seem "green" need to find some excuse and not understanding the real problem blame safety and not that the route is useless.
In Ithaca we have crazy hills so it is a good plan to take the bus up and then ride down although E-bikes change that equation.
In Ithaca we have great bus service between the Ithaca Commons, Cornell and the Pyramid Mall. Before the pandemic we had a bus every 15 minutes at the mall which was great -- it's still pretty good. There are 5 buses a day during weekdays to the rural area where I live. These are well timed for the 9-5 worker at Cornell and I'm going to be taking the late one back today because I'm going to go photograph a Field Hockey game over in Barton Hall and the timing is right -- it's OK but we did have more buses during the pandemic.
Bus service is not so good to Ithaca College. When I've tried to make the connection with my bus I've concluded that I might as well walk up the hill the IC rather than wait for the bus.
In Minnesota, we built light rail... with an honor system for boarding.
It got so bad, especially on the middle cars (the "party cars") after COVID, that the middle car was retired and they are now in Year 3 of a security improvement plan.
https://www.metrotransit.org/public-safety
They are also retro-fitting screens into the buses, showing the buses' own live camera feeds, to further reinforce the perception of being watched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SBd3wno61k
It's still not working in some areas.
https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-46th-st-light-rail-c...
https://www.instagram.com/karenthecamera/?hl=en
Honor system with regular fare inspection is a good best practice. However it only works when the fines for not having a fare are high enough that everyone knows it isn't worth the risk. If you are checked once a month the fine should be the costs of 3 months pass, though you can work the math in many different ways, just make sure paying for a ticket (preferably a monthly pass!) is cheapest and everyone believe that.
Honor systems only work with honorable people.
The problem with fining the homeless is that they don't pay, followed by being onboard the next day. This can't be solved without being a little mean.
In 2023, Democratic lawmakers changed it from being a misdemeanor to being an administrative citation, with... get this... $35 for first offense, scaling up to $100 + 120 day ban by 4th offense. More merciful than going through a court system inconsistently, at least in theory. Huge surprise it's not working out.
Many of the emotionally disturbed and criminal people aren't actually homeless, and many homeless people are basically law abiding and not so crazy.
About a year ago I went to NYC and it was a bit surreal. It didn't really seem unsafe but boy I saw a lot of people (mostly white) propping open the emergency exits so other people could sneak in just around the corner from New York Guard troops supporting the NYPD. Video ads on the subway were oddly calibrated: "Don't sleep on the subway because it makes you vulnerable to crime", "Don't jump the turnstile because we have roughly 30 programs that could get you free or reduced fares" together with ads for deodorant.
The New York Guard is not the New York Army National Guard (which were the personnel actually deployed). The New York Guard is less then 1000 personnel. The entire operation was a transparent psyop when some brainwashed tv news views saw a crime on the 6 o'clock news. The governor of New York might as well be from another planet when it comes to understanding New York City.
Homeless should be on a different program that gives them a free pass anyway. The pass should be paid for by the service that deals with the homeless not the transit agency (note that I just forced a lot of budget changes!). The service wants to hand out those passes because it is a chance for them to see what else they can do for those people (who often don't want help and so they need to be careful what they offer vs force)
There should be passes for disabled vets, children, and other poor people as well.
Believe me, visit Reddit for Minneapolis, the most transit-optimist place you can find, and see what they think about their light rail. Full grown adult women won't ride it. Children? That's almost child endangerment by itself.
I have no problem with homeless people getting free transit if they need it. However, the subset of homeless that are consistently riding for free and making nuisances, they may need to be forcibly kept off the train. It doesn't even need to be police action - install physical barriers, requiring cash or pass, and hand out passes to the homeless like candy with revocation for repeated misbehavior.
i lived in minneapolis until 15 years ago. Transit is getting better but it is still useless for the majority. Even those who live near light rail often findiit useless because it doesn't 'go where you want to go, when you want to go, for a reasonable price, in a reasonable amount of time'. (there might be more in that list?) Priceiis reasonable but the others are too often lacking.
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.
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).
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.
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...
I'm just saying that the "China cheaper because dirty, bad quality copycat products" is in my view mostly an incorrect excuse; cheap labor and (sometimes) larger scale are (for now!) Chinese advantages that people love to ignore.
Being price-competitive with Chinese production then means either driving down local wages or inflating product costs, and there is absolutely no way around this (until you have heavy industry that literally builds itself).
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> More likely that the companies that institute this will hemorrhage talent that is offered a better deal by competitors.
Won't work when the market colludes. And Silicon Valley Big Tech already got caught in such a cartel - see [1], debated back then in [2].
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168214
> "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!"
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?
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.
Taxpayer subsidies to domestic entities should also be explicit.
Public sector organizations should focus on their operational requirements when deciding what to buy. When a transit agency wants to buy buses, it should not pay extra due to unrelated policy goals. If the best option is foreign, and there is an equivalent but more expensive domestic option, the price the agency pays should be the price of the foreign option. If politicians want to subsidize domestic labor, they can tell the transit agency to choose the domestic option and pay the rest from an appropriate budget.
The thing is the public sector does have competition. We have a surplus of houses with XXL master bedroom suites in Arizona and a deficit of high speed rail. If they used union labor to build houses in Arizona and non-union labor to build high speed rail it would be the other way around.
If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as the private sector people are going to turn against the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
> If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as the private sector people are going to turn against the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
Given the encroachment of enshittification on the private sector, I'm not sure it's any more efficient than the public sector on the whole.
And in the cases where it is more efficient, that's because there's either less at stake, or people care less. I don't care what Jim at Jim's Quik Lube does with my money after I pay him for an oil change. I do care what the Feds do with my tax dollars after I file my return, and so does everyone else, so we create regulations and policies to keep government agents from blowing taxpayer dollars. Or, at least, we used to.
Now, we've bought into this "the private sector is always more efficient" BS and put a private sector guy in charge, and it's a disaster. I don't want the mechanisms of the state being treated like a company where the guy in charge has his name on the building and always gets what he wants, because the mechanisms of the state are that of force. People get arrested, assaulted, imprisoned, and killed. It has to be more deliberate and take longer.
The problem with rail isn't just labor, it's land acquisition. For the old freight lines that was done centuries ago, now that virtually all land has been claimed by someone it's much more expensive by default. On top of that, California got Musk disrupting everything with Hyperloop.
You need to use eminent domain on straight lines as much as possible for HSR, both to keep costs low and to allow for actually high speeds, but that's risky for legal challenges and even then, horribly expensive at US scales.
Yes, China has larger scales and still gets it done, but they a) just throw money at the problem and b) just do what the CCP wants.
> Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant.
That's not made easier by the fact that many cities just hand one way bus tickets to local homeless and nutjobs that bus them off to somewhere else [1], often to Democrat-run cities. In addition to that, there are almost no asylums left to take care of the nutjobs because a lot of them had been forced to shut down for sometimes atrocious violations of human rights many decades ago. Some areas now (ab)use jails and prisons to punish homeless people for being homeless, a practice that has also come under fire for creating the same abusive conditions, on top of scandals like "Kids for cash" [2].
The obvious solution to a lot of the problems with nutjobs, homeless and drug addicts would be a sensible drug policy combined with a "housing first" policy. Both of that has been tried in the US and in other countries worldwide to a sometimes massively positive effect, the problem is it has to be done federally - otherwise you end up like Frankfurt here in Germany, where Frankfurt pays the bill for drug addiction treatments and somewhat safe consumption facilities, but ended up having to pay that for people from almost across the whole of Europe.
> If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
It could be at least pleasant and responsive, the problem is you need (a lot) of money to pay for it, and no one likes paying taxes. It's a chicken and egg problem across Western countries - ever since up to the 80s, when neoliberal politics, trickle-down and lean-state ideology took over, public service has been cut and cut and cut. People don't believe any more that paying higher taxes would yield a net benefit because they lost all trust in politicians, and I don't see any way of fixing that - not without a stint of a good-willing dictator at least, and I don't see that on the horizon at all.
[1] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/bussed-out-how-americ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
I disagree with this.
You are basically asking taxpayers to fund an uncompetitive (i.e. wasteful) local industry.
I think that's justifiable when you have high local unemployment (making the thing a job program, really), or when you really need the industry for strategic reasons (food and weapon manufacturing), but when that is not the case, doing this raises labor costs in general and hurts your actually useful and globally competitive industries, too.
The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank. A big ass diesel engine and literal tons of steel. And in war time, you can convert the bus and truck manufacturing facilities into making tanks and airplanes.
That is why even something as manufacturing cars, trucks and airplanes is vital to be resilient. And in addition, it's bad enough how much of a grip China has on our balls with rare-earth metals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the threat of snacking a piece of Taiwan. India isn't much better, they keep buying up Russian oil despite sanctions. We don't need to hand them more economic power.
And yes, resilience costs money. We need to explain that to our populations - and most importantly, we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!
> The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank.
I can see your point, but I'm not buying this argument for multiple reasons.
First, if you do blanket-protectionism like this, the actual strategic gain per "wasted" tax-dollar is abysmal. You could have just bought those singaporean busses, and spent the money on skunkworks and lithium mine subsidies instead if you actually needed that resilience and military capability.
But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What kind of war are you even anticipating where you would need massively scaled up tank production of all things? The US, currently, could fight an offensive land war against the whole continent pretty much (regardless of foreign support), and for anything else tank production capabilities are more than sufficient.
Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks.
> we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!
100% agree with that, but I think this is a (tax) policy failure most of all: my take is that in a capitalist society capital inevitably accumulates at the top, and regulatory backpressure (progressive taxation and antitrust law) is needed to keep the wealth/income distribution somewhat stable; the US has been shitting the bed in that regard for more than half a century now with predictable outcomes for wealth/income distribution (similar for other industrialized nations). Redistribution/balancing dynamics ("poor people getting paid for labor") are also getting weaker because unskilled labor lost lots of relative value.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-time-clock-vandaliz...
this is the kind of domestic union labour you're up against. american union labour should absolutely at least be subject to competition from union labour elsewhere, including european bus manufacturers.
> 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.
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.
What geography allows for worker oppression and environmental degradation as a competitive advantage?
Where did I say anything about worker oppression?
imagine how much money the government could save by just continuing to collect taxes and not providing any services! we could privatize everything!
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.
>Yes! we can even distribute political and military power to selected individuals who can rule over small portions maintaining security and collecting taxes.
That's basically what states and municipalities are.
That's running the government like a business!
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
The very first sentence in that sayes "cutting taxes". I'm explicitly proposing that taxes be maintained or raised while reducing or eliminating government services.