20 ms·

US cities pay too much for buses

355 points by pavel_lishin 1y ago

tonyhart7 1y ago
bulk price 200 buses equal cheaper buses, nothing surprise here
lenerdenator 1y ago
> "A new paper argues that lack of competition, demand for custom features and “Buy America” rules have driven up costs for transit agencies in the US." If that's not the most NYC finance-centered headline ever, I don't know what is. "If we just offload our bus-building industry to somewhere else, we could save $x on taxes each year. Yeah, it eliminates jobs and is another blow against strategically-important heavy industry, but please, think of my balance sheet!"
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- sidewndr46 1y ago
  imagine how much money the government could save by just continuing to collect taxes and not providing any services! we could privatize everything!
  - red_rech 1y ago
    Yes! we can even distribute political and military power to selected individuals who can rule over small portions maintaining security and collecting taxes. After all, it was divine right (Darwinian evolution, AI schizobabble, etc) that made them men of might.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      >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.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    That's ... decently close to what the current political course of action is, a strategy called "starve the beast" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
    - sidewndr46 1y ago
      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.
  - supertrope 1y ago
    That's running the government like a business!
- namdnay 1y ago
  it's not a question of "offloading" it, it's a question of reaping the benefits of global competition Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived? Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy?
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    There's a difference between private companies and state-run companies / authorities. When a US airline thinks it's better for them to switch over to Airbus, by all means do so, that's competition. But taxpayer money should not be used to prop up other countries' economies unless explicitly designated that way (e.g. contributions to international agencies, economic aid), and certainly not if that replaces domestic union labor.
    - rangestransform 1y ago
      https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-time-clock-vandalized-days-after-similar-incident-at-lirr-amid-overtime-scandal/ 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.
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      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.
- infecto 1y ago
  One of the worst takes I have ever seen. It’s not about offloading an industry but if another geography has a comparative advantage everyone benefits. I would also argue that customizations are indeed a total waste of money for systems that already cash strapped.
  - Mountain_Skies 1y ago
    What geography allows for worker oppression and environmental degradation as a competitive advantage?
    - infecto 1y ago
      Where did I say anything about worker oppression?
  - bsder 1y ago
    > if another geography has a comparative advantage everyone benefits. I don't necessarily agree. Outsourcing has a cost in that you also lose the knowledge of the entire engineering chain. That engineering chain has a LOT of value to us as a society. However, it has negative value to a single CEO looking at his quarterly bonus.
mschuster91 1y ago
A lot of fluff (although I do appreciate the hard numbers and reasons - thirteen shades of grey for flooring is utterly ridiculous) for essentially these two points: - low lot size combined with a lot of customization demands leads to high per-unit costs - "Buy American" is expensive. D'uh. Unfortunately the article doesn't dig down deeper into why BYD and other Chinese manufacturers are cheaper - 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability not just against American companies but against other Chinese companies.
- red_rech 1y ago
  > 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability not just against American companies but against other Chinese companies. Silicon Valley CEOs saw this and thought it should be their playbook. So hell, maybe made in America will eventually get cheaper as this innovative economic and social system sees adoption by brave pioneers.
  - pm90 1y ago
    More likely that the companies that institute this will hemorrhage talent that is offered a better deal by competitors. 996 works because the supply of Engineers is quite high in China.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      > 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-jobs-settlement-20150903-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168214
- 1y ago
SoftTalker 1y ago
Not sure why transit agencies are still paying for custom paint schemes or colors when they just turn around and wrap the whole bus with advertising. Just buy a plain white bus. The article didn't mention corruption but I would not rule it out. Follow the money. Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus.
- altcognito 1y ago
  Since they are often adorned with ads, I'm not sure why they pay for anything at all.
- michaelt 1y ago
  > Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus. I mean, that could just be normal, routine failure to negotiate effectively. If every bus vendor says "call for pricing" and your organisation has "always" paid $940k per bus, when you're told to buy some more buses, you might not even know you can get them for half or a third of that price by getting competing quotes from other vendors. And if you're an ambitious, hard-nosed type that can really turn the screws on vendors, leaving no stone unturned in your search for savings - would you be working in the purchasing department of a municipal bus company?
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    OK I agree... add "incompetence" along with "corruption" as a potential reason. Though corruption is easier to get away with if it appears as incompetence.
    - conductr 1y ago
      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.
myrmidon 1y ago
I think this shows one of the downsides of trade barriers very well: You get stuck with undesirable industries (diesel bus manufacturing), binding capital and labor better used elsewhere (and you easily end up with underperforming, overpriced solutions, too). But I'm curious how much this actually affects transport costs. If such a bus is used 12h/day, then even overpaying 100% for the vehicle should get outscaled by labor + maintenance pretty quickly, long before the vehicle is replaced...
- mrits 1y ago
  What is wrong with diesel bus manufacturing? Just the exhaust pedestrians have to breath in? It seems near the bottom of the list for things we'd need to solve for carbon emissions.
  - uxp100 1y ago
    My experience is tainted by the fact that the battery electric busses are new and the diesel busses are (comparatively) old, but our battery electric busses are far more comfortable to ride. Diesels are uh, jerky. Maybe the drivers fault, but that’s how it is.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      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.
      - maxerickson 1y ago
        They use hydraulic retarders in the transmission rather than engine brakes.
      - rsynnott 1y ago
tdeck 1y ago
Our buses are also less comfortable and "rattle" more that busses I've ridden in many other first world countries. I'm not sure if this is an economics thing but the standard New Flyer buses feel a bit dated.
- roryirvine 1y ago
  What's causing the rattle? In the UK, there were always a few buses in any given fleet that rattled more than others, especially when idling or at low revs - something to do with resonance with the body panels, I think. But that was back when diesel engines were universal, so hasn't really been a thing since hybrids and (more recently) BEVs took over. Looks like New Flyer hybrids use BAE Systems' Hybridrive, which was fairly common in London during the 2010s but didn't produce noticeably excessive vibration as far as I remember. Is there something different about how the engines are mounted in US buses, I wonder?
  - tdeck 1y ago
    I'm not sure? Perhaps the shocks are different, or the seats are just harder, or perhaps I'm imagining it.
  - notatoad 1y ago
    in my experience the rattle is usually from the fittings inside the bus, not the bus itself - mounting brackets for information screens or advertising panels, seatbelts on the accessible seating, that sort of thing. and part of the rattle is just down to under-use - a bus with all the seats filled shakes less, because the suspension is tuned for a full bus not an empty one. one of the buses i ride frequently has a ski rack installed in it that looks like a homemade contraption, and it rattles like crazy.
  - Symbiote 1y ago
    I once complained to Transport for London when a bus I was using regularly was rattling so much it made me feel ill. They said the driver can change gear (put it in neutral?) which reduces the rattle, and they are supposed to do this, but some drivers don't bother.
jmyeet 1y ago
As people should know by now, in the last few decades China has built a massive amount of public transit infrastructure, both within cities and regional [1]. Some of the subway systems are pretty amazing (eg Chongqing [2]). I'm interested in how they did this and I think it comes down to a few major factors: 1. They standardize rolling stock. The same stuff is used across the country. I think this is really important. If you think about how the US does things, every city will have its own procurement process. This is wasteful but is just more opportunity for corruption; 2. China had a long term strategy to building its own trains (and, I assume, buses). They first imported high speed trains from Japan and Germany but ultimately wanted to build their own; and 3. Streamlined permitting. China has private property but the way private property works in the US is as a huge barrier to any change or planning whatsoever. China just doesn't allow this to happen. I keep coming back to the extortionate cost of the Second Avenue Subway in NYC. It's like ~$2.5 billion per mile (Phase 2 is estimated at $4 billion per mile). You may be tempted to say that China isn't a good comparison here because of cheap labor or whatever. Fine. But let's compare it to the UK's Crossrail, which was still expensive but way cheaper than the SEcond Avenue Subway. California's HSR is hitting huge roadblocks from permitting, planning and political interests across the Central Valley, forcing a line designed to cut the travel time from LA to SF to divert to tiny towns along the way. There is a concerted effort in the US to kill public transit projects across the country (eg [3]). You don't just do this by blocking projects. You also make things take much longer and make the processes so much more expensive. In California, for example, we've seen the weaponization of the otherwise well-intentioned CEQA [4]. I feel like China's command economy is going to eat us alive over the next century. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_highspeed_railway_map_2008_vs_2020/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_hig... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7gvr_U4R4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7gvr_U4R4w [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html?emc=edit_nn_20180619&nl=morning-briefing&nlid=7770633020180619&te=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub... [4]: https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/show/362268-de-weaponizing-ceqa/ https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/s...
- rangestransform 1y ago
  > They standardize rolling stock. re: buses, we have the same rickety ass new flyers essentially everywhere in the US, that doesn't make them any cheaper
PaulHoule 1y ago
Tompkins County bought Proterra buses, they had some serious problems. When they jacked one up to work on it the axle came off and they immediately took all our electric buses out of the fleet -- and Proterra was bankrupt and not able to make it right. TCAT is still scrambling to find diesel buses to replace those and older diesel buses that are aging out. Lately they've added some ugly-looking buses which are the wrong color which I guess they didn't customize but it means they can run the routes.
- taeric 1y ago
  This is something I would honestly expect if you try and get cheaper from market pressure.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    Some of it is that "legacy" products often involve more difficult engineering than people think. Circa 1980 this bus design was a notorious failure in NYC: https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php/Grumman_Flxible_870 https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php/Grumman_Flxible_870 Buses get shaken really hard.
    - taeric 1y ago
      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.
      - rootusrootus 1y ago
        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.
        1y ago
xnx 1y ago
Ultimately due to a lack of transit competition. Municipal transit will be bloated and inefficient on every level because no amount of failure will put them out of business. Indeed, most agencies' main goal is to increase budget (any increase in service or customer satisfaction is incidental) because more budget equals bigger projects and more staff which is more prestigious and higher paying.
- savanaly 1y ago
  I'm with you at heart, but experience says government owned transit works just fine and even great in other countries. What's their secret sauce?
  - rootusrootus 1y ago
    Perception, maybe? My local transit agency seems to do pretty well. There will always be critics, but they don't seem unnecessarily bloated, the vehicles are well maintained and clean, etc. Not any different than a typical bus in, for example, UK. And I would caution that if you think everybody other than the US does government-owned transit very well, you may be focusing in a small subset of wealthy first world countries.
  - hamdingers 1y ago
    Other countries provide transit as a transportation service for all. US politicians and voters view it as a charity for the temporarily carless. All the other issues are downstream of this mindset.
  - xnx 1y ago
    Historically denser cities.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    I'm guessing that unlike here, some of those places need buses, and they simply can't afford any waste.
taeric 1y ago
The idea that you can leverage competition to build public infrastructure things feels dubious, to me. Will try to take a dive on some of that literature. At face value, though, public infrastructure is largely the sort of thing that enables many things with no obvious stakeholder that could have done it themselves. Certainly not in a way that would have an easy path to profits for the infrastructure.
bluGill 1y ago
Don't be fooled, paying less won't help much since the cost of a bus is a small part of the costs of running a bus route. about half your costs are the bus driver. The most expensive bus is still only 1/3rd of your hourly cost of running the bus. If a more expensive bus is more reliable that could more than make up for a more expensive bus (I don't have any numbers to do math on though). Half the costs of running a bus route are the driver's labor. The other half needs to pay for maintenance, the cost of the bus, and all the other overhead.
- esafak 1y ago
  I'm hearing you say we should have self-driving buses... which is feasible since their route is fixed.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Bus driver also does things like trigger ramp for handicapped people, strap in wheelchairs securely, answer questions about the route, and security surveillance.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      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
      - Symbiote 1y ago
        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 https://www.moviatrafik.dk/flexkunde/flexhandicap
jlhawn 1y ago
One of the issues that AC Transit (SF East Bay bus agency) has is that it purchased a lot of Hydrogen Fuel Cell busses which have issues which dramatically impact their reliability. It's also very expensive technology. There's a decent argument that public agencies _should_ invest in early emerging technologies like that but the costs should not be borne by the transit agency alone, at the cost of poor service for its riders.
- namibj 1y ago
  Make the argument why the bus company that provides bus-based transportation near one's home/work should spend marginal income on fancy emerging technologies instead of on higher-quality service (or lowering ticket prices if somehow service quality has reached an upper limit)? Sure if the state or feds want to pay the extra costs to get such technology out there into production, make them an offer as the local bus company how much they'd have to chip in for you to deploy that.
dayvid 1y ago
Worth watching Modern MBA on the inefficiencies of transit in USA. Detailed analysis and comparison against Asian, European and Latin American systems along with private and government run operations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ3LSNXwZ2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ3LSNXwZ2Y
- bryceacc 1y ago
  unbelievably in depth channel, love all of the local business interviews (from other videos with restaurants and such)
- rootusrootus 1y ago
  Repeating the oft-cited but questionable assertion that car companies dismantled city rail systems makes me uncertain about how trustworthy the rest of their claims are. Though they did mention that the US is the most wealthy nation in the world -- did they later offer an opinion whether that would still be true had we approached public transit and health care subsidies the same way European countries did?
  - Aunche 1y ago
    Modern MBA videos are like ChatGPT. They sound reasonable when he's talking about something you don't know, but you'll notice him getting basic facts wrong in topics that you're familiar with. For example, he diagnoses the growth of public storage as people from single family homes to apartments in big cities and having no place to store their things, citing that America's urbanization rate has increased. However, the increased urbanization was actually driven by the growth of suburbs and actually, home sizes actually significantly increased during that period.
    - meinersbur 1y ago
      What is your alternative explanation for why people rent public storage space? Urban growth and growth in suburbs are not mutually exclusive.
isthispermanent 1y ago
So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production. As if that doesn’t carry any negative side effects. This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing. Everyone is now fully aware that offshoring for a cheap sticker price comes with higher, harder to price costs elsewhere.
- rootusrootus 1y ago
  > This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against Hardly. Less than two thirds of Americans actually bothered to vote. And a slight minority of those voted for the current government. In any case, why does this need to be about identity politics? And if so, why are you suggesting that only the left is committed to an open, free market? Isn't that more traditionally a right-wing position?
  - jvanderbot 1y ago
    All fun and games to point out seeming contradictions! Especially here. Unfortunately GP is right - optics matters more than factual correctness, and the optics here is mixed - yes gov is overspending, but the solution is to offshore more jobs.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      "Government is spending the amount required for developed world jobs to build buses." would be a better title than "US cities pay too much for buses." The macro of deflationary globalization due to enormous surplus labor in the developing world are mostly over. Someone's comment said "why not let China subsidize US bus deployment?" I think that's a fine argument, as long as we're still spending to keep the US manufacturing muscle strong. The cost is the cost to have domestic skilled manufacturing labor at the ready, and someone is going to have to pay it, because you're not going to be able to buy warships from China for war with China. No different than the US auto and aerospace industries retooling from civilian to military production rapidly during previous world wars. Corporate America cares about quarterly profits, not capability readiness. This is an incentive alignment and capital efficiency issue requiring policy improvement.
Spooky23 1y ago
There's also a bunch of PE money in the space for specialized vehicles, leading to the usual consequences. Fire trucks are the canonical example. Shittier trucks that take 3x longer to get and are dramatically less reliable.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  There are about as many concrete trucks as there are fire trucks in the US (and like fire trucks some of the fleet is purpose built and some of the fleet is specialty bodies on normal-ish trucks) and they don't have comparable problems with PE buying the manufacturing up. I think there's more to it than just evil PE
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    I’m on a city e&a board. A couple of PE groups have rolled up the remaining fire truck manufacturers. 3 companies own 75% of the market. This is a well known issue… Google away and there’s lots to read about. I know nothing about cement mixers. A rig that was $500k in 2010 is $2-2.5M now. That’s “cheap” —- volunteer fire companies tend to pimp up the trucks (usually they are paid via grant), cities are cheap on capital spend. It’s a squeeze play as if you don’t keep the trucks up to date with modern gear, insurers will raise homeowners premiums. Bad look for the mayor.
    - namibj 1y ago
      I assume buying from the European supply is federally banned due to truck import rules? Or would the insurance companies not recognize their capabilities?
      - Spooky23 1y ago
        I think there are some differences in approach and philosophy. Some are probably real and essential and some are more culture in fire service. There are most certainly online discussions at great length on the topic.
      - 1y ago
ecshafer 1y ago
I think that the authors solution, outsourcing production is not quite right, they gloss over other issues. >In a large country like the US, some variation in bus design is inevitable due to differences in conditions like weather and topography. But Silverberg said that many customizations are cosmetic, reflecting agency preferences or color schemes but not affecting vehicle performance. This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. >Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each. The issue here appears to be: Why is SORTA's purchasing so incompetent that they are buying 17 busses for the price of 35? They are over double the price of RTD. > That same year, Singapore’s Land Transport Authority also bought buses. Their order called for 240 fully electric vehicles — which are typically twice as expensive as diesel ones in the US. List price: Just $333,000 each. Singapore has a very efficient, highly trained, highly educated, highly paid administrative staff, and their competency is what is being shown here. They thought to get a reduction in price because of the large number of busses they are ordering. One solution the author doesn't point out is that Federal funds often come coupled with a large amount of bureaucratic red tape. It could be cheaper in the long run to have more tax collection and expenditure at the local level, and not rely as much on federal grants.
- itopaloglu83 1y ago
  We also don't know much about these so called purchasing contracts either. For example. do they contain sustainment services, maintenance equipment, storage facilities, or other sourcing requirements? When using federal funds, you're generally required to purchase all American products, I remember trying to furnish an office with just two desks and four chairs (nothing fancy), and the initial cost estimates were over six thousand dollars. When we acquired private funding, we were able to get everything under two thousand, you can see the same pricing with Zoom hardware as a service leasing prices as well, they're leasing some equipment almost at twice the cost due (as far as I know) to all American sourcing. I'm not questioning the sourcing restrictions, but trying to point out that it's a little more than the education level of the staff only.
snthd 1y ago
Similar data on police vehicles could be interesting.
- hamdingers 1y ago
  Firefighting vehicles too, more expensive than European counterparts by a factor of 10.
- snthd 1y ago
  Started googling and found this: https://www.newsweek.com/americas-new-police-cars-are-taxpayer-dollar-saving-hybrids-1936693 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...
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    They're protecting and serving so well they're worried about getting jumped.
logifail 1y ago
Ever since I first looked at the Oshkosh NGDV for the USPS I couldn't help but wonder WHY there was a need for a custom vehicle?* European parcel delivery firms and postal systems (Deutsche Post DHL, La Poste, Royal Mail, PostNL and all the non-legacy competitors) generally do not commission purpose-built vehicles, they buy off the shelf small vans and light commercial vehicles. * of course I do know why, "because jobs and politics"...
- pkaye 1y ago
  The USPS is an US federal agency. At one time it even had a cabinet level position though not so any more. Its not private like in most countries. At the scale they buy these vehicles, it probably makes sense to get a custom one. Even Amazon has custom EVs built for them.
  - wolrah 1y ago
    > Even Amazon has custom EVs built for them. Eh, sort of. Amazon partnered with Rivian to help design the EDV and had an initial exclusivity agreement as long as they ordered a certain number of them, but this agreement has since been terminated so anyone can buy them now. The USPS actually tested one in early 2024.
    - pkaye 1y ago
      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 trucks Fedex and Amazon buy just like in countries where the mail service is privatized.
      - wolrah 1y ago
        IMO a LLV or NGDV is a custom-designed vehicle for USPS, the EDV is a delivery-optimized electric step van that happens to have been designed with the input of one specific delivery vendor.
RobKohr 1y ago
"Federal funding typically covers 80% of bus purchases, with agencies responsible for the remainder." Well, there is your answer. The one making the purchase isn't the one primarily paying for the purchase. This makes them less sensitive to pricing. Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance. Or how you don't care how much you put on your plate or what you choose to eat at an all you can eat buffet. The second you detach the consumer from the price of something, even through an intermediary such as health insurance, that is when they stop caring about how much something costs, and so the price jumps.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Shouldn't insurance care about the pricing though? I get why federal govt isn't sensitive, given 0 competition.
  - whimsicalism 1y ago
    massive proportions of utilization come from govt subsidized plans
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Insurance profit is limited to a percentage of what they pay out. So the more they pay, the more money they make.
    - frollogaston 1y ago
      Oh, that's important info. Also such a rule suggests that health insurance isn't a competitive market.
      - littlestymaar 1y ago
        There's no such thing as a “competitive market” in the real world.
1024core 1y ago
This reminds me of the "trash can fiasco" that went down in San Fracnsico. https://sfpublicworks.org/trashcanredesign https://sfpublicworks.org/trashcanredesign TL;DR: San Francisco government decided to go with custom-designed, bespoke, artisanal public trash cans. Each can ended up coming in at around $20K. When, in fact, if you buy a typical run-of-the-mill public trash can that most other cities do, it would cost them less than $1000.
- avree 1y ago
  You are conflating two things with that story. The prototypes cost $20,000. The designed can cost $3,000. Higher than your "$1,000" can, but it also had a bunch of "features". If you've ever worked at a hardware company, you probably know that the price of DVT units, or any prototype, ends up being significantly higher than the production unit.
  - 1024core 1y ago
    So you're saying the designed can cost 3X the COTS one. Similar idea to the story, no?
Exoristos 1y ago
Isn't this kind of thing always tacitly by design? Federal and local funding streams diffuse throughout the economy.
silexia 1y ago
Outsourcing is not a good solution, we should support our local manufacturers who have to follow our ethical rules on labor treatment, safety, and environmental damage. Outsourcing just allows the worst abuses to happen elsewhere. We should get rid of labor and environmental rules if we want to allow outsourcing.
tclover 1y ago
Well, what did you expect? if competition is banned, they can churn out whatever, charge whatever they want, and it'll still get bought with tax money.
ge96 1y ago
One day when I needed to take the bus I realized it was free, you used to have to pay for the rides. I thought that was great to help people out in need, but then they reverted it...
bgnn 1y ago
I see a lot of people saying this is due to lack of competition. I hate to break this to you but it isn't that. A lot of European countries thinking the competition will drive the costs down, including on the supply side, and liberalizing the market realized not long after that this did nothing to reduce the cost. More often than not it drove the cost up. The problem is that the public transportation is never truly free market, as they are always heavily subsidized. More companies relying on subsidies to do business doesn't change the fact. On the supply side, bus manufacturers have the same. US federal govrhas strict requirements to buy American made busses. I think NAFTA might be ok too, but not sure. In any case, what the US government paying for is manufacturing jobs and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Or let's put it another way. Those busses can be produced in China or Japan for much cheaper. But then you will let go of this industry, and have more dead towns and small cities without jobs.
balderdash 1y ago
They probably pay too much for everything - and in many cases that’s by design (e.g. ever increasing public sector pay packages). If municipalities had to disclose the deferred maintenance capex cost on infrastructure and capital assets, I’d hazard most places are in a pretty dicey situation (80 year old water or sewer systems that need replacing, aging buses, etc) - and towns saying they balanced the budget or in a good fiscal position is a joke.
sweeter 1y ago
Who could've guessed that the "public private partnership" was extremely ineffective and only serves to funnel tax payer dollars to private owners while giving kick backs to politicians. Wow. Who knew.
iamcalledrob 1y ago
The article focuses on purchase price -- and buying from BYD in China will be a lot cheaper. But I'm curious of the downstream effects of forcing cities to buy local, even at a higher price. After all, that money will get taxed many times over and could potentially change the equation?
QuantumNoodle 1y ago
Whatever solution to increase competition and bring down prices - great. The solution should also either increase bus capacity and/or bus routes to more desirable locations so people would _want_ and _need_ to take the bus. Are 40 foot buses the right option when ridership is so low in the states? Europe has small van-like busses but more of them. Sure less people fit on one sitting, but routes are tighter, more frequent, and transferring between bus lines doesn't require going waaay out of the way to a hub to transfer. 40 ft busses are great once riders are dependant on it... Seems like a classic case of over optimization.
jagged-chisel 1y ago
More things should be like the Interstate System when federal money is involved: locally budget, appropriate, source, build/implement, and when it meets federal guidelines, you get reimbursed.
bashmelek 1y ago
I think a bigger problem is that, with urban sprawl, it makes it hard to service enough people with public transportation.
ksynwa 1y ago
This is true for every public utility vehicle. For example, firetrucks: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/fire-truck-prices-hit-2-million-us-firefighters-demand-an-antitrust-probe-2025-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... It's a feature of the economic setup.
xbmcuser 1y ago
This problem is not unique to buses it's in almost all markets or industries in the US. Almost every industry has monopolies or virtual monopolies. Incubants pay/finance politicians to make rules that make it harder for new entrants to get into the market or use false free market narrative to hamper community inniatives. The attack on wind and solar by the current administration is part of the same play.
rsynnott 1y ago
> Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each. Huh. TFI, the Irish transport authority, currently has a deal to pay 400 million euro for 800 electric buses, mostly double deckers (so a lot bigger than these ones). Diesel double deckers cost them significantly less (about 250-350k IIRC), but obviously cost more to operate. That's for custom jobs (in particular TFI has weird beliefs about what shape windscreens should be). I wonder if part of it is just that these US transit agencies are buying them on such a small scale; a state-level agency responsible for sourcing the buses might be more effective.
- ainiriand 1y ago
  But each State and County wants their say on what vehicles they want, and for sure a lot of them do not want those woke electric buses...
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    So give them a choice of two or three.
ThinkBeat 1y ago
The biggest killer are all the specific changes each city decides they need. If a standard feature set could be achieved mass production would be easier to arrange. Perhaps with a module system to remove or add some subset of feature that are easily to adapt to it. The 80% of federal funding¹ should be based on a "universal common standard", and cities pay 20% plus the city pays 100% for various customisations they need. ¹ I have not made any effort to verify this data but it's in hte article. It seems more generous than the federal government tend to be.
- m101 1y ago
  Similar to another comment here: the principle agent issue here is the person designing the spec for busses is not the person paying for the buses. If it was the case then the market would settle on a common standard as everyone seeks the lowest price.
iamtheworstdev 1y ago
Article leaves out how Private Equity has moved hard into the supply chains for buses and fire trucks and started taking advantage of their positions.
notmyjob 1y ago
Public transit is intersectional. It helps poor and elderly people while also being climate friendly (assuming enough ridership). It’s often not used enough to satisfy either goal. California’s high speed rail boondoggle comes to mind as a great example.
BobbyTables2 1y ago
I’m all for mass transportation m, but city buses blocking a busy two-lane road for several minutes waiting at a stop has got to end. Even when not stopped, they do a pretty good job at impeding traffic. The bus system has one set of costs. But it has another set of external costs on the rest of society. In contrast, I’ve seen British short trains arrive + unload + load + depart in far less than 5 minutes total, and that involves a far greater number of passengers than a crawling bus. Yeah, trains require more infrastructure, but I think the public could grow to like them.
- ranadomo 1y ago
  Transit violence is not limited to outlier cases like the nyc immolation or Iryna's horrific slaughter. Women in particular may never feel safe on public transit and avoid it entirely at night and alone. Daily harassment, stalking, threats and verbal abuse are "facts of life" for the majority of female passengers in metro areas. They will all move up or out to safer environments and take their car or private transportation everywhere. Pretending like Americans are instinctually averse to public transit is an absurd contention when they've been behaviorally conditioned by the insanely dangerous environment and a justice system that works to inflict it upon them until they give up or die.
DudeOpotomus 1y ago
In many municipalities, it would be cheaper to run on demand van service for people than run busses. Not only would it get people to and from their actual homes and work, vans are cheap and readily available. Paying more drivers is cheaper than buying and maintaining multi million dollar busses that are empty a lot of the time. In most of CA, most homes are far from bus lines. Making their use prohibitive for all but those who must use them. I know they do something like this in LA. People love it.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Metro micro doesn’t scale at all. It is still limited to pilot study areas. Cost per trip is absurd compared to traditional bussing. One of the stated goals of the next gen bus plan in LA was to get a bus stop in a 10 min walk of 85% of the workers in LA county and this was achieved. The real trouble with transit is people choose where they live based on car convenience rather than transit convenience. So they open an app and go “gee I can drive to work in 30 mins but I have to take two or three busses and three times the time on transit.” And write it off forever, rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work. The way LA county is developed is that there are apartments basically in every neighborhood anyhow without very strong neighborhood specific effects on pricing. Housing a little more neighborhood specific but that changes as townhomes and other sort of not-detached-sfh buying opportunities come to bear generally in neighborhoods with demand for a song compared to detached housing.
  - rootusrootus 1y ago
    > rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work In many places I've lived, this optimization would need to be re-done every job change and you would probably need to move, because it's as much about where the job is as where your house is. The thing about optimizing for a good commute in a car is that you're way more likely to be at least average or better even if your job location changes.

355 points by pavel_lishin 1y ago

bulk price 200 buses equal cheaper buses, nothing surprise here

> "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!"

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
sidewndr46 1y ago
imagine how much money the government could save by just continuing to collect taxes and not providing any services! we could privatize everything!
- red_rech 1y ago
  Yes! we can even distribute political and military power to selected individuals who can rule over small portions maintaining security and collecting taxes. After all, it was divine right (Darwinian evolution, AI schizobabble, etc) that made them men of might.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >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.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  That's ... decently close to what the current political course of action is, a strategy called "starve the beast" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
  - sidewndr46 1y ago
    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.
- supertrope 1y ago
  That's running the government like a business!
namdnay 1y ago
it's not a question of "offloading" it, it's a question of reaping the benefits of global competition Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived? Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy?
- mschuster91 1y ago
  There's a difference between private companies and state-run companies / authorities. When a US airline thinks it's better for them to switch over to Airbus, by all means do so, that's competition. But taxpayer money should not be used to prop up other countries' economies unless explicitly designated that way (e.g. contributions to international agencies, economic aid), and certainly not if that replaces domestic union labor.
  - rangestransform 1y ago
    https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-time-clock-vandalized-days-after-similar-incident-at-lirr-amid-overtime-scandal/ 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.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    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.
infecto 1y ago
One of the worst takes I have ever seen. It’s not about offloading an industry but if another geography has a comparative advantage everyone benefits. I would also argue that customizations are indeed a total waste of money for systems that already cash strapped.
- Mountain_Skies 1y ago
  What geography allows for worker oppression and environmental degradation as a competitive advantage?
  - infecto 1y ago
    Where did I say anything about worker oppression?
- bsder 1y ago
  > if another geography has a comparative advantage everyone benefits. I don't necessarily agree. Outsourcing has a cost in that you also lose the knowledge of the entire engineering chain. That engineering chain has a LOT of value to us as a society. However, it has negative value to a single CEO looking at his quarterly bonus.

mschuster91 1y ago

A lot of fluff (although I do appreciate the hard numbers and reasons - thirteen shades of grey for flooring is utterly ridiculous) for essentially these two points: - low lot size combined with a lot of customization demands leads to high per-unit costs - "Buy American" is expensive. D'uh. Unfortunately the article doesn't dig down deeper into why BYD and other Chinese manufacturers are cheaper - 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability not just against American companies but against other Chinese companies.

red_rech 1y ago
> 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability not just against American companies but against other Chinese companies. Silicon Valley CEOs saw this and thought it should be their playbook. So hell, maybe made in America will eventually get cheaper as this innovative economic and social system sees adoption by brave pioneers.
- pm90 1y ago
  More likely that the companies that institute this will hemorrhage talent that is offered a better deal by competitors. 996 works because the supply of Engineers is quite high in China.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > 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-jobs-settlement-20150903-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168214
1y ago

SoftTalker 1y ago

Not sure why transit agencies are still paying for custom paint schemes or colors when they just turn around and wrap the whole bus with advertising. Just buy a plain white bus. The article didn't mention corruption but I would not rule it out. Follow the money. Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus.

altcognito 1y ago
Since they are often adorned with ads, I'm not sure why they pay for anything at all.
michaelt 1y ago
> Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus. I mean, that could just be normal, routine failure to negotiate effectively. If every bus vendor says "call for pricing" and your organisation has "always" paid $940k per bus, when you're told to buy some more buses, you might not even know you can get them for half or a third of that price by getting competing quotes from other vendors. And if you're an ambitious, hard-nosed type that can really turn the screws on vendors, leaving no stone unturned in your search for savings - would you be working in the purchasing department of a municipal bus company?
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  OK I agree... add "incompetence" along with "corruption" as a potential reason. Though corruption is easier to get away with if it appears as incompetence.
  - conductr 1y ago
    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.

myrmidon 1y ago

I think this shows one of the downsides of trade barriers very well: You get stuck with undesirable industries (diesel bus manufacturing), binding capital and labor better used elsewhere (and you easily end up with underperforming, overpriced solutions, too). But I'm curious how much this actually affects transport costs. If such a bus is used 12h/day, then even overpaying 100% for the vehicle should get outscaled by labor + maintenance pretty quickly, long before the vehicle is replaced...

mrits 1y ago
What is wrong with diesel bus manufacturing? Just the exhaust pedestrians have to breath in? It seems near the bottom of the list for things we'd need to solve for carbon emissions.
- uxp100 1y ago
  My experience is tainted by the fact that the battery electric busses are new and the diesel busses are (comparatively) old, but our battery electric busses are far more comfortable to ride. Diesels are uh, jerky. Maybe the drivers fault, but that’s how it is.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    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.
    - maxerickson 1y ago
      They use hydraulic retarders in the transmission rather than engine brakes.
    - rsynnott 1y ago

tdeck 1y ago

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

roryirvine 1y ago
What's causing the rattle? In the UK, there were always a few buses in any given fleet that rattled more than others, especially when idling or at low revs - something to do with resonance with the body panels, I think. But that was back when diesel engines were universal, so hasn't really been a thing since hybrids and (more recently) BEVs took over. Looks like New Flyer hybrids use BAE Systems' Hybridrive, which was fairly common in London during the 2010s but didn't produce noticeably excessive vibration as far as I remember. Is there something different about how the engines are mounted in US buses, I wonder?
- tdeck 1y ago
  I'm not sure? Perhaps the shocks are different, or the seats are just harder, or perhaps I'm imagining it.
- notatoad 1y ago
  in my experience the rattle is usually from the fittings inside the bus, not the bus itself - mounting brackets for information screens or advertising panels, seatbelts on the accessible seating, that sort of thing. and part of the rattle is just down to under-use - a bus with all the seats filled shakes less, because the suspension is tuned for a full bus not an empty one. one of the buses i ride frequently has a ski rack installed in it that looks like a homemade contraption, and it rattles like crazy.
- Symbiote 1y ago
  I once complained to Transport for London when a bus I was using regularly was rattling so much it made me feel ill. They said the driver can change gear (put it in neutral?) which reduces the rattle, and they are supposed to do this, but some drivers don't bother.

jmyeet 1y ago

As people should know by now, in the last few decades China has built a massive amount of public transit infrastructure, both within cities and regional [1]. Some of the subway systems are pretty amazing (eg Chongqing [2]). I'm interested in how they did this and I think it comes down to a few major factors: 1. They standardize rolling stock. The same stuff is used across the country. I think this is really important. If you think about how the US does things, every city will have its own procurement process. This is wasteful but is just more opportunity for corruption; 2. China had a long term strategy to building its own trains (and, I assume, buses). They first imported high speed trains from Japan and Germany but ultimately wanted to build their own; and 3. Streamlined permitting. China has private property but the way private property works in the US is as a huge barrier to any change or planning whatsoever. China just doesn't allow this to happen. I keep coming back to the extortionate cost of the Second Avenue Subway in NYC. It's like ~$2.5 billion per mile (Phase 2 is estimated at $4 billion per mile). You may be tempted to say that China isn't a good comparison here because of cheap labor or whatever. Fine. But let's compare it to the UK's Crossrail, which was still expensive but way cheaper than the SEcond Avenue Subway. California's HSR is hitting huge roadblocks from permitting, planning and political interests across the Central Valley, forcing a line designed to cut the travel time from LA to SF to divert to tiny towns along the way. There is a concerted effort in the US to kill public transit projects across the country (eg [3]). You don't just do this by blocking projects. You also make things take much longer and make the processes so much more expensive. In California, for example, we've seen the weaponization of the otherwise well-intentioned CEQA [4]. I feel like China's command economy is going to eat us alive over the next century. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_highspeed_railway_map_2008_vs_2020/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_hig... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7gvr_U4R4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7gvr_U4R4w [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html?emc=edit_nn_20180619&nl=morning-briefing&nlid=7770633020180619&te=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub... [4]: https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/show/362268-de-weaponizing-ceqa/ https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/s...

rangestransform 1y ago
> They standardize rolling stock. re: buses, we have the same rickety ass new flyers essentially everywhere in the US, that doesn't make them any cheaper

PaulHoule 1y ago

Tompkins County bought Proterra buses, they had some serious problems. When they jacked one up to work on it the axle came off and they immediately took all our electric buses out of the fleet -- and Proterra was bankrupt and not able to make it right. TCAT is still scrambling to find diesel buses to replace those and older diesel buses that are aging out. Lately they've added some ugly-looking buses which are the wrong color which I guess they didn't customize but it means they can run the routes.

taeric 1y ago
This is something I would honestly expect if you try and get cheaper from market pressure.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Some of it is that "legacy" products often involve more difficult engineering than people think. Circa 1980 this bus design was a notorious failure in NYC: https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php/Grumman_Flxible_870 https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php/Grumman_Flxible_870 Buses get shaken really hard.
  - taeric 1y ago
    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.
    - rootusrootus 1y ago
      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.
      - 1y ago

xnx 1y ago

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

savanaly 1y ago
I'm with you at heart, but experience says government owned transit works just fine and even great in other countries. What's their secret sauce?
- rootusrootus 1y ago
  Perception, maybe? My local transit agency seems to do pretty well. There will always be critics, but they don't seem unnecessarily bloated, the vehicles are well maintained and clean, etc. Not any different than a typical bus in, for example, UK. And I would caution that if you think everybody other than the US does government-owned transit very well, you may be focusing in a small subset of wealthy first world countries.
- hamdingers 1y ago
  Other countries provide transit as a transportation service for all. US politicians and voters view it as a charity for the temporarily carless. All the other issues are downstream of this mindset.
- xnx 1y ago
  Historically denser cities.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  I'm guessing that unlike here, some of those places need buses, and they simply can't afford any waste.

taeric 1y ago

The idea that you can leverage competition to build public infrastructure things feels dubious, to me. Will try to take a dive on some of that literature. At face value, though, public infrastructure is largely the sort of thing that enables many things with no obvious stakeholder that could have done it themselves. Certainly not in a way that would have an easy path to profits for the infrastructure.

bluGill 1y ago

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

esafak 1y ago
I'm hearing you say we should have self-driving buses... which is feasible since their route is fixed.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Bus driver also does things like trigger ramp for handicapped people, strap in wheelchairs securely, answer questions about the route, and security surveillance.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    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
    - Symbiote 1y ago
      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 https://www.moviatrafik.dk/flexkunde/flexhandicap

jlhawn 1y ago

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

namibj 1y ago
Make the argument why the bus company that provides bus-based transportation near one's home/work should spend marginal income on fancy emerging technologies instead of on higher-quality service (or lowering ticket prices if somehow service quality has reached an upper limit)? Sure if the state or feds want to pay the extra costs to get such technology out there into production, make them an offer as the local bus company how much they'd have to chip in for you to deploy that.

dayvid 1y ago

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

bryceacc 1y ago
unbelievably in depth channel, love all of the local business interviews (from other videos with restaurants and such)
rootusrootus 1y ago
Repeating the oft-cited but questionable assertion that car companies dismantled city rail systems makes me uncertain about how trustworthy the rest of their claims are. Though they did mention that the US is the most wealthy nation in the world -- did they later offer an opinion whether that would still be true had we approached public transit and health care subsidies the same way European countries did?
- Aunche 1y ago
  Modern MBA videos are like ChatGPT. They sound reasonable when he's talking about something you don't know, but you'll notice him getting basic facts wrong in topics that you're familiar with. For example, he diagnoses the growth of public storage as people from single family homes to apartments in big cities and having no place to store their things, citing that America's urbanization rate has increased. However, the increased urbanization was actually driven by the growth of suburbs and actually, home sizes actually significantly increased during that period.
  - meinersbur 1y ago
    What is your alternative explanation for why people rent public storage space? Urban growth and growth in suburbs are not mutually exclusive.

isthispermanent 1y ago

So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production. As if that doesn’t carry any negative side effects. This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing. Everyone is now fully aware that offshoring for a cheap sticker price comes with higher, harder to price costs elsewhere.

rootusrootus 1y ago
> This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against Hardly. Less than two thirds of Americans actually bothered to vote. And a slight minority of those voted for the current government. In any case, why does this need to be about identity politics? And if so, why are you suggesting that only the left is committed to an open, free market? Isn't that more traditionally a right-wing position?
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  All fun and games to point out seeming contradictions! Especially here. Unfortunately GP is right - optics matters more than factual correctness, and the optics here is mixed - yes gov is overspending, but the solution is to offshore more jobs.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    "Government is spending the amount required for developed world jobs to build buses." would be a better title than "US cities pay too much for buses." The macro of deflationary globalization due to enormous surplus labor in the developing world are mostly over. Someone's comment said "why not let China subsidize US bus deployment?" I think that's a fine argument, as long as we're still spending to keep the US manufacturing muscle strong. The cost is the cost to have domestic skilled manufacturing labor at the ready, and someone is going to have to pay it, because you're not going to be able to buy warships from China for war with China. No different than the US auto and aerospace industries retooling from civilian to military production rapidly during previous world wars. Corporate America cares about quarterly profits, not capability readiness. This is an incentive alignment and capital efficiency issue requiring policy improvement.

Spooky23 1y ago

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

potato3732842 1y ago
There are about as many concrete trucks as there are fire trucks in the US (and like fire trucks some of the fleet is purpose built and some of the fleet is specialty bodies on normal-ish trucks) and they don't have comparable problems with PE buying the manufacturing up. I think there's more to it than just evil PE
- Spooky23 1y ago
  I’m on a city e&a board. A couple of PE groups have rolled up the remaining fire truck manufacturers. 3 companies own 75% of the market. This is a well known issue… Google away and there’s lots to read about. I know nothing about cement mixers. A rig that was $500k in 2010 is $2-2.5M now. That’s “cheap” —- volunteer fire companies tend to pimp up the trucks (usually they are paid via grant), cities are cheap on capital spend. It’s a squeeze play as if you don’t keep the trucks up to date with modern gear, insurers will raise homeowners premiums. Bad look for the mayor.
  - namibj 1y ago
    I assume buying from the European supply is federally banned due to truck import rules? Or would the insurance companies not recognize their capabilities?
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      I think there are some differences in approach and philosophy. Some are probably real and essential and some are more culture in fire service. There are most certainly online discussions at great length on the topic.
    - 1y ago

ecshafer 1y ago

I think that the authors solution, outsourcing production is not quite right, they gloss over other issues. >In a large country like the US, some variation in bus design is inevitable due to differences in conditions like weather and topography. But Silverberg said that many customizations are cosmetic, reflecting agency preferences or color schemes but not affecting vehicle performance. This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. >Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each. The issue here appears to be: Why is SORTA's purchasing so incompetent that they are buying 17 busses for the price of 35? They are over double the price of RTD. > That same year, Singapore’s Land Transport Authority also bought buses. Their order called for 240 fully electric vehicles — which are typically twice as expensive as diesel ones in the US. List price: Just $333,000 each. Singapore has a very efficient, highly trained, highly educated, highly paid administrative staff, and their competency is what is being shown here. They thought to get a reduction in price because of the large number of busses they are ordering. One solution the author doesn't point out is that Federal funds often come coupled with a large amount of bureaucratic red tape. It could be cheaper in the long run to have more tax collection and expenditure at the local level, and not rely as much on federal grants.

itopaloglu83 1y ago
We also don't know much about these so called purchasing contracts either. For example. do they contain sustainment services, maintenance equipment, storage facilities, or other sourcing requirements? When using federal funds, you're generally required to purchase all American products, I remember trying to furnish an office with just two desks and four chairs (nothing fancy), and the initial cost estimates were over six thousand dollars. When we acquired private funding, we were able to get everything under two thousand, you can see the same pricing with Zoom hardware as a service leasing prices as well, they're leasing some equipment almost at twice the cost due (as far as I know) to all American sourcing. I'm not questioning the sourcing restrictions, but trying to point out that it's a little more than the education level of the staff only.

snthd 1y ago

Similar data on police vehicles could be interesting.

hamdingers 1y ago
Firefighting vehicles too, more expensive than European counterparts by a factor of 10.
snthd 1y ago
Started googling and found this: https://www.newsweek.com/americas-new-police-cars-are-taxpayer-dollar-saving-hybrids-1936693 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...
- potato3732842 1y ago
  They're protecting and serving so well they're worried about getting jumped.

logifail 1y ago

Ever since I first looked at the Oshkosh NGDV for the USPS I couldn't help but wonder WHY there was a need for a custom vehicle?* European parcel delivery firms and postal systems (Deutsche Post DHL, La Poste, Royal Mail, PostNL and all the non-legacy competitors) generally do not commission purpose-built vehicles, they buy off the shelf small vans and light commercial vehicles. * of course I do know why, "because jobs and politics"...

pkaye 1y ago
The USPS is an US federal agency. At one time it even had a cabinet level position though not so any more. Its not private like in most countries. At the scale they buy these vehicles, it probably makes sense to get a custom one. Even Amazon has custom EVs built for them.
- wolrah 1y ago
  > Even Amazon has custom EVs built for them. Eh, sort of. Amazon partnered with Rivian to help design the EDV and had an initial exclusivity agreement as long as they ordered a certain number of them, but this agreement has since been terminated so anyone can buy them now. The USPS actually tested one in early 2024.
  - pkaye 1y ago
    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 trucks Fedex and Amazon buy just like in countries where the mail service is privatized.
    - wolrah 1y ago
      IMO a LLV or NGDV is a custom-designed vehicle for USPS, the EDV is a delivery-optimized electric step van that happens to have been designed with the input of one specific delivery vendor.

RobKohr 1y ago

"Federal funding typically covers 80% of bus purchases, with agencies responsible for the remainder." Well, there is your answer. The one making the purchase isn't the one primarily paying for the purchase. This makes them less sensitive to pricing. Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance. Or how you don't care how much you put on your plate or what you choose to eat at an all you can eat buffet. The second you detach the consumer from the price of something, even through an intermediary such as health insurance, that is when they stop caring about how much something costs, and so the price jumps.

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frollogaston 1y ago
Shouldn't insurance care about the pricing though? I get why federal govt isn't sensitive, given 0 competition.
- whimsicalism 1y ago
  massive proportions of utilization come from govt subsidized plans
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Insurance profit is limited to a percentage of what they pay out. So the more they pay, the more money they make.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    Oh, that's important info. Also such a rule suggests that health insurance isn't a competitive market.
    - littlestymaar 1y ago
      There's no such thing as a “competitive market” in the real world.

1024core 1y ago

This reminds me of the "trash can fiasco" that went down in San Fracnsico. https://sfpublicworks.org/trashcanredesign https://sfpublicworks.org/trashcanredesign TL;DR: San Francisco government decided to go with custom-designed, bespoke, artisanal public trash cans. Each can ended up coming in at around $20K. When, in fact, if you buy a typical run-of-the-mill public trash can that most other cities do, it would cost them less than $1000.

avree 1y ago
You are conflating two things with that story. The prototypes cost $20,000. The designed can cost $3,000. Higher than your "$1,000" can, but it also had a bunch of "features". If you've ever worked at a hardware company, you probably know that the price of DVT units, or any prototype, ends up being significantly higher than the production unit.
- 1024core 1y ago
  So you're saying the designed can cost 3X the COTS one. Similar idea to the story, no?

Exoristos 1y ago

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

silexia 1y ago

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

tclover 1y ago

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

ge96 1y ago

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

bgnn 1y ago

I see a lot of people saying this is due to lack of competition. I hate to break this to you but it isn't that. A lot of European countries thinking the competition will drive the costs down, including on the supply side, and liberalizing the market realized not long after that this did nothing to reduce the cost. More often than not it drove the cost up. The problem is that the public transportation is never truly free market, as they are always heavily subsidized. More companies relying on subsidies to do business doesn't change the fact. On the supply side, bus manufacturers have the same. US federal govrhas strict requirements to buy American made busses. I think NAFTA might be ok too, but not sure. In any case, what the US government paying for is manufacturing jobs and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Or let's put it another way. Those busses can be produced in China or Japan for much cheaper. But then you will let go of this industry, and have more dead towns and small cities without jobs.

balderdash 1y ago

They probably pay too much for everything - and in many cases that’s by design (e.g. ever increasing public sector pay packages). If municipalities had to disclose the deferred maintenance capex cost on infrastructure and capital assets, I’d hazard most places are in a pretty dicey situation (80 year old water or sewer systems that need replacing, aging buses, etc) - and towns saying they balanced the budget or in a good fiscal position is a joke.

sweeter 1y ago

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

iamcalledrob 1y ago

The article focuses on purchase price -- and buying from BYD in China will be a lot cheaper. But I'm curious of the downstream effects of forcing cities to buy local, even at a higher price. After all, that money will get taxed many times over and could potentially change the equation?

QuantumNoodle 1y ago

Whatever solution to increase competition and bring down prices - great. The solution should also either increase bus capacity and/or bus routes to more desirable locations so people would _want_ and _need_ to take the bus. Are 40 foot buses the right option when ridership is so low in the states? Europe has small van-like busses but more of them. Sure less people fit on one sitting, but routes are tighter, more frequent, and transferring between bus lines doesn't require going waaay out of the way to a hub to transfer. 40 ft busses are great once riders are dependant on it... Seems like a classic case of over optimization.

jagged-chisel 1y ago

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

bashmelek 1y ago

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

ksynwa 1y ago

This is true for every public utility vehicle. For example, firetrucks: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/fire-truck-prices-hit-2-million-us-firefighters-demand-an-antitrust-probe-2025-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... It's a feature of the economic setup.

xbmcuser 1y ago

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

rsynnott 1y ago

> Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each. Huh. TFI, the Irish transport authority, currently has a deal to pay 400 million euro for 800 electric buses, mostly double deckers (so a lot bigger than these ones). Diesel double deckers cost them significantly less (about 250-350k IIRC), but obviously cost more to operate. That's for custom jobs (in particular TFI has weird beliefs about what shape windscreens should be). I wonder if part of it is just that these US transit agencies are buying them on such a small scale; a state-level agency responsible for sourcing the buses might be more effective.

ainiriand 1y ago
But each State and County wants their say on what vehicles they want, and for sure a lot of them do not want those woke electric buses...
- rsynnott 1y ago
  So give them a choice of two or three.

ThinkBeat 1y ago

The biggest killer are all the specific changes each city decides they need. If a standard feature set could be achieved mass production would be easier to arrange. Perhaps with a module system to remove or add some subset of feature that are easily to adapt to it. The 80% of federal funding¹ should be based on a "universal common standard", and cities pay 20% plus the city pays 100% for various customisations they need. ¹ I have not made any effort to verify this data but it's in hte article. It seems more generous than the federal government tend to be.

m101 1y ago
Similar to another comment here: the principle agent issue here is the person designing the spec for busses is not the person paying for the buses. If it was the case then the market would settle on a common standard as everyone seeks the lowest price.

iamtheworstdev 1y ago

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

notmyjob 1y ago

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

BobbyTables2 1y ago

I’m all for mass transportation m, but city buses blocking a busy two-lane road for several minutes waiting at a stop has got to end. Even when not stopped, they do a pretty good job at impeding traffic. The bus system has one set of costs. But it has another set of external costs on the rest of society. In contrast, I’ve seen British short trains arrive + unload + load + depart in far less than 5 minutes total, and that involves a far greater number of passengers than a crawling bus. Yeah, trains require more infrastructure, but I think the public could grow to like them.

ranadomo 1y ago
Transit violence is not limited to outlier cases like the nyc immolation or Iryna's horrific slaughter. Women in particular may never feel safe on public transit and avoid it entirely at night and alone. Daily harassment, stalking, threats and verbal abuse are "facts of life" for the majority of female passengers in metro areas. They will all move up or out to safer environments and take their car or private transportation everywhere. Pretending like Americans are instinctually averse to public transit is an absurd contention when they've been behaviorally conditioned by the insanely dangerous environment and a justice system that works to inflict it upon them until they give up or die.

DudeOpotomus 1y ago

In many municipalities, it would be cheaper to run on demand van service for people than run busses. Not only would it get people to and from their actual homes and work, vans are cheap and readily available. Paying more drivers is cheaper than buying and maintaining multi million dollar busses that are empty a lot of the time. In most of CA, most homes are far from bus lines. Making their use prohibitive for all but those who must use them. I know they do something like this in LA. People love it.

kjkjadksj 1y ago
Metro micro doesn’t scale at all. It is still limited to pilot study areas. Cost per trip is absurd compared to traditional bussing. One of the stated goals of the next gen bus plan in LA was to get a bus stop in a 10 min walk of 85% of the workers in LA county and this was achieved. The real trouble with transit is people choose where they live based on car convenience rather than transit convenience. So they open an app and go “gee I can drive to work in 30 mins but I have to take two or three busses and three times the time on transit.” And write it off forever, rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work. The way LA county is developed is that there are apartments basically in every neighborhood anyhow without very strong neighborhood specific effects on pricing. Housing a little more neighborhood specific but that changes as townhomes and other sort of not-detached-sfh buying opportunities come to bear generally in neighborhoods with demand for a song compared to detached housing.
- rootusrootus 1y ago
  > rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work In many places I've lived, this optimization would need to be re-done every job change and you would probably need to move, because it's as much about where the job is as where your house is. The thing about optimizing for a good commute in a car is that you're way more likely to be at least average or better even if your job location changes.