7 ms·

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

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.
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  All the contract stuff is too muddled to even consider debating online. I'd start with one HUGE obvious waste. Why don't the buses anywhere have some sort of uber style pickup. My point. I see countless buses running empty all the time through the day where I live outside of busy hours. It is so depressing to watch 3 empty busses pull up to an empty stop to not pick anyone up then do it again and again and again.. I was once told it cost something like $250+ every time an empty bus drives one direction on its empty route. And there are hundreds of busses that do this for hours each day. Just so in case someone is there they can be picked up. It seems like a dynamic system for determining where where people that need the bus are would be a massive saving. Or really just changing to a taxi style system only using buses during rush hours. I think some cities are actually experimenting with this. Someone is gonna come at me about the reliability scheduling of transport for underprividged. But they have never actually rode a bus route so they don't know that the buses are as reliably late as they are on time in 90% of cities. This change would likely improve scheduling for people that need it.
  - SpicyUme 1y ago
    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.
  - milesvp 1y ago
    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.
SpicyUme 1y ago
But a bus isn't just a bus, there are differences in what is needed in different cities. Some need heat, some need AC, some need both. In Utah there are buses that go up the canyons and they have gearboxes focused on climbing steep hills, while a bus in the valley might never need that ratio and can be optimized for efficiency on the flats. Seattle has buses with electric trolley lines above, and buses that were designed to go through the tunnel under downtown on battery power to avoid causing air quality issues in a confined space. https://bsky.app/profile/noahsbwilliams.com/post/3lx4hqvf5q22o https://bsky.app/profile/noahsbwilliams.com/post/3lx4hqvf5q2... Maybe SORTA wanted more customization on the interior of their buses? I'm not sure but in the last year I've been riding buses to work much more than before and I've been interested in the different seating configurations on buses from the same service and route. That shouldn't explain $8 million in differnce but I'm sure that semi custom work isn't cheap. A friend worked on airline interiors which might be reasonably analogous, I wonder what the cost for say Lufthansa seats/upholstery is vs Southwest?
- cenamus 1y ago
  But they all basically come with AC and heating? At least in basically any semi-modern bus I've ever been in in Europe. No matter if it's -20 or +35 celsius, as long as they turn the AC actually on it's tolerable. And we also have some mountains here, so there's some buses for that (still stock from the factory)
  - lazyasciiart 1y ago
    No, they certainly don’t all come with AC and heat.
    - decimalenough 1y ago
      I haven't seen a non-AC bus in ages, even in developing countries.
      - jacobgkau 1y ago
        My public school buses in a decent Midwestern suburb had no AC cooling as recently as a decade ago (only heat, since heat comes free with an engine). I wouldn't expect them to have AC cooling today. Buses you pay directly to ride may be a bit different, but I'd also expect AC isn't ubiquitous in those, or wasn't until very recently.
cwmma 1y ago
< This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. Off the top of my head, road salt, used in the northern areas of America to melt snow can cause corrosion of metal pieces on the underside of the bus. So Chicago or Boston might need to take that into account but Miami probably doesn't.
- bradfa 1y ago
  Yearly fluid film or woolwax treatment solves the rust concern in salt states. Roughly $1k/year/bus in operating expense. Schools do this to their buses already, it’s totally common.
closeparen 1y ago
San Francisco continues to use trolleybuses (powered by overhead wires) after the most of the country has moved onto hybrid and battery-electric vehicles because the energy demands from climbing hills are beyond at least the earlier generations of batteries.
bee_rider 1y ago
> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. I don’t know much about bus procurement, but I’m not sure I believe you just based on the fact that you’ve ridden on lots of busses. I’d expect that things like tire choice, engine, and transmission choices could be dependent on weather and geography. I’d expect any expensive differences to show up there, and I don’t really see how a passenger would gain much insight.
numpad0 1y ago
> Singapore has a very efficient, highly trained, highly educated, highly paid administrative staff, Or it's just literal economy of scale. 10 buses, 17 buses, vs 240, that difference changes economics completely. You will be buying 500 of headlights, little under 1k tyres and wheels, couple thousands of seats, etc. Those are all whole lot numbers. That will save tons of overheads.
- crote 1y ago
  Yes, but that's exactly the point the article is making: stop doing expensive one-off purchases! Rather than having 20 cities each buy their own set of 10 custom buses, have them place a shared order of 200 identical buses.
freeopinion 1y ago
Your excerpts don't divulge whether one of the bus manufacturers is required by law to pay health insurance, social security, and other labor costs. Are they required by law to treat the water from their cooling towers before they dump it in the river? Do they have to pay a 50% tariff on imported parts? I'm sure there is a lot of slop in different purchasing departments. They can probably all tighten things up. But there are legitimate reasons for one product to cost more than its twin. The U.S. should not allow twin products to be sold on the same shelf if one was not manufactured under the same rules as the domestic product. If all three of these products played under the same rules, then we can point fingers. Without that you are just ridiculing the company who knowingly takes a hit for purchasing from responsible vendors. If that is what you are doing, shame on you.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- maxerickson 1y ago
  The 2 bus contracts were with the same manufacturer, which is headquartered in California.
  - freeopinion 1y ago
    Thank you. That's informative. What about the third contract?
    - maxerickson 1y ago
      The difference between the North American buses is larger than the difference between the cheaper NA bus and the Singapore buses. Is your theory that they treat half the plant poorly?
  - inferiorhuman 1y ago
    The 2 bus contracts were with the same manufacturer, which is headquartered in California. The wikipedia entry for SORTA claims that in 2024 they took delivery of 19 buses: 7 diesel-electric hybrid and 12 diesel. They also list four more hybrid coaches on order. Presumably some or all of these are the 2023 order. RTD's web site shows far more than 10 buses delivered in 2023 and nothing beyond that. They talk a bit about diesel hybrids but from what I can tell RTD does not operate any 40 ft hybrids. Unsure what to say about the Bloomberg article but it smells like bullshit to me. Regardless, hybrid drivetrains will increase the unit cost significantly.
russdill 1y ago
A very common problem in Metro Phoenix involves government or corporate procurement. They just purchase whatever is used everywhere else and end up with something that lasts well under is rated life time or doesn't even make it though a single summer.
- inferiorhuman 1y ago
  Federal funds for transit vehicles come with an expected lifetime.
inferiorhuman 1y ago
The issue here appears to be: Why is SORTA's purchasing so incompetent that they are buying 17 busses for the price of 35? They are over double the price of RTD. As far as I can tell the author is making a bad faith argument. SORTA's purchase was about one third diesel-electric hybrids, while RTD's was almost certainly diesel only. AFAICT the RTD buses don't have air conditioning while the SORTA buses do. SG vs the US? Economies of scale, simpler drivetrains (hybrid vs non), and less expensive smog equipment.
gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. It definitely depends. The traditional yellow school buses here (Canada) use diesel, so they need things like glow plugs [0] and block heaters [1] to be able to run in the winter. But even that only helps so much, so when the nighttime lows are below –40°C, they cancel the busses since they know that they won't run. Most of the city busses here use natural gas, and they're considerably more reliable in the cold weather but if they're parked for too long on a really cold day (even while running), the brakes will freeze up and they won't be able to move [2]. Similarly, the busses need a fairly powerful heating system, since it's tricky to heat a large space when it's really cold and the front door is open half the time. But conversely, most of the busses have no A/C. Adding glow plugs, and block heaters, and brake dryers shouldn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a more reliable natural gas bus might be double the price of an unreliable diesel one. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glow_plug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glow_plug [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_brake_(road_vehicle)#Disadvantages:~:text=Defective%20air%20dryers%20lead%20to%20ice%20in%20the%20air%2Dbrake%20system%20in%20cold%20locations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_brake_(road_vehicle)#Disad...
4MOAisgoodenuf 1y ago
> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. That’s because your job was passenger. From the drivers perspective: configuration should absolutely match the terrain and the expected route. For example: an Allison AT545 transmission without a lockup torque converter will be hell in the mountain and hill climbs of Colorado, possibly even dangerous. Whereas it may serve perfectly fine in Nebraska.
kmeisthax 1y ago
[dead]
rsynnott 1y ago
> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. Hmm, not sure about that. I live in Dublin, which is, generally, very flat, and where the temperature rarely goes far outside the 0 to 20 degrees C range. The buses can be fairly unpleasant on rare very hot days (no air conditioning), the electric ones can be unpleasantly cold on rare extremely cold days (heating not specced for it; this isn't an issue for the diesel ones as those produce so much waste heat anyway), and when I was a kid I lived in one of the few hilly parts of Dublin, and bus breakdowns going uphill were somewhat common (in fairness I think this is less of a thing now). Geography absolutely matters; Dublin's buses would be basically unusable anywhere very hot or cold. There's other stuff, too. Buses here are almost always double-decker, but one specific new bus route requires single-decker buses, because the double-deckers won't fit under some of the older railway bridges. This will also require modifications to some road infra, which won't currently take long buses (to have a decent capacity single-deckers need to be longer; the single-deckers will be about 13m long vs 11m for the normal buses). Some cities use articulated buses; those wouldn't work here at all.
saalweachter 1y ago
> It could be cheaper in the long run to have more tax collection and expenditure at the local level, and not rely as much on federal grants. There's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma here in that even if a city decides to go this route, their citizens are still paying Federal taxes and contributing to the programs used to buy busses. So you're not going to save your citizens any money unless everyone stops using the programs. From an incremental standpoint, where everyone has already defected, you want your local governments to be grabbing every grant they can.

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.

citizenpaul 1y ago
All the contract stuff is too muddled to even consider debating online. I'd start with one HUGE obvious waste. Why don't the buses anywhere have some sort of uber style pickup. My point. I see countless buses running empty all the time through the day where I live outside of busy hours. It is so depressing to watch 3 empty busses pull up to an empty stop to not pick anyone up then do it again and again and again.. I was once told it cost something like $250+ every time an empty bus drives one direction on its empty route. And there are hundreds of busses that do this for hours each day. Just so in case someone is there they can be picked up. It seems like a dynamic system for determining where where people that need the bus are would be a massive saving. Or really just changing to a taxi style system only using buses during rush hours. I think some cities are actually experimenting with this. Someone is gonna come at me about the reliability scheduling of transport for underprividged. But they have never actually rode a bus route so they don't know that the buses are as reliably late as they are on time in 90% of cities. This change would likely improve scheduling for people that need it.
- SpicyUme 1y ago
  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.
- milesvp 1y ago
  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.

SpicyUme 1y ago

But a bus isn't just a bus, there are differences in what is needed in different cities. Some need heat, some need AC, some need both. In Utah there are buses that go up the canyons and they have gearboxes focused on climbing steep hills, while a bus in the valley might never need that ratio and can be optimized for efficiency on the flats. Seattle has buses with electric trolley lines above, and buses that were designed to go through the tunnel under downtown on battery power to avoid causing air quality issues in a confined space. https://bsky.app/profile/noahsbwilliams.com/post/3lx4hqvf5q22o https://bsky.app/profile/noahsbwilliams.com/post/3lx4hqvf5q2... Maybe SORTA wanted more customization on the interior of their buses? I'm not sure but in the last year I've been riding buses to work much more than before and I've been interested in the different seating configurations on buses from the same service and route. That shouldn't explain $8 million in differnce but I'm sure that semi custom work isn't cheap. A friend worked on airline interiors which might be reasonably analogous, I wonder what the cost for say Lufthansa seats/upholstery is vs Southwest?

cenamus 1y ago
But they all basically come with AC and heating? At least in basically any semi-modern bus I've ever been in in Europe. No matter if it's -20 or +35 celsius, as long as they turn the AC actually on it's tolerable. And we also have some mountains here, so there's some buses for that (still stock from the factory)
- lazyasciiart 1y ago
  No, they certainly don’t all come with AC and heat.
  - decimalenough 1y ago
    I haven't seen a non-AC bus in ages, even in developing countries.
    - jacobgkau 1y ago
      My public school buses in a decent Midwestern suburb had no AC cooling as recently as a decade ago (only heat, since heat comes free with an engine). I wouldn't expect them to have AC cooling today. Buses you pay directly to ride may be a bit different, but I'd also expect AC isn't ubiquitous in those, or wasn't until very recently.

cwmma 1y ago

< This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. Off the top of my head, road salt, used in the northern areas of America to melt snow can cause corrosion of metal pieces on the underside of the bus. So Chicago or Boston might need to take that into account but Miami probably doesn't.

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

closeparen 1y ago

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

bee_rider 1y ago

> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. I don’t know much about bus procurement, but I’m not sure I believe you just based on the fact that you’ve ridden on lots of busses. I’d expect that things like tire choice, engine, and transmission choices could be dependent on weather and geography. I’d expect any expensive differences to show up there, and I don’t really see how a passenger would gain much insight.

numpad0 1y ago

> Singapore has a very efficient, highly trained, highly educated, highly paid administrative staff, Or it's just literal economy of scale. 10 buses, 17 buses, vs 240, that difference changes economics completely. You will be buying 500 of headlights, little under 1k tyres and wheels, couple thousands of seats, etc. Those are all whole lot numbers. That will save tons of overheads.

crote 1y ago
Yes, but that's exactly the point the article is making: stop doing expensive one-off purchases! Rather than having 20 cities each buy their own set of 10 custom buses, have them place a shared order of 200 identical buses.

freeopinion 1y ago

Your excerpts don't divulge whether one of the bus manufacturers is required by law to pay health insurance, social security, and other labor costs. Are they required by law to treat the water from their cooling towers before they dump it in the river? Do they have to pay a 50% tariff on imported parts? I'm sure there is a lot of slop in different purchasing departments. They can probably all tighten things up. But there are legitimate reasons for one product to cost more than its twin. The U.S. should not allow twin products to be sold on the same shelf if one was not manufactured under the same rules as the domestic product. If all three of these products played under the same rules, then we can point fingers. Without that you are just ridiculing the company who knowingly takes a hit for purchasing from responsible vendors. If that is what you are doing, shame on you.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
maxerickson 1y ago
The 2 bus contracts were with the same manufacturer, which is headquartered in California.
- freeopinion 1y ago
  Thank you. That's informative. What about the third contract?
  - maxerickson 1y ago
    The difference between the North American buses is larger than the difference between the cheaper NA bus and the Singapore buses. Is your theory that they treat half the plant poorly?
- inferiorhuman 1y ago
  The 2 bus contracts were with the same manufacturer, which is headquartered in California. The wikipedia entry for SORTA claims that in 2024 they took delivery of 19 buses: 7 diesel-electric hybrid and 12 diesel. They also list four more hybrid coaches on order. Presumably some or all of these are the 2023 order. RTD's web site shows far more than 10 buses delivered in 2023 and nothing beyond that. They talk a bit about diesel hybrids but from what I can tell RTD does not operate any 40 ft hybrids. Unsure what to say about the Bloomberg article but it smells like bullshit to me. Regardless, hybrid drivetrains will increase the unit cost significantly.

russdill 1y ago

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

inferiorhuman 1y ago
Federal funds for transit vehicles come with an expected lifetime.

inferiorhuman 1y ago

The issue here appears to be: Why is SORTA's purchasing so incompetent that they are buying 17 busses for the price of 35? They are over double the price of RTD. As far as I can tell the author is making a bad faith argument. SORTA's purchase was about one third diesel-electric hybrids, while RTD's was almost certainly diesel only. AFAICT the RTD buses don't have air conditioning while the SORTA buses do. SG vs the US? Economies of scale, simpler drivetrains (hybrid vs non), and less expensive smog equipment.

gucci-on-fleek 1y ago

> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. It definitely depends. The traditional yellow school buses here (Canada) use diesel, so they need things like glow plugs [0] and block heaters [1] to be able to run in the winter. But even that only helps so much, so when the nighttime lows are below –40°C, they cancel the busses since they know that they won't run. Most of the city busses here use natural gas, and they're considerably more reliable in the cold weather but if they're parked for too long on a really cold day (even while running), the brakes will freeze up and they won't be able to move [2]. Similarly, the busses need a fairly powerful heating system, since it's tricky to heat a large space when it's really cold and the front door is open half the time. But conversely, most of the busses have no A/C. Adding glow plugs, and block heaters, and brake dryers shouldn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a more reliable natural gas bus might be double the price of an unreliable diesel one. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glow_plug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glow_plug [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_brake_(road_vehicle)#Disadvantages:~:text=Defective%20air%20dryers%20lead%20to%20ice%20in%20the%20air%2Dbrake%20system%20in%20cold%20locations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_brake_(road_vehicle)#Disad...

4MOAisgoodenuf 1y ago

> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. That’s because your job was passenger. From the drivers perspective: configuration should absolutely match the terrain and the expected route. For example: an Allison AT545 transmission without a lockup torque converter will be hell in the mountain and hill climbs of Colorado, possibly even dangerous. Whereas it may serve perfectly fine in Nebraska.

kmeisthax 1y ago

[dead]

rsynnott 1y ago

> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate. Hmm, not sure about that. I live in Dublin, which is, generally, very flat, and where the temperature rarely goes far outside the 0 to 20 degrees C range. The buses can be fairly unpleasant on rare very hot days (no air conditioning), the electric ones can be unpleasantly cold on rare extremely cold days (heating not specced for it; this isn't an issue for the diesel ones as those produce so much waste heat anyway), and when I was a kid I lived in one of the few hilly parts of Dublin, and bus breakdowns going uphill were somewhat common (in fairness I think this is less of a thing now). Geography absolutely matters; Dublin's buses would be basically unusable anywhere very hot or cold. There's other stuff, too. Buses here are almost always double-decker, but one specific new bus route requires single-decker buses, because the double-deckers won't fit under some of the older railway bridges. This will also require modifications to some road infra, which won't currently take long buses (to have a decent capacity single-deckers need to be longer; the single-deckers will be about 13m long vs 11m for the normal buses). Some cities use articulated buses; those wouldn't work here at all.

saalweachter 1y ago

> It could be cheaper in the long run to have more tax collection and expenditure at the local level, and not rely as much on federal grants. There's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma here in that even if a city decides to go this route, their citizens are still paying Federal taxes and contributing to the programs used to buy busses. So you're not going to save your citizens any money unless everyone stops using the programs. From an incremental standpoint, where everyone has already defected, you want your local governments to be grabbing every grant they can.