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US cities pay too much for buses

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Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#541

Post by devsda »

simianwords wrote: post #527
mellow_observer wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting line of thought. How would you say the US/west are able to bypass this problem more effectively?

No matter how poorly one thinks of westerners and their leaders, it is clear that in general they can look beyond themselves and their immediate surroundings when optimising their impact. The same cannot be said about Indians and other poor people from poor countries. Their optimisation lies solely on themselves or immediate family. This has consequences at every level and even at the political level.

It is just the case that the west and its leaders have had the luxury of choice and have only seen relative poverty but not absolute poverty for various reasons.

When your are poor and basic necessities are difficult to meet, its natural to optimize for self and not care about the big picture.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#542

Post by AnthonyMouse »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #484
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a mechanism for some governments to cheat, because medicine is R&D-intensive. Suppose that to devise some treatment for 10 million people worldwide, it costs a billion dollars once for R&D, i.e. $100 each, and then $10 more per person to actually manufacture it. So the average person will have to pay no less than $110. Then some countries say "that costs you $10 to manufacture, we won't pay more than $40" a…

Yeah that’s the story people tell. On the other hand, I need to take a brand name version of a medicine that was patented in the early 20th century, and in the US the co-pay alone costs me $200/mo or more (not including what insurance pays) while I can buy it from Canada for $30 without insurance. (The generics cost a similar amount, but don’t work as well due to bioavailability issues.) So while I appreciate the ide…

The trouble is that it's both things at the same time. Countries that fix prices are paying less than their share of the R&D and the US market has bad regulations that unnecessarily limit competition.

The situation you're describing can happen in one of two ways. The first is that the more bioavailable version wasn't patented in the early 20th century, only the less bioavailable version, and then the version you like is still under patent and that's exactly what's supposed to happen. They get to charge a lot until the patent expires as the incentive to invent the more bioavailable version to begin with, and then Canada isn't paying their share and the US will be paying less when the patent expires, and if you don't like what they're charging then you can use the old version until the patent expires.

The second is that nobody is making a generic of the more bioavailable version even though the patent is expired. The US could and ought to fix that by remediating whatever regulation is impeding other companies from entering the market even though they should be able to. But then we're into a different problem because it can't be other countries not paying their share for something still under patent if it isn't still under patent.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#543

Post by cyberax »

zbentley wrote: post #495
cyberax wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that they don't cost less. And are more inconvenient, especially if you can't move a lot. And they're slower, and will require you to make a transfer. And don't run at night. But otherwise,yeah. Sure.

Slower? In top speed maybe, but not in time-to-destination (or, given congested streets, average speed). Trains “require” you to make a transfer? Depends on your city, I guess; many train systems are hub-and-spoke-like enough (and dense enough) that common commutes don’t require any transfers. Also, I’m curious whether bus-centric mass transit requires more or fewer transfers than train-centric or hybrid.

> Slower? In top speed maybe, but not in time-to-destination (or, given congested streets, average speed).

Yep. Transit is ALWAYS slower on average compared to cars. It is faster only in a very narrow set of circumstances.

Try an experiment: drop 10 random points inside a city, and plot routes between them for cars and transit (you can use Google Maps API). Transit will be on average 2-3 times slower, even in the rush hour.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#544

Post by AnthonyMouse »

airstrike wrote: post #501
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, a great majority of problems in the US fundamentally boils down to people looking for markets and money where there aren’t any. Your examples are mostly things where there are, though, e.g.: > rising healthcare costs (what is the right price to pay for saving a child’s life, for example? Culturally, it’s basically unlimited!) This is confusing value with cost. If you had to pay a million dollars to save a ch…

I think you have the cars issue backwards

I don't think I do. Are you going to run a bus every 15 minutes down a road that would have one passenger an hour? Mass transit isn't viable at the density of the suburbs but building higher density there is banned.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#545

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #499
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It takes more than just misaligned incentives to get a banking crisis -- you have to have structural corruption preventing the transfer of the loss gradient back to the "misaligned" decision makers. Nah, you can do it just on the basis of information asymmetries. Banks can sell mortgages. People think buying mortgages is safe, because banks don't loan money to people they don't think can pay it back, and even if th…

Let me tell you something about people... You can sit them down and explain precisely why buying something, like a new car, is a bad financial decision and that they cannot afford it anyway, and then watch them go buy it anyway. To the point where I have seen people laugh about how dumb of an idea it is, while in the act of doing it. The "I wish someone explained to me..." that comes later when it all falls apart is…

> You can sit them down and explain precisely why buying something, like a new car, is a bad financial decision and that they cannot afford it anyway, and then watch them go buy it anyway. To the point where I have seen people laugh about how dumb of an idea it is, while in the act of doing it.

And this is actually fine because it comes with its own integrated stupidity penalty. We only need the government to impose a penalty if the person who needs the disincentive when making a decision is different than the person being affected by it.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#546

Post by AnthonyMouse »

aloha2436 wrote: post #483
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It takes more than just misaligned incentives to get a banking crisis -- you have to have structural corruption preventing the transfer of the loss gradient back to the "misaligned" decision makers. Nah, you can do it just on the basis of information asymmetries. Banks can sell mortgages. People think buying mortgages is safe, because banks don't loan money to people they don't think can pay it back, and even if th…

> and people still buy them You skip over a very important step here, where people keep buying the MBSes because the ratings agencies are knowingly rating the securities incorrectly. If that didn't happen, the market would be too small to blow up in the way that it did, all of the safe money can't invest if the MBSes aren't AAA. It's not that no-one noticed in time, it's that the people responsible for noticing were…

It's not obvious that this was corruption though.

What they were doing was, they'd take a bucket of high risk mortgages and apply a contract to them to retroactively sort them. So, if you bought the 30th percentile of the bucket and then anything more than 70% of the people in the bucket paid their mortgages you would get paid, and if fewer than that did then you wouldn't.

Then they were rating the highest percentiles in the bucket as AAA because even for borrowers with bad credit, the probability that such a high percentage of them would default was considered very low. Even for people with bad credit, default rates are usually only something like 10%.

But that doesn't work out if you haven't noticed that banks have stopped caring about the default rate when issuing mortgages.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#547

Post by cyberax »

dns_snek wrote: post #465
cyberax wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's this supposed to mean? A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning. You can verify by looking at the maximum lane throughput in vehicles per hour. > At higher speeds it's even less as the footprint of each vehicle equals "vehicle length + following distance". The commercial speed of buses in cities is around 10-15 mph. There are no "higher spee…

> A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning. I've never heard anything of the sort and I don't believe it at face value - that's roughly the length of a football field. Perhaps this is true in a specific area with terrible bus infrastructure but where I live, and the majority of places where I've been, bus stops are off the main road so they never blo…

> I've never heard anything of the sort and I don't believe it at face value

Perhaps you should stop listening to propaganda from the ubranists and start digging past the images of happy smiling cyclists riding the bike lanes in perfect weather with the sun shining on them?

> that's roughly the length of a football field.

Yep. That's how bad buses are. Want another fun fact? One bus does the same amount of road damage as 1000-5000 cars. If you have a bus lane, look at it and you'll see that it is much more damaged compared to the nearby lanes, even though it carries far fewer vehicles.

> As I said, a consequence of bad infrastructure, not an inherent flaw of this mode of transportation.

Yes. A well-designed city like Houston will have enough road space so that buses are do not affect the traffic disproportionately. But then it means that such a city does not _need_ buses.

> This table lists "Coach (bus)" at 27g CO2e/passenger-km

It's a UK term for long-distance buses. Yes, they are indeed more efficient than cars. If you can get a bus to drive at freeway speeds without frequent stops, then it becomes extremely efficient.

> Additionally, carbon footprint is one small part of pollution and arguably it's not even the most important one. Ultrafine particles, PM2.5, and noise pollution matter just as much to the local population.

Ok. Let's talk about PM25. If we're talking about the _brake_ _dust_ then buses are absolutely the worst. They emit way more dust per passenger. But I don't believe that this is a problem long-term, EVs barely use frictional brakes and future EV buses should also be able to mitigate the brake wear.

For _tire_ wear, it's more complex. There are no good studies of tire wear that control for the average speed. In most studies, tire wear is simply calculated by weighing the tires and dividing the lost mass by the number of miles traveled. A few studies that tried to measure the direct particulate emissions near highway exits produced results with error bars that make them useless.

Here's a nice overview: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-11/documents/42...

Noise pollution is a solved problem, btw. EVs are now required to make _artificial_ noise because they are so quiet. Ditto for brake dust, regenerative braking takes care of that.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#548

Post by coryrc »

rsynnott wrote: post #461
PaulHoule wrote: post #29

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 wr…

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

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

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#549

Post by matthewdgreen »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #542
matthewdgreen wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that’s the story people tell. On the other hand, I need to take a brand name version of a medicine that was patented in the early 20th century, and in the US the co-pay alone costs me $200/mo or more (not including what insurance pays) while I can buy it from Canada for $30 without insurance. (The generics cost a similar amount, but don’t work as well due to bioavailability issues.) So while I appreciate the ide…

The trouble is that it's both things at the same time. Countries that fix prices are paying less than their share of the R&D and the US market has bad regulations that unnecessarily limit competition. The situation you're describing can happen in one of two ways. The first is that the more bioavailable version wasn't patented in the early 20th century, only the less bioavailable version, and then the version you like…

>The second is that nobody is making a generic of the more bioavailable version even though the patent is expired.

I've been taking this drug since 1995 and the brand-name version has been in production (in its current format) since 1938. I don't think there have been any substantial improvements in the formulation in decades (as evidenced by my dosage, at least.) It certainly isn't expensive due to patents.

What's happening here is that in the US generic alternatives are supposed to demonstrate bioequivalence (meaning the same bioavailability), but the standards are lax and not well-enforced. Insurance formularies aren't going to spring for a brand-name drug formulation that costs 10x when the government has certified the cheap generic as bioequivalent. Manufacturers of the unpatented (but more bioavailable) brand-name drugs know that in reality some subset of their patients will need their formulation to keep blood levels stable, which means that in the US they can crank their prices way up and soak a bunch of sick people. In Canada they can't do this. Nothing about this is really defensible.

Which brings me back to the larger issue. High US drug prices can be due to both (1) recouping R&D costs and (2) greed, but the greed is enough to render our current system unworkable. You can't just assign manufacturers a monopoly and the right to charge whatever they want, and expect that they won't abuse this to soak desperate sick people with prices far in excess of their costs (as they are clearly doing.) So yes, you can point to the cost of R&D as one reason we should all (globally) pay more for some drugs, but you can't really use the need for R&D to justify the US system, which is inefficient and dangerous.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#550

Post by zarathustreal »

devsda wrote: post #541
simianwords wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter how poorly one thinks of westerners and their leaders, it is clear that in general they can look beyond themselves and their immediate surroundings when optimising their impact. The same cannot be said about Indians and other poor people from poor countries. Their optimisation lies solely on themselves or immediate family. This has consequences at every level and even at the political level.

It is just the case that the west and its leaders have had the luxury of choice and have only seen relative poverty but not absolute poverty for various reasons. When your are poor and basic necessities are difficult to meet, its natural to optimize for self and not care about the big picture.

This may explain the phenomenon but it certainly doesn’t excuse it - just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s smart or morally correct
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