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US cities pay too much for buses

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Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#101

Post by brailsafe »

bluGill wrote: post #63

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 b…

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

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

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#102

Post by paddy_m »

xethos wrote: post #74
myrmidon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't think there is any future for them longer term (>10y). Long distance, diesel vehicles might hold out for a bit longer than a decade, but the situation looks kinda inevitable even there to me. CO2 wise, electrifying a bus like this should pay off much quicker than replacing individual vehicles, because utilization is higher (not a lot of people drive 12h a day).

Even more damning, diesel is objectively, inarguably more expensive to run, costing more than four times as much as [Vancouver's] battery-electric busses in fuel/electricity. Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.

citation needed.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#103

Post by lenerdenator »

PaulHoule wrote: post #37
mschuster91 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 un…

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. Hav…

> If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as the private sector people are going to turn against the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.

Given the encroachment of enshittification on the private sector, I'm not sure it's any more efficient than the public sector on the whole.

And in the cases where it is more efficient, that's because there's either less at stake, or people care less. I don't care what Jim at Jim's Quik Lube does with my money after I pay him for an oil change. I do care what the Feds do with my tax dollars after I file my return, and so does everyone else, so we create regulations and policies to keep government agents from blowing taxpayer dollars. Or, at least, we used to.

Now, we've bought into this "the private sector is always more efficient" BS and put a private sector guy in charge, and it's a disaster. I don't want the mechanisms of the state being treated like a company where the guy in charge has his name on the building and always gets what he wants, because the mechanisms of the state are that of force. People get arrested, assaulted, imprisoned, and killed. It has to be more deliberate and take longer.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#104

Post by rootusrootus »

isthispermanent wrote: post #89

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.

> 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?

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#105

Post by kjkjadksj »

jmyeet wrote: post #27

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…

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

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#106

Post by paddy_m »

mschuster91 wrote: post #23
mrits wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Busses are loud, but not nearly as load and polluting as cars in aggregate

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#107

Post by mcflubbins »

bluGill wrote: post #63

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 b…

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

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#108

Post by crazygringo »

stackskipton wrote: post #95
crazygringo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> still paying for custom paint schemes or colors Because you need to be able to recognize from a distance, hey that's a city bus. Not a charter bus. Not a school bus. Not a long distance bus. And buses aren't usually wrapped with advertising. It's usually just a banner on the sides below the windows. Some ad campaigns pay much more money to extend it over the windows with that mesh material. But that's generally a s…

>Because you need to be able to recognize from a distance, hey that's a city bus. Sure, but fix here seems to be that DOT Regulations state that transit buses are painted "Lime Green" (example) and other companies should not use said color. People would quickly learn that Lime Green = transit bus in same way School Bus Yellow means school bus.

People already recognize their city bus colors just fine.

I don't see any reason why it would need to be standardized to the same color in every city nationwide.

School buses are the only ones that do that because it's a safety issue as opposed to a convenience isuse.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#109

Post by conductr »

crazygringo wrote: post #43
SoftTalker wrote: post #4

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

> still paying for custom paint schemes or colors Because you need to be able to recognize from a distance, hey that's a city bus. Not a charter bus. Not a school bus. Not a long distance bus. And buses aren't usually wrapped with advertising. It's usually just a banner on the sides below the windows. Some ad campaigns pay much more money to extend it over the windows with that mesh material. But that's generally a s…

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

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#110

Post by jvanderbot »

rootusrootus wrote: post #104
isthispermanent wrote: post #89

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.

> 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?

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.

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