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US cities pay too much for buses

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Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#241

Post by Johnny555 »

citizenpaul wrote: post #170
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Because buses are shared and follow a fixed-route and can't support an on-demand model. It may take a bus over an hour to complete the entire route.

Would you rather have to call for a bus that might take an hour (or might take 2 minutes) to get to your stop when you call it, or would you like to know that it comes at 4:45, 5:45 and 6:45 so you can plan ahead to know when to get to your stop.

(failing to run on schedule is a separate issue, but on-demand rides won't solve that). In cities, one solution to that problem is to run at such frequent headways that a late bus doesn't matter -- when I lived in SF, I had 2 busy bus routes that could take me to work, during peak hours a bus ran every 6 minutes, so even if they weren't on schedule I didn't care since I knew another would be along soon.

If you want me to ride the bus to work every morning and home every evening, you still have to have buses in mid-day so I can go home early if I need to. Even if those buses are mostly empty.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#242

Post by pkaye »

wolrah wrote: post #208
pkaye wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USPS is an US federal agency. At one time it even had a cabinet level position though not so any more. Its not private like in most countries. At the scale they buy these vehicles, it probably makes sense to get a custom one. Even Amazon has custom EVs built for them.

> Even Amazon has custom EVs built for them. Eh, sort of. Amazon partnered with Rivian to help design the EDV and had an initial exclusivity agreement as long as they ordered a certain number of them, but this agreement has since been terminated so anyone can buy them now. The USPS actually tested one in early 2024.

Its not clear what your point is? Both USPS and Amazon got heavily customized vehicles made for them. In the US the USPS is a government agency so any kind of government contracts get heavily securitized by the public but nobody cares what trucks Fedex and Amazon buy just like in countries where the mail service is privatized.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#243

Post by myrmidon »

mschuster91 wrote: post #100
myrmidon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this. You are basically asking taxpayers to fund an uncompetitive (i.e. wasteful) local industry. I think that's justifiable when you have high local unemployment (making the thing a job program, really), or when you really need the industry for strategic reasons (food and weapon manufacturing), but when that is not the case, doing this raises labor costs in general and hurts your actually useful and…

The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank. A big ass diesel engine and literal tons of steel. And in war time, you can convert the bus and truck manufacturing facilities into making tanks and airplanes. That is why even something as manufacturing cars, trucks and airplanes is vital to be resilient. And in addition, it's bad enough how much of a grip China has on our…

> The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank.

I can see your point, but I'm not buying this argument for multiple reasons.

First, if you do blanket-protectionism like this, the actual strategic gain per "wasted" tax-dollar is abysmal. You could have just bought those singaporean busses, and spent the money on skunkworks and lithium mine subsidies instead if you actually needed that resilience and military capability.

But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What kind of war are you even anticipating where you would need massively scaled up tank production of all things? The US, currently, could fight an offensive land war against the whole continent pretty much (regardless of foreign support), and for anything else tank production capabilities are more than sufficient.

Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks.

> we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!

100% agree with that, but I think this is a (tax) policy failure most of all: my take is that in a capitalist society capital inevitably accumulates at the top, and regulatory backpressure (progressive taxation and antitrust law) is needed to keep the wealth/income distribution somewhat stable; the US has been shitting the bed in that regard for more than half a century now with predictable outcomes for wealth/income distribution (similar for other industrialized nations). Redistribution/balancing dynamics ("poor people getting paid for labor") are also getting weaker because unskilled labor lost lots of relative value.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#244

Post by SoftTalker »

uxp100 wrote: post #20
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.

My experience is tainted by the fact that the battery electric busses are new and the diesel busses are (comparatively) old, but our battery electric busses are far more comfortable to ride. Diesels are uh, jerky. Maybe the drivers fault, but that’s how it is.

It's probably more the brakes than the engine. Diesel engines don't provide much of an engine braking effect (unless fitted with additional mechanisms a/k/a "Jake Brake" to provide this) so the vehicles use friction brakes any time they need to slow down, which can be jerky especially with air brakes. Electric buses would have regenerative braking which is probably smoother.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#245

Post by phinnaeus »

SoftTalker wrote: post #230
wat10000 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since the route is fixed, maybe we could install guides rather than needing a complicated steering mechanism. Then replace inefficient tires with much more efficient metal wheels rolling on the guides....

And then we need to make a change to the route.... oops.

No we don’t. Put another one in if need arises.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#246

Post by Spooky23 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #216
Spooky23 wrote: post #111

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

There are about as many concrete trucks as there are fire trucks in the US (and like fire trucks some of the fleet is purpose built and some of the fleet is specialty bodies on normal-ish trucks) and they don't have comparable problems with PE buying the manufacturing up. I think there's more to it than just evil PE

I’m on a city e&a board. A couple of PE groups have rolled up the remaining fire truck manufacturers. 3 companies own 75% of the market. This is a well known issue… Google away and there’s lots to read about. I know nothing about cement mixers.

A rig that was $500k in 2010 is $2-2.5M now. That’s “cheap” —- volunteer fire companies tend to pimp up the trucks (usually they are paid via grant), cities are cheap on capital spend.

It’s a squeeze play as if you don’t keep the trucks up to date with modern gear, insurers will raise homeowners premiums. Bad look for the mayor.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#248

Post by numpad0 »

ecshafer wrote: post #133

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 hav…

> 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.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#249

Post by samdoesnothing »

littlestymaar wrote: post #239
frollogaston wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's important info. Also such a rule suggests that health insurance isn't a competitive market.

There's no such thing as a “competitive market” in the real world.

Yes there is.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#250

Post by decimalenough »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #221
cenamus wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they all basically come with AC and heating? At least in basically any semi-modern bus I've ever been in in Europe. No matter if it's -20 or +35 celsius, as long as they turn the AC actually on it's tolerable. And we also have some mountains here, so there's some buses for that (still stock from the factory)

No, they certainly don’t all come with AC and heat.

I haven't seen a non-AC bus in ages, even in developing countries.
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