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.
US cities pay too much for buses
271–280 of 590 posts
Re: US cities pay too much for buses
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: US cities pay too much for buses
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's even worse, I will use my healthcare just because it is free. I would feel like a moron not get my free physical, bloodwork and other labs every year. If it was $20 I wouldn't bother but its almost obligatory to take something "because its free". Once I learn something is free it is like I already own it, so now I don't get it if I take it, I lose it if I don't.
Preventative care is free because it saves a tremendous amount of money for the insurance company and physical and emotional hardship for yourself by catching bad things early.
Your view is a commonly-held one, and makes a lot of sense; unfortunately there is very little support for it. One data point to the contrary is the Oregon Health Care Study, which showed that 'free' preventative care increased healthcare spending, but did not improve lifespan or reduce long-term cost.
Re: US cities pay too much for buses
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It worked back then because labor was expensive, because unions were waning, but still strong in the 80's. If labor is expensive, you make sure to do it right once. Nowadays with spending power way down, it may in fact be more "efficient" to get something out quick, and have frequent repairs. If you hit the expensive failure... welp, just throw it out and make a new one.
I'm not sure that is the reason, honestly. Used to, the government could spend a TON of money with relatively little resistance. Even programs that did get a lot of resistance could still be done without worrying about the political capital of fighting people that were largely on your side.
At the federal level, this was somewhat easy to do, because the vast majority of government spending would go to domestic recipients. Yes, we were spending a lot, but local places would see and could celebrate in the results.
At some point, though, we switched to the idea that taxation is punitive. And we stopped taking pride in big things the government can do. Quite the contrary, people are still convinced the F22 is bad. Meanwhile, many of us still revere the SR-71 as a beautiful thing. (Which, I mean, it is.)
Re: US cities pay too much for buses
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Preventative care is free because it saves a tremendous amount of money for the insurance company and physical and emotional hardship for yourself by catching bad things early.
Your view is a commonly-held one, and makes a lot of sense; unfortunately there is very little support for it. One data point to the contrary is the Oregon Health Care Study, which showed that 'free' preventative care increased healthcare spending, but did not improve lifespan or reduce long-term cost.
I'm not sure they determined that it did not improve lifespans. Here's some snippets from the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experim...):
> On average, Medicaid coverage increased annual medical spending by approximately $1,172 relative to spending in the control group. The researchers looked at mortality rates, but they could not reach any conclusions because of the extremely low death rate of the general population of able-bodied Oregon adults aged 19 to 64.
> In the first year after the lottery, Medicaid coverage was associated with higher rates of health care use, a lower probability of having medical debts sent to a collection agency, and higher self-reported mental and physical health. In the 18 months following the lottery, researchers found that Medicaid increased emergency department visits.
> Approximately two years after the lottery, researchers found that Medicaid had no statistically significant impact on physical health measures, but "it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain."
Re: US cities pay too much for buses
#276This reminds me of the "trash can fiasco" that went down in San Fracnsico. 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.
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.
So you're saying the designed can cost 3X the COTS one. Similar idea to the story, no?
Re: US cities pay too much for buses
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
general rule of thumb is 5 passangers for a but to break even. Now a civic is a smaller car so it will be better, and you specified 3 passanges whes single occupant is by far more likely - even with those unrealistic assumption a typical bus will do well overall.
> general rule of thumb is 5 passangers for a but to break even. "Break even" how? A bus has a road footprint of about 15 cars (it's more than the physical bus length because it also occupies the road during stops and is less maneuverable). 15 cars have the occupancy of about 25 people. > even with those unrealistic assumption a typical bus will do well overall. Nope. Buses absolutely fail in efficiency. They pollute…
> A bus has a road footprint of about 15 cars
What's this supposed to mean? I can't even try to take it at face value, it's ridiculous.
In bumper to bumper traffic they might take up 2 cars worth of footprint. At higher speeds it's even less as the footprint of each vehicle equals "vehicle length + following distance". At 30km/h (8.3 m/s) and minimal 1s following distance, the "footprint" of a 5m long car is 13m, and the footprint of a 12m long bus is 20m. At highway speeds their footprint is almost equivalent to cars.
> it also occupies the road during stops
I've never seen a bus block a busy city road. Either way this is an easily solvable problem stemming from poor design and lack of investment and not some inherent issue with this mode of transportation.
> They pollute WAY more than cars
Citation?
Re: US cities pay too much for buses
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. And then the city government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to shut the tunnel down and make it light rail-only, forcing the buses up onto the surface and clogging up the street grid.
Given the choice between clogging up the city grid for car commuters, and clogging up the rail grid because buses are pushed to share rail lines, I'm going to pull the trigger on the first option, every day of the week. Clogging up the rail grid was somewhat acceptable when it was a few end-of-line terminal stops, but now those tunnels are in the middle of the rail network. A bus breaking down and blocking the tunnel…
It's not that pushing buses onto surface streets makes it worse for cars. It's that it makes it worse for buses, which then leads people to take cars instead, which makes things even worse.
Re: US cities pay too much for buses
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Preventative care is free because it saves a tremendous amount of money for the insurance company and physical and emotional hardship for yourself by catching bad things early.
Your view is a commonly-held one, and makes a lot of sense; unfortunately there is very little support for it. One data point to the contrary is the Oregon Health Care Study, which showed that 'free' preventative care increased healthcare spending, but did not improve lifespan or reduce long-term cost.
But it only looked at two year outcomes, yet you made a claim about long-term health and cost outcomes.
For example, it found that diagnoses and medication increased. If you are diagnosed with heart disease and you begin an intervention, you probably see no change in mortality in two years especially since it took decades for you to progress to that point in the first place.
Re: US cities pay too much for buses
#280One 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...