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US cities pay too much for buses

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Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#291

Post by rfrey »

gosub100 wrote: post #160
rfrey wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming this on the amorphous "left" is extraordinary, when offshoring has been a 40 year project of corporate America and "shareholder returns at any cost". A neoliberal global order has been the traditional Republican platform.

The left serves corporations at least as much as it claims to represent the people. That is why they are blamed.

This is confusing. If I accept your statement, then it seems:

1) The democrats hypocritically supports offshoring while claiming to support workers

2) The republicans explicitly (prior to Trump, but MAGA is not very similar to traditional Republicans) support corporations and offshoring as a mechanism for increased profits

And so we blame "the left"?

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#292

Post by burkaman »

esafak wrote: post #93
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'm hearing you say we should have self-driving buses... which is feasible since their route is fixed.

It is absolutely not feasible (yet), most of the job of the bus driver is knowing when to break the "rules", because someone is parked in the bus stop, or traffic is backed up so it make sense to stop a bit before the stop to let people off, or when to stop for longer than usual because someone needs to use the bike rack on the front, or when to use the bus kneeling feature because someone with mobility issues needs to get on or off, or when to skip a stop because your bus is too full and there's another right behind you, etc.

This is ignoring payment issues (hopefully it would be free anyway), answering riders' questions, being nice and letting someone off halfway between stops because it's 2am and pouring and they're the only one on the bus, and so on. I guess the general theme is that unlike Waymo where everything is ordered and planned out ahead of time and the car just needs to go from A to B, a self-driving bus will need to be constantly updating its plan in real time based on the conditions outside and what people on the bus need. It's not like a train where it can always stop in the exact same place and open the doors for a pre-defined amount of time.

It's obviously not impossible, but bus driving is much more complex than taxi driving despite the predictable route.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#293

Post by Zagreus2142 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #267
esafak wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hearing you say we should have self-driving buses... which is feasible since their route is fixed.

e: after looking at the numbers again, i was wrong.

The market clearing wage only applies in economic textbooks, in a perfectly competitive market with balanced supply and demand. The US public transportation sector has major supply/demand imbalances and is a regulated market.

Also the median weekly wage in the US is currently $1196 a week (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf)

Seattle is currently paying bus drivers $31.39 an hour, 40x = $1256 (https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/metro/about/careers/drive-for...). And I'm sure the pay is less in less affluent/dense US cities.

It's not exactly apples to apples because the bls figure is nationwide and doesn't include healthcare benefits, and king county metro may have better than average healthcare, but at least ballparking this: No, public bus drivers are not paid "well above" the median wage

Edit: I found this listing on indeed for greyhound bus drivers (the closest comparison I could think of in the private sector) and starting rate is $28-$31 in Seattle (https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=2516c81006044ec8).

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#294

Post by hibikir »

decimalenough wrote: post #250
lazyasciiart wrote: post #221

Earlier 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.

You'll find buses with no AC in northern Spain today. And it's not ancient ones, but ones running on natural gas: They option then without, making them a hazard in July and August. I've seen one specifically operated to take special needs children to their facility, where we'd argue with the company that the fact that they are special needs doesn't mean they don't feel the heat in the summer.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#295

Post by bgnn »

I see a lot of people saying this is due to lack of competition. I hate to break this to you but it isn't that. A lot of European countries thinking the competition will drive the costs down, including on the supply side, and liberalizing the market realized not long after that this did nothing to reduce the cost. More often than not it drove the cost up.

The problem is that the public transportation is never truly free market, as they are always heavily subsidized. More companies relying on subsidies to do business doesn't change the fact. On the supply side, bus manufacturers have the same. US federal govrhas strict requirements to buy American made busses. I think NAFTA might be ok too, but not sure. In any case, what the US government paying for is manufacturing jobs and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Or let's put it another way. Those busses can be produced in China or Japan for much cheaper. But then you will let go of this industry, and have more dead towns and small cities without jobs.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#296

Post by itsmek »

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.

Global commodities are not competitive?

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#297

Post by wyre »

airstrike wrote: post #282
Y_Y wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And congratulations to any of today's lucky ten thousand who are just learning of the Principal-Agent Problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

How about the ten thousand learning about "today's lucky ten thousand"?

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#298

Post by [deleted] »

freeopinion wrote: post #255
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…

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 t…

[deleted]

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#299

Post by balderdash »

They probably pay too much for everything - and in many cases that’s by design (e.g. ever increasing public sector pay packages).

If municipalities had to disclose the deferred maintenance capex cost on infrastructure and capital assets, I’d hazard most places are in a pretty dicey situation (80 year old water or sewer systems that need replacing, aging buses, etc) - and towns saying they balanced the budget or in a good fiscal position is a joke.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#300

Post by itsmek »

axiolite wrote: post #278
vkou wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not familiar with the details of the situation but the tunnel is being used for transit either way right? If someone used to rely on busses in that tunnel aren't they vastly more likely to switch to whatever replacement is in the tunnel (rail?) than a car?
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