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US cities pay too much for buses

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Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#41

Post by SoftTalker »

michaelt wrote: post #34
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.

> Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus. I mean, that could just be normal, routine failure to negotiate effectively. If every bus vendor says "call for pricing" and your organisation has "always" paid $940k per bus, when you're told to buy some more buses, you might not even know you can get them for half or a third of that price by getting competi…

OK I agree... add "incompetence" along with "corruption" as a potential reason. Though corruption is easier to get away with if it appears as incompetence.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#42

Post by myrmidon »

PaulHoule wrote: post #35
myrmidon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think labor cost alone is most plausible, especially combined with higher quantities. Average yearly salary in urban China is Getting parity with subsidies, worker/environmental protection and regulation overhead would not even come close to make the US price-competitive for labor intensive work like this right now, IMO.

Chinese manufacturers use more advanced processes, not just cheap labor. For instance they built a mushroom factory in Shanghai where they only touch the mushrooms with a forklift -- contrast that to the "big" indoor mushroom farms in Pennsylvania that make those Agaricus white button mushrooms where somebody has to cut each mushroom with a knife. They just opened one in Texas. BYD constructs cars with radically diff…

I'm just saying that the "China cheaper because dirty, bad quality copycat products" is in my view mostly an incorrect excuse; cheap labor and (sometimes) larger scale are (for now!) Chinese advantages that people love to ignore.

Being price-competitive with Chinese production then means either driving down local wages or inflating product costs, and there is absolutely no way around this (until you have heavy industry that literally builds itself).

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#43

Post by crazygringo »

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 small minority. But even then the colors on front and top and often borders still clearly identify it. E.g. these are still very clearly public transit if you live there, which is what's important:

https://contravisionoutlook.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads...

https://contravisionoutlook.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads...

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#44

Post by kube-system »

rangestransform wrote: post #32
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…

> They standardize rolling stock. re: buses, we have the same rickety ass new flyers essentially everywhere in the US, that doesn't make them any cheaper

I think the gist of the article is that we don't have the same busses across the US. Yes there are only two major manufacturers, but they're all being procured in different ways, in different custom configurations, all across the country.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#45

Post by xnx »

SoftTalker wrote: post #25
mschuster91 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Modern diesels emit almost no particulates. The older ones yes, but few are still on the road in public transit service.

> The older ones yes, but few are still on the road in public transit service

If only that were true in my major US city. The public buses are probably the most filthy vehicles on the road. Every fourth one lets out a cloud of acrid black smoke every time it accelerates. I have to assume they are officially or informally exempt from emissions testing.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#46

Post by bluGill »

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.

I hate those advertising wraps. Most of them cover the windows that I as a rider want to look out of (you can see out, but they are not clear). If I don't want to look out give me a window shade, but when I want to look out I want to be able to see.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#47

Post by garciasn »

michaelt wrote: post #34
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.

> Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus. I mean, that could just be normal, routine failure to negotiate effectively. If every bus vendor says "call for pricing" and your organisation has "always" paid $940k per bus, when you're told to buy some more buses, you might not even know you can get them for half or a third of that price by getting competi…

I have a degree in Public Administration. This is basically an MBA for the public sector; but, the difference between the two largely lies in an MBA looking for opportunities to maximize the business and its shareholders vs an MPA looking to implement policies that best serve the public good.

Government employees are NOT well-equipped to compete with private sector ones; they don't think like them and they don't act like them. Why? Because the public sector is driven by a completely different model: bottoms-up management, led by the citizenry, not led top-down to maximize shareholder value. In addition, because private sector jobs pay 2x+ what the same level in a public sector organization will pay and thus the candidate pool is simply not at the level that you would expect at a similarly sized private sector organization. Because of this flip-flopped model of operation (bottoms-up vs top-down) Public/Private partnerships are NOT equal arrangements and the private sector companies know exactly how to leverage these differences in their favor.

In this instance, a public sector employee may feel that paying more for a bus will better serve the public good because it /may/ be better engineered, have a longer lifetime, and offer value to the public that's above and beyond what a less expensive model will do. But! Even if the support staff look for multiple quotes from a variety of vendors, all of which may be at the cost level a private sector company may prefer, that public sector staff member may very well be directly overruled by the elected officials; who, for reasons that can only be hypothesized (take your pick: corruption, brand/personal preference, whatever) may prefer the more expensive vendors that were not included in the research and bidding process.

While I have laid out that the public sector is not well-equipped for public/private partnerships and business dealings, there are MANY reasons for this including: candidate pool, different underlying model of operation, and elected official decisioning.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#48

Post by xnx »

michaelt wrote: post #34
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.

> Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus. I mean, that could just be normal, routine failure to negotiate effectively. If every bus vendor says "call for pricing" and your organisation has "always" paid $940k per bus, when you're told to buy some more buses, you might not even know you can get them for half or a third of that price by getting competi…

> And if you're an ambitious, hard-nosed type that can really turn the screws on vendors,

Absolutely not. Cost savings is career suicide in the public sector. The goal is to spend all budget and then beg for more. Regardless of ridership, the ironclad rule is "budget must go up".

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#49

Post by roryirvine »

tdeck wrote: post #30

Our buses are also less comfortable and "rattle" more that busses I've ridden in many other first world countries. I'm not sure if this is an economics thing but the standard New Flyer buses feel a bit dated.

What's causing the rattle?

In the UK, there were always a few buses in any given fleet that rattled more than others, especially when idling or at low revs - something to do with resonance with the body panels, I think. But that was back when diesel engines were universal, so hasn't really been a thing since hybrids and (more recently) BEVs took over.

Looks like New Flyer hybrids use BAE Systems' Hybridrive, which was fairly common in London during the 2010s but didn't produce noticeably excessive vibration as far as I remember. Is there something different about how the engines are mounted in US buses, I wonder?

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#50

Post by bluGill »

kube-system wrote: post #44
rangestransform wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They standardize rolling stock. re: buses, we have the same rickety ass new flyers essentially everywhere in the US, that doesn't make them any cheaper

I think the gist of the article is that we don't have the same busses across the US. Yes there are only two major manufacturers, but they're all being procured in different ways, in different custom configurations, all across the country.

We do. What is different is the options. The bus itself is the same, but you can put options on the bus that drive up the price.
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