Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

To be clear no necessary corruption of the people in agencies themself,

- but of the people consulting them

- and/or influential investors in a sunk cost fallacy where they think they still can save their investments

- again often a place they ended up in due to corruption, not necessary them themself being corrupt but other which gave them wrong consultancy

Even when I looked into the topic around 14~ years ago it was very clear that hydrogen will likely not be a competitive technology for cars "in general", through maybe somewhat competitive in some niche (i.e. trucks). But the thing is if you considered marked dynamics back then it never looked long side promising. As whatever wins outside of the niche (batteries) will get so much more traction weather it's infrastructure or science investments.

Now the question is what kind of corruption?

Russian Money (and any other natural gas exporter, but in Germany mainly Russian Money)

Again not necessary Russia directly going to people and bribing them. But mainly by using co-investments, potentially with obfuscated source, to convince people that a lot of other reliable investors are investing into it and therefor you should, too. Which, with a bit of more direct corruption, is quite an efficient strategy to push investments into a specific direction. Because the more you convince ("in general" independent) investors to invest into hydrogen the more they will lobby for hydrogen themself.

Now the key question here is why would Russia want to convince countries to use hydrogen as a "green future technology"?

Because why it technically looks like it can work, _it practically does not_!

This isn't even about hydrogen cars by themself.

But about hydrogen production, the simplest cheapest way to produce hydrogen is from natural gas in a non green way. While you can produce it green it has a pretty bad efficiency and exiting (and long term planed!!!) infrastructure is barely enough to move the hydrogen usage from other industries which do not it anyway to green methane.

And while lobbyist go on and on about how it's just a question to spin up the infrastructure it not only doesn't seem to happen even ~14 years ago it didn't seem that likely and today it's very clear it won't happen because it makes no sense. I mean sure e.g. Australia will likely produce a ton of green Hydrogen in the future, but again in comparison of what is needed to move all trucks & busses etc. to it it's not that relevant.

This doesn't mean there is no use ever for green hydrogen (like mentioned various existing industries need hydrogen). But today you can very clearly say it doesn't make sense for PKWs (full stop) and due to constant battery improvements in all areas and high investments into future improvements and not having reached a wall in science in that are it has moved from "it might make sense for some decades for trucks" to, nah, seems dump for trucks, too.

So to sum up:

- It seems doable enough so that (potentially corrupt) lobbyist can be convincing.

- Russia spend a ton of money in co-investing into research to push research in the EU and especially Germany in that direction. Implicitly making it look like a good investment deal.

- Then a lot of people which can influence political decisions got stuck with it as they are worried about losing their investment and worse, having missed the window to get a foothold into the actual future technologies.

- Then this people using their vast influence, including e.g. the "Springer Verlag" (most influential new publisher in Germany).

- Leading to a loop where more people get mislead into tinging it's good and invest themself, and then lobby for it and then worry to lose their investment so now lobby against any of it's competition.

- And even companies and politicians not stuck in that loop in any way might thing it's not "viable" and as such don't push against that nonsense.

Certainly wind power was viable as soon as fiberglass was invented.

The mass engineering should have also been directed at that which would have saved us a billion tons of carbon.

Alternatively, you could add charging infrastructure in more places. Eg, partially have trolley-like lines on the route to "top up". This could make sense on dedicated buslanes, especially when multiple lines use that stretch (eg near central stop).