Live data from Hacker News

US cities pay too much for buses

bloomberg.com

451–460 of 590 posts

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes there is.

You first have to agree on a definition of free in this context. When Adam Smith was writing the Wealth of Nations most of the transactions in the market were between entities with more or less comparable power. Local people bought stuff from local suppliers. This is very much not the case any more when it comes to transactions involving private individuals on one side and corporations on the other.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#452
> Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each.

Huh. TFI, the Irish transport authority, currently has a deal to pay 400 million euro for 800 electric buses, mostly double deckers (so a lot bigger than these ones). Diesel double deckers cost them significantly less (about 250-350k IIRC), but obviously cost more to operate. That's for custom jobs (in particular TFI has weird beliefs about what shape windscreens should be).

I wonder if part of it is just that these US transit agencies are buying them on such a small scale; a state-level agency responsible for sourcing the buses might be more effective.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#453
post #254

"Federal funding typically covers 80% of bus purchases, with agencies responsible for the remainder." Well, there is your answer. The one making the purchase isn't the one primarily paying for the purchase. This makes them less sensitive to pricing. Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance. Or how you don't care how much you put on your plate or what you choose to eat at an all you can…

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...

You've got me wondering about if and to what extent AI could alter the dynamic

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life cycles costs are not what is being argued here, but operating costs of a battery electric bus compared to a diesel one. The electric variant is clearly significantly cheaper to operate (like my linked source shows) even taking charging infrastructure and maintenance into account. Battery electric busses becoming CAPEX competitive with diesel ones is also just a matter of time in my view (case in point: singapore…

> Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked. > My takeaway: No reasonable assumption exists that would make operating battery electric busses more expensive than diesel ones. The problem here is that these were your initial opinions that aren't supported by the reality. Diesel is fucked, long term, and that's good, but that's also long term future, not the reality right now like you were arguing. The ma…

Note how the whole thread has been about cost of diesel fuel vs electricity from the start, and how I'm explicitly talking about operating costs for them.

From the linked analysis you will also find that the higher price example for diesel bus in the article ($980k) is already more expensive than a typical BEV alternative and likely a net drain on the operator (by comparison) within the first year.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#455
post #287
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...

I'm convinced that a great majority of problems in the US these days fundamentally boils down to principal agent problems. The 2008 financial crisis is a great example. Once banks no longer kept mortgages on their own books, it just became a matter of time until that was going to blow up. The incentives change.

You are right but in a roundabout way. It’s true that most problems in US can be explained by this but it’s also true that the west and US particularly are successful because they can bypass the principal agent problem to an extent.

You just have to look at India or Africa a bit to understand the severity to which this problem permeates day to day in these countries.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#456

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…

> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.

Hmm, not sure about that. I live in Dublin, which is, generally, very flat, and where the temperature rarely goes far outside the 0 to 20 degrees C range. The buses can be fairly unpleasant on rare very hot days (no air conditioning), the electric ones can be unpleasantly cold on rare extremely cold days (heating not specced for it; this isn't an issue for the diesel ones as those produce so much waste heat anyway), and when I was a kid I lived in one of the few hilly parts of Dublin, and bus breakdowns going uphill were somewhat common (in fairness I think this is less of a thing now). Geography absolutely matters; Dublin's buses would be basically unusable anywhere very hot or cold.

There's other stuff, too. Buses here are almost always double-decker, but one specific new bus route requires single-decker buses, because the double-deckers won't fit under some of the older railway bridges. This will also require modifications to some road infra, which won't currently take long buses (to have a decent capacity single-deckers need to be longer; the single-deckers will be about 13m long vs 11m for the normal buses). Some cities use articulated buses; those wouldn't work here at all.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#457

"Federal funding typically covers 80% of bus purchases, with agencies responsible for the remainder." Well, there is your answer. The one making the purchase isn't the one primarily paying for the purchase. This makes them less sensitive to pricing. Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance. Or how you don't care how much you put on your plate or what you choose to eat at an all you can…

Isnt it a little onesided to put blame on the payers for price insensitivity? > The second you detach the consumer from the price of something, that is when they stop caring about how much something costs, and so the price jumps. Why should nobody care about prices? The customer gets subsidizes by another payer, in this case governments that have to authorize budgets. The reverse could be true too, companies raise th…

Companies are incentivised to keep costs low and the feedback loop for this incentive is much smaller. What I mean by feedback loop is: the cost of running the company directly affects the stake-holders in a meaningful way. The CEO is probably has stock options and has to hit a target so that they can be paid well. To do so they need to be more sensitive with prices or shareholders or the board will be on the CEO’s behind. There is a direct monetary incentive relation here.

There is one for the government too but the feedback loop is much bigger. If some one in the government makes a suboptimal decision, what incentives exist to penalise them?

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a bus isn't just a bus, there are differences in what is needed in different cities. Some need heat, some need AC, some need both. In Utah there are buses that go up the canyons and they have gearboxes focused on climbing steep hills, while a bus in the valley might never need that ratio and can be optimized for efficiency on the flats. Seattle has buses with electric trolley lines above, and buses that were desi…

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)

Irish buses don't have AC (rarely hot enough here to need it) and the electric ones only have heating adequate for about 0 degrees and up (rarely colder than that, though they're unpleasant when it is).

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#459
post #93
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.

Driving a city bus is much, much, _much_ harder than driving a car. Shuttle bus in an airport or something, sure, maybe. But (with the exception of BRT systems with mostly/all segregated routes), I'd expect city buses to be about the most difficult form of transport to automate.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#460
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.

Or buy 10 Teslas for the same price and offer superior service.

The main cost of running a bus system is drivers, not buses. So that would be horribly expensive.

Also... how small are you imagining buses are? Standard buses here have a capacity of around a hundred people. If you broke them out into cars there simply wouldn't be space on the roads.

Post reply on HN