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US cities pay too much for buses

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Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#461

Post by rsynnott »

PaulHoule wrote: post #29

Tompkins County bought Proterra buses, they had some serious problems. When they jacked one up to work on it the axle came off and they immediately took all our electric buses out of the fleet -- and Proterra was bankrupt and not able to make it right. TCAT is still scrambling to find diesel buses to replace those and older diesel buses that are aging out. Lately they've added some ugly-looking buses which are the wr…

Something that strikes me as a bit odd is that most US electric buses seem to come from companies who just make electric buses. The electric buses here are made by conventional bus companies who've been making buses for, in one case, 80 years an in another over a century. Do none of the traditional US bus companies make electric ones?

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#462

Post by rsynnott »

SoftTalker wrote: post #244
uxp100 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is tainted by the fact that the battery electric busses are new and the diesel busses are (comparatively) old, but our battery electric busses are far more comfortable to ride. Diesels are uh, jerky. Maybe the drivers fault, but that’s how it is.

It's probably more the brakes than the engine. Diesel engines don't provide much of an engine braking effect (unless fitted with additional mechanisms a/k/a "Jake Brake" to provide this) so the vehicles use friction brakes any time they need to slow down, which can be jerky especially with air brakes. Electric buses would have regenerative braking which is probably smoother.

The vibration of the running engine is a big part of it. Very noticeable on diesel-electric battery hybrids; the whole feel of the thing changes when it's running on battery power.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#463

Post by rsynnott »

bombcar wrote: post #97
xethos wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more damning, diesel is objectively, inarguably more expensive to run, costing more than four times as much as [Vancouver's] battery-electric busses in fuel/electricity. Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.

Diesel’s last remaining benefits are of no value for a bus (locomotive-class horsepower possibilities and rapid refueling) as a bus never weighs much and goes in a circle.

The first one feels like a red herring, anyway; some places have battery powered _locomotives_, now.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#464

Post by nickjj »

moduspol wrote: post #408
qgin wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a $6500 deductible. I definitely care what things cost because my insurance almost never actually helps pay for anything unless I have an unbelievably bad year. The problem is that literally nobody can tell me how much anything is going to cost until I get the bill in a month. Not even because they don't want to tell me. Nobody at the desk even knows what my price is going to be because it's all numberwang.

Not defending insurance but theoretically you do also get a better rate than the uninsured rate just by having it go through the health insurance. I say “theoretically” because I’ve also heard they’re often willing to cut some pretty good deals if you don’t have insurance and pay cash. And I mean “good” relative to the initially billed amount, not “good” relative to what it should actually cost.

I was told it's also illegal in the US for a hospital to bill you as uninsured if you have insurance.

You won't get in trouble but the hospital will, but if they ask if you have insurance and you say no when you do, that could change the situation.

Again, I'm not a lawyer but this was they told me once a few years ago because I got charged a ridiculous amount for something and wanted to see if it would be cheaper if I just paid without insurance considering my deductible was many thousands of dollars.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#465

Post by dns_snek »

cyberax wrote: post #402
dns_snek wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What's this supposed to mean? A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning. You can verify by looking at the maximum lane throughput in vehicles per hour. > At higher speeds it's even less as the footprint of each vehicle equals "vehicle length + following distance". The commercial speed of buses in cities is around 10-15 mph. There are no "higher spee…

> A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning.

I've never heard anything of the sort and I don't believe it at face value - that's roughly the length of a football field. Perhaps this is true in a specific area with terrible bus infrastructure but where I live, and the majority of places where I've been, bus stops are off the main road so they never block traffic.

> I've seen buses blocking multiple cars for a traffic light cycle because buses take so much space.

As I said, a consequence of bad infrastructure, not an inherent flaw of this mode of transportation. And even if some cars get held up that doesn't necessarily mean that the throughput has been affected - in heavy traffic this gap will be filled by other cars.

> For example: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint

This table lists "Coach (bus)" at 27g CO2e/passenger-km. I don't know why buses are listed three times and they don't clarify, but it sure seems like the figure for passenger EVs represents the average for all types of trips whilst bus service is broken down into long-distance (coach) and local city service, making direct comparison impossible.

Additionally, carbon footprint is one small part of pollution and arguably it's not even the most important one. Ultrafine particles, PM2.5, and noise pollution matter just as much to the local population.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#466

Post by rsynnott »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #371
klooney wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purchasers for buses, trainsets, etc., are bad- lots of unnecessary customization, last minute changes, low volume, etc. This drives down efficiency across the system.

Isn’t that true in other countries though?

RE volume, a couple of years back, Ireland, a country of a little over 5 million people, recently made an order for 800 electric buses over five years via the national transport authority. Meanwhile, the transport authorities in the article, in a country with 340 million people, made orders for 10 and 17 buses respectively.

Now, I think Ireland's extreme centralisation on this is unusual, but the US's approach of having loads of absolutely tiny transport authorities is, too.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#467

Post by rsynnott »

jibe wrote: post #128
twoodfin wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The side effects of “Buy American” rules do not include a dynamic, competitive domestic bus manufacturing industry. Just the opposite. If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them? Are busses really critical national security concerns? If we needed the existing NA producers to build military busses it sounds like we’d be screwed!

A literal bus factory may not be critical for national security, but the ability to manufacture a vehicle is. So the know-how, the supply lines, and the manufacturing facility are important. The ability to manufacture a fuel injector, a transmission, a windshield is going going to apply to a bus, a plane, a tank..

So subsidise the bus manufacturers to make competitive products directly, rather than an indirect subsidy via forcing transport authorities to buy uncompetitive junk.

Forcing transport authorities etc to buy local seems like clearly the worst way to subsidise industry; there is little incentive for the manufacturers to make a good or cost-competitive product.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#468

Post by rsynnott »

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…

> China had a long term strategy to building its own trains (and, I assume, buses). They first imported high speed trains from Japan and Germany but ultimately wanted to build their own

Interestingly, this process has now somewhat gone into reverse. Alexander Dennis, say, built their first-gen electric buses on BYD tech (China was the leader in this space), but their second-gen on their own design.

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#469

Post by AnthonyMouse »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #395
phil21 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your personal life is abundant with meaningful human activity that cannot at all be explained by money incentives. The principal agent problem has this same problem: once we stop talking about money, “interests” can be vague and overlapping, making the problem disappear with scrutiny. To me, a great majority of problems in the US fundamentally boils down to people looking for markets and money where there aren’t any.…

> To me, a great majority of problems in the US fundamentally boils down to people looking for markets and money where there aren’t any.

Your examples are mostly things where there are, though, e.g.:

> rising healthcare costs (what is the right price to pay for saving a child’s life, for example? Culturally, it’s basically unlimited!)

This is confusing value with cost. If you had to pay a million dollars to save a child's life, maybe that's worth it, but that's not the problem. The problem is that so often we could have saved the child's life for $100 but for various bad reasons it ends up being $100,000 instead, and the people getting the other $99,900 want to keep it that way.

> whereas rising legal costs are NOT seen as a crisis (suing other people over BS grievances, unlike saving lives, is not compulsory)

Isn't the problem with the rising legal costs mostly on the defense side? You can't prevent someone from filing an unmeritorious lawsuit against you, or avoid hiring compliance lawyers to tell you what to do to prevent that from happening, so it matters when those things get more expensive. But then the compliance lawyers and their lobbyists like it to get more expensive because they're the ones getting the money.

> infrastructure investment (cars don’t make financial sense everywhere and everything all the time, but they’re REALLY cozy, so we will spend exorbitant amounts of money on infrastructure for them compared to everything else)

People who hate cars say this but we mostly spend money on cars because everything is too spread out for mass transit, which brings us to this one:

> lack of growth of alternatives to single family homes

Markets are great at solving this. If it wasn't literally banned in most of the relevant places, developers would be replacing single family homes with higher density housing all over and people would be buying it.

> the obesity crisis (eating feels GOOD, even if it costs EXORBITANT amounts of money)

Government subsidizes the production of high fructose corn syrup, which does this:

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/03/22/sweet-problem-prin...

> worsening education outcomes

And then people make school choice arguments.

Which one of these isn't a situation where we would benefit from a competitive market but the existing laws prevent us from having one?

Re: US cities pay too much for buses

#470

Post by ainiriand »

rsynnott wrote: post #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 (ab…

But each State and County wants their say on what vehicles they want, and for sure a lot of them do not want those woke electric buses...
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