[HN Gopher] US cities pay too much for buses
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US cities pay too much for buses
Author : pavel_lishin
Score : 173 points
Date : 2025-09-26 13:57 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > "A new paper argues that lack of competition, demand for custom
| features and "Buy America" rules have driven up costs for transit
| agencies in the US."
|
| If that's not the most NYC finance-centered headline ever, I
| don't know what is.
|
| "If we just offload our bus-building industry to somewhere else,
| we could save $x on taxes each year. Yeah, it eliminates jobs and
| is another blow against strategically-important heavy industry,
| but please, think of my balance sheet!"
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| imagine how much money the government could save by just
| continuing to collect taxes and not providing any services! we
| could privatize everything!
| red_rech wrote:
| Yes! we can even distribute political and military power to
| selected individuals who can rule over small portions
| maintaining security and collecting taxes.
|
| After all, it was divine right (Darwinian evolution, AI
| schizobabble, etc) that made them men of might.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >Yes! we can even distribute political and military power
| to selected individuals who can rule over small portions
| maintaining security and collecting taxes.
|
| That's basically what states and municipalities are.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That's ... decently close to what the current political
| course of action is, a strategy called "starve the beast"
| [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| The very first sentence in that sayes "cutting taxes". I'm
| explicitly proposing that taxes be maintained or raised
| while reducing or eliminating government services.
| supertrope wrote:
| That's running the government like a business!
| namdnay wrote:
| it's not a question of "offloading" it, it's a question of
| reaping the benefits of global competition
|
| Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made
| by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota
| and co arrived? Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they
| didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents
| just get lazy?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| There's a difference between private companies and state-run
| companies / authorities.
|
| When a US airline thinks it's better for them to switch over
| to Airbus, by all means do so, that's competition.
|
| But taxpayer money should not be used to prop up other
| countries' economies unless explicitly designated that way
| (e.g. contributions to international agencies, economic aid),
| and _certainly not_ if that replaces domestic union labor.
| rangestransform wrote:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-time-clock-
| vandaliz...
|
| this is the kind of domestic union labour you're up
| against. american union labour should absolutely at least
| be subject to competition from union labour elsewhere,
| including european bus manufacturers.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The thing is the public sector _does_ have competition. We
| have a surplus of houses with XXL master bedroom suites in
| Arizona and a deficit of high speed rail. If they used
| union labor to build houses in Arizona and non-union labor
| to build high speed rail it would be the other way around.
|
| If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as
| the private sector people are going to turn against the
| public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street
| corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs
| and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a
| private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a
| restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive
| and _pleasant_ people would be voting for more of it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem with rail isn't just labor, it's land
| acquisition. For the old freight lines that was done
| centuries ago, now that virtually all land has been
| claimed by someone it's much more expensive by default.
| On top of that, California got Musk disrupting everything
| with Hyperloop.
|
| You need to use eminent domain on straight lines as much
| as possible for HSR, both to keep costs low and to allow
| for actually high speeds, but that's risky for legal
| challenges and even then, horribly expensive at US
| scales.
|
| Yes, China has larger scales and still gets it done, but
| they a) just throw money at the problem and b) just do
| what the CCP wants.
|
| > Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the
| city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order
| from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private
| taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant.
|
| That's not made easier by the fact that many cities just
| hand one way bus tickets to local homeless and nutjobs
| that bus them off to somewhere else [1], often to
| Democrat-run cities. In addition to that, there are
| almost no asylums left to take care of the nutjobs
| because a lot of them had been forced to shut down for
| sometimes atrocious violations of human rights many
| decades ago. Some areas now (ab)use jails and prisons to
| punish homeless people for being homeless, a practice
| that has also come under fire for creating the same
| abusive conditions, on top of scandals like "Kids for
| cash" [2].
|
| The obvious solution to a lot of the problems with
| nutjobs, homeless and drug addicts would be a sensible
| drug policy combined with a "housing first" policy. Both
| of that has been tried in the US and in other countries
| worldwide to a sometimes massively positive effect, the
| problem is it has to be done federally - otherwise you
| end up like Frankfurt here in Germany, where Frankfurt
| pays the bill for drug addiction treatments and somewhat
| safe consumption facilities, but ended up having to pay
| that for people from almost across the whole of Europe.
|
| > If the public sector were efficient, responsive and
| pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
|
| It could be at least pleasant and responsive, the problem
| is you need (a lot) of money to pay for it, and no one
| likes paying taxes. It's a chicken and egg problem across
| Western countries - ever since up to the 80s, when
| neoliberal politics, trickle-down and lean-state ideology
| took over, public service has been cut and cut and cut.
| People don't believe any more that paying higher taxes
| would yield a net benefit because they lost all trust in
| politicians, and I don't see any way of fixing that - not
| without a stint of a good-willing dictator at least, and
| I don't see _that_ on the horizon at all.
|
| [1] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/bussed-out-
| how-americ...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things
| as the private sector people are going to turn against
| the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the
| street corner in the city and people will retreat to the
| suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping,
| order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going
| to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient,
| responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more
| of it.
|
| Given the encroachment of enshittification on the private
| sector, I'm not sure it's any more efficient than the
| public sector on the whole.
|
| And in the cases where it is more efficient, that's
| because there's either less at stake, or people care
| less. I don't care what Jim at Jim's Quik Lube does with
| my money after I pay him for an oil change. I _do_ care
| what the Feds do with my tax dollars after I file my
| return, and so does everyone else, so we create
| regulations and policies to keep government agents from
| blowing taxpayer dollars. Or, at least, we used to.
|
| Now, we've bought into this "the private sector is always
| more efficient" BS and put a private sector guy in
| charge, and it's a disaster. I don't want the mechanisms
| of the state being treated like a company where the guy
| in charge has his name on the building and always gets
| what he wants, because the mechanisms of the state are
| that of force. People get arrested, assaulted,
| imprisoned, and killed. It _has_ to be more deliberate
| and take longer.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Private sector knows how to keep costs down, but that's
| because the incentive is to enrich the people at the top.
| This eventually comes at the cost of quality.
|
| Public sector sometimes acts like they have infinite
| money. They'll just print more and drive up inflation
| while paying lip service to voters and pretending to care
| during election season.
|
| There's also the massive corruption in the public sector.
| All the work is actually done by the private sector, but
| the contract isn't decided on who will delivery the best
| quality at the lowest cost, no no no. You'd have to be
| naive to believe that. The actual decision is based on
| who will kick back the most money (labeled as "campaign
| contributions") to the people who are in charge of making
| the decision.
|
| So really, both suck. Private sector will give you a
| shitty product at a great price. Public section will give
| you a terrible price with the quality being a complete
| gamble.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I disagree with this.
|
| You are basically asking taxpayers to fund an uncompetitive
| (i.e. wasteful) local industry.
|
| I think that's justifiable when you have high local
| unemployment (making the thing a job program, really), or
| when you really need the industry for strategic reasons
| (food and weapon manufacturing), but when that is not the
| case, doing this raises labor costs _in general_ and hurts
| your actually useful and globally competitive industries,
| too.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The thing is, fundamentally there is very little
| difference between a truck, a bus and a tank. A big ass
| diesel engine and literal tons of steel. And in war time,
| you can convert the bus and truck manufacturing
| facilities into making tanks and airplanes.
|
| _That_ is why even something as manufacturing cars,
| trucks and airplanes is vital to be resilient. And in
| addition, it 's bad enough how much of a grip China has
| on our balls with rare-earth metals, pharmaceuticals,
| chemicals and the threat of snacking a piece of Taiwan.
| India isn't much better, they keep buying up Russian oil
| despite sanctions. We don't need to hand them _more_
| economic power.
|
| And yes, resilience costs money. We need to explain that
| to our populations - and most importantly, we need to
| make sure that our populations actually get some more of
| the wealth and income that is being generated every year
| so they can afford it, like in the past!
| myrmidon wrote:
| > The thing is, fundamentally there is very little
| difference between a truck, a bus and a tank.
|
| I can see your point, but I'm not buying this argument
| for multiple reasons.
|
| First, if you do blanket-protectionism like this, the
| actual strategic gain per "wasted" tax-dollar is abysmal.
| You could have just bought those singaporean busses, and
| spent the money on skunkworks and lithium mine subsidies
| instead if you actually _needed_ that resilience and
| military capability.
|
| But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What
| kind of war are you even anticipating where you would
| need massively scaled up tank production of all things?
| The US, currently, could fight an offensive land war
| against the whole continent pretty much (regardless of
| foreign support), and for anything else tank production
| capabilities are more than sufficient.
|
| Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks
| appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas
| situation), but isolating your nation economically has a
| _really_ shitty track record, historically, especially
| when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to
| circumvent some of the drawbacks.
|
| > we need to make sure that our populations actually get
| some more of the wealth and income that is being
| generated every year so they can afford it, like in the
| past!
|
| 100% agree with that, but I think this is a (tax) policy
| failure most of all: my take is that in a capitalist
| society capital _inevitably_ accumulates at the top, and
| regulatory backpressure (progressive taxation and
| antitrust law) is needed to keep the wealth /income
| distribution somewhat stable; the US has been shitting
| the bed in that regard for more than half a century now
| with predictable outcomes for wealth/income distribution
| (similar for other industrialized nations).
| Redistribution/balancing dynamics ("poor people getting
| paid for labor") are also getting weaker because
| unskilled labor lost lots of relative value.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Taxpayer subsidies to domestic entities should also be
| explicit.
|
| Public sector organizations should focus on their
| operational requirements when deciding what to buy. When a
| transit agency wants to buy buses, it should not pay extra
| due to unrelated policy goals. If the best option is
| foreign, and there is an equivalent but more expensive
| domestic option, the price the agency pays should be the
| price of the foreign option. If politicians want to
| subsidize domestic labor, they can tell the transit agency
| to choose the domestic option and pay the rest from an
| appropriate budget.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > it's not a question of "offloading" it, it's a question of
| reaping the benefits of global competition
|
| _What benefits_?
|
| > Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars
| made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when
| Toyota and co arrived?
|
| Been through Flint, MI lately?
|
| How about Gary, IN? Camden, NJ? East St. Louis, IL?
|
| > Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have
| to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get
| lazy?
|
| They already do have to compete with Airbus for pretty much
| everything that doesn't involve the US Government as a
| customer. That's the majority of the global aircraft market.
| How's that working out? The incumbent still got "lazy", not
| so much from entitlement but from a "need" to constantly
| reduce costs while simultaneously increasing revenues for the
| benefit of shareholders. You can only make aircraft building
| (or anything else) so profitable before you hit a ceiling.
| Boeing hit that ceiling, but of course, that doesn't matter.
| Number must go up.
|
| People in postindustrial economies cannot work as cheaply as
| people in developing economies because they _must_ pay local
| prices for goods and services required for them to live.
| Going with the global competition because "it's cheaper"
| doesn't address the hundreds of thousands of people in the US
| who now don't have the ability to earn a living in the way
| that they did before while still being forced to consume
| using the value of their labor. Worse yet, it enriches people
| who don't have our national best interests in mind.
|
| This kind of "globalization benefits Americans" mindset is
| why we're in the mess we're in now with a tyrant in office
| and people having no faith in the economy or the future. It's
| not 1990 anymore. The experiment's over, it failed. Horribly.
| infecto wrote:
| One of the worst takes I have ever seen. It's not about
| offloading an industry but if another geography has a
| comparative advantage everyone benefits.
|
| I would also argue that customizations are indeed a total waste
| of money for systems that already cash strapped.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| What geography allows for worker oppression and environmental
| degradation as a competitive advantage?
| infecto wrote:
| Where did I say anything about worker oppression?
| bsder wrote:
| > if another geography has a comparative advantage everyone
| benefits.
|
| I don't necessarily agree. Outsourcing has a cost in that you
| also lose the knowledge of the entire engineering chain.
|
| That engineering chain has a _LOT_ of value to us as a
| society. However, it has negative value to a single CEO
| looking at his quarterly bonus.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| A lot of fluff (although I do appreciate the hard numbers and
| reasons - thirteen shades of grey for flooring is utterly
| ridiculous) for essentially these two points:
|
| - low lot size combined with a lot of customization demands leads
| to high per-unit costs
|
| - "Buy American" is expensive. D'uh. Unfortunately the article
| doesn't dig down deeper into _why_ BYD and other Chinese
| manufacturers are cheaper - 996 style slave labor production, a
| lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of
| state /regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below
| sustainability not just against American companies but against
| other Chinese companies.
| red_rech wrote:
| > 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental
| protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional
| subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability not
| just against American companies but against other Chinese
| companies.
|
| Silicon Valley CEOs saw this and thought it should be their
| playbook. So hell, maybe made in America will eventually get
| cheaper as this innovative economic and social system sees
| adoption by brave pioneers.
| pm90 wrote:
| More likely that the companies that institute this will
| hemorrhage talent that is offered a better deal by
| competitors. 996 works because the supply of Engineers is
| quite high in China.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > More likely that the companies that institute this will
| hemorrhage talent that is offered a better deal by
| competitors.
|
| Won't work when the market colludes. And Silicon Valley Big
| Tech already got caught in such a cartel - see [1], debated
| back then in [2].
|
| [1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-
| tech-jo...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168214
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Not calling you out on BYD, but a lack of competition in the
| U.S. means we'll never know what the price for "Buy American"
| _could_ be.
|
| To your point though, even at a much higher price, the "Buy
| American" is putting that money back into the U.S. economy (we
| hope).
| myrmidon wrote:
| I think labor cost alone is most plausible, especially combined
| with higher quantities. Average yearly salary in urban China is
| <$20k.
|
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 different methods than
| Western manufacturers, who can close much of the gap when
| they catch up in technique
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1mnel0i/f.
| ..
| myrmidon wrote:
| 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).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Transit agencies (at least the big ones) normally do their
| maintenance and repair in-house. So they will want to buy one
| make/model of bus as much as possible so that they don't have
| to train mechanics on many different manufacturer's products
| and stock parts for many different models. Once those decisions
| are made, any competitors will have that weighing against them.
| That will tend to reduce the number of viable competitors.
|
| Same with municipal vehicles, most towns will buy all Ford or
| all Chevrolet and as few different models as possible.
| bluGill wrote:
| Sure, but a bus lasts 12 years in service (depending on use
| slightly different, but 12 is a reasonable number for
| discussion). You should be buying them on a longer contract
| to deliver 1/12 of your total fleet every year for several
| years. This means that you only need to ask what to train the
| mechanics on at the end of the contract and in turns there
| are not that many different buses you need to train on.
| Keeping the same manufacture does reduce training costs some,
| but it isn't like every bus is different.
|
| Even ignoring the above, all but the smallest agencies can
| dedicate mechanics to each make. A mechanic can maintain so
| many buses per year - lets say 10 for discussion (I have no
| idea what the real number is), so if you have 100 buses you
| need 10 mechanics. if you have 4 trained on brand A, 4 on
| brand B, and 2 on both you are fine.
| ajross wrote:
| Economy of scale is basically all of it, honestly. The lede is
| that Denver pays ~60% more than Singapore[1] per bus. _Because
| Singapore ordered 24x as many buses._
|
| [1] There's an even worse number for Cincinatti.
| bikelang wrote:
| > the article doesn't dig down deeper into why BYD and other
| Chinese manufacturers are cheaper - 996 style slave labor
| production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most
| notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping
| prices below sustainability
|
| I'm not sure that this is accurate. My understanding is that
| BYD invested heavily into automation. Their factories have few
| human employees left. They do almost all their automation
| robotics design and manufacturing in house to boot. That's a
| huge advantage
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| altcognito wrote:
| Since they are often adorned with ads, I'm not sure why they
| pay for anything at all.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> 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 competing
| quotes from other vendors.
|
| And if you're an ambitious, hard-nosed type that can really
| turn the screws on vendors, leaving no stone unturned in your
| search for savings - would you be working in the purchasing
| department of a municipal bus company?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| conductr wrote:
| It's a matter of procurement process and personnel. They
| simply aren't always concerned with cost as the primary
| decision point and thus tend to not negotiate as hard as
| you might like. I'm in a finance role, company's money is
| my responsibility so I very frequently have to tell
| procurement people that think a product "ticks all the
| boxes of the RFP" or similar, that the runner up product
| only missed on items we can live without so paying 2x isn't
| worth it. I does come off as lacking critical thinking, but
| I've come to learn they just go off the requirement and
| don't really know which things are critical versus nice to
| have. Those kinds of things, so I'd blame this entirely on
| whoever is supposed to have financial oversight over the
| bureaucracy. Do they have CFOs or similar, idk honestly,
| but that's a reason most for profit companies do. They are
| monitoring large financial decisions for reasonableness.
| garciasn wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| > 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".
| Volundr wrote:
| It funny because having worked both in private industry and
| public (transit!) service, my experience is the exact
| opposite. In private anytime my department were coming in
| under budget on anything, there was always the end of the
| year pressure to spend it on _something_ lest accounting
| take it away. Meanwhile in the public sector my team went
| to great lengths to get rid of vendor services that weren
| 't providing value.
| xnx wrote:
| Good example. That budget behavior is common.
| Fortunately, if that has true negative effects, the
| market corrects by putting one company out of business.
| Volundr wrote:
| Let me know when the market gets around to that. At this
| time it's ignored all the ones I've worked for.
| mh- wrote:
| Is it "ignoring" it, or is it priced in to the company's
| valuation?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In my fantasy world where I run things as a benevolent
| dictator, people would get bonuses for finishing the year
| under budget while still achieving all their objectives.
| I suppose that would just incent them to inflate the
| budgets to begin with though.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| That already exists in MetroTransit in Minnesota. The only
| company that was seriously interested for several years was
| Planned Parenthood.
|
| https://www.startribune.com/the-drive-birth-control-bus-ad-s...
|
| This did not improve public sympathies for bus service broadly
| speaking.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a pet peeve of mine that buses in my city have wrap-
| around ads for a car dealer an hour's drive away. (Turns out
| all the car dealers in this area are owned by the same
| people) Then there was that bus which had a supergraphic that
| made the whole bus look like an MRI machine advertising the
| medical center.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Personally, I'm not opposed to bus service; quite the
| opposite. Especially if I could bring an eBike.
|
| However, buses can and should _feel_ safe for everyone,
| whether you 're 5 years old or 95 years old, a US citizen
| or a visitor from Japan, whether it's 2 PM or 2 AM. In the
| United States, they absolutely don't. This can be fixed,
| but nobody has the political will to be perceived as a
| little mean.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In my town all the buses have a bus rack in the front
| that fits up to two bikes or e-bikes.
|
| I perceive buses in my town be very safe. I definitely
| see emotionally disturbed people downtown and near the
| homeless colony behind Wal-Mart, but I don't see them on
| the bus.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| In Minnesota, we built light rail... with an honor system
| for boarding.
|
| It got so bad, especially on the middle cars (the "party
| cars") after COVID, that the middle car was retired and
| they are now in Year 3 of a security improvement plan.
|
| https://www.metrotransit.org/public-safety
|
| They are also retro-fitting screens into the buses,
| showing the buses' own live camera feeds, to further
| reinforce the perception of being watched.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SBd3wno61k
|
| It's still not working in some areas.
|
| https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-46th-st-light-
| rail-c...
|
| https://www.instagram.com/karenthecamera/?hl=en
| bluGill wrote:
| Honor system with regular fare inspection is a good best
| practice. However it only works when the fines for not
| having a fare are high enough that everyone knows it
| isn't worth the risk. If you are checked once a month the
| fine should be the costs of 3 months pass, though you can
| work the math in many different ways, just make sure
| paying for a ticket (preferably a monthly pass!) is
| cheapest and everyone believe that.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| The problem with fining the homeless is that _they don 't
| pay_, followed by _being onboard the next day_. This can
| 't be solved without being a little mean.
|
| In 2023, Democratic lawmakers changed it from being a
| misdemeanor to being an administrative citation, with...
| get this... $35 for first offense, scaling up to $100 +
| 120 day ban by 4th offense. More merciful than going
| through a court system inconsistently, at least in
| theory. Huge surprise it's not working out.
| bluGill wrote:
| Homeless should be on a different program that gives them
| a free pass anyway. The pass should be paid for by the
| service that deals with the homeless not the transit
| agency (note that I just forced a lot of budget
| changes!). The service wants to hand out those passes
| because it is a chance for them to see what else they can
| do for those people (who often don't want help and so
| they need to be careful what they offer vs force)
|
| There should be passes for disabled vets, children, and
| other poor people as well.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Believe me, visit Reddit for Minneapolis, the most
| transit-optimist place you can find, and see what they
| think about their light rail. Full grown adult women
| won't ride it. Children? That's almost child endangerment
| by itself.
|
| I have no problem with homeless people getting free
| transit if they need it. However, the subset of homeless
| that are consistently riding for free and making
| nuisances, they may need to be forcibly kept off the
| train. It doesn't even need to be police action - install
| physical barriers, requiring cash or pass, and hand out
| passes to the homeless like candy with revocation for
| repeated misbehavior.
| bluGill wrote:
| i lived in minneapolis until 15 years ago. Transit is
| getting better but it is still useless for the majority.
| Even those who live near light rail often findiit useless
| because it doesn't 'go where you want to go, when you
| want to go, for a reasonable price, in a reasonable
| amount of time'. (there might be more in that list?)
| Priceiis reasonable but the others are too often lacking.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Many of the emotionally disturbed and criminal people
| aren't actually homeless, and many homeless people are
| basically law abiding and not so crazy.
|
| About a year ago I went to NYC and it was a bit surreal.
| It didn't really seem unsafe but boy I saw a lot of
| people (mostly white) propping open the emergency exits
| so other people could sneak in just around the corner
| from New York Guard troops supporting the NYPD. Video ads
| on the subway were oddly calibrated: "Don't sleep on the
| subway because it makes you vulnerable to crime", "Don't
| jump the turnstile because we have roughly 30 programs
| that could get you free or reduced fares" together with
| ads for deodorant.
| mike50 wrote:
| The New York Guard is not the New York Army National
| Guard (which were the personnel actually deployed). The
| New York Guard is less then 1000 personnel. The entire
| operation was a transparent psyop when some brainwashed
| tv news views saw a crime on the 6 o'clock news. The
| governor of New York might as well be from another planet
| when it comes to understanding New York City.
| jshprentz wrote:
| Perhaps we should implement public therapy buses,
| suggested by Steven Johnson in his 1991 book of the same
| name.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Honor systems only work with honorable people.
| bluGill wrote:
| I hate those racks. 2 bikes capacity means the transit
| agency needs to ensure they are not well used since they
| will fill up fast if people actually use them. Also the
| time it takes to put a bike on/off them is time robbed
| from everyone else on the bus who is now 30 seconds
| latter to where they want to be. They just are not worth
| it, and cannot be. Either take the bike on the bus (good
| luck even getting it to fit, much less doing this in a
| reasonable amount of time for reasonable effort), or lock
| them up at your stop.
|
| I find buses are safe too. I don't understand the worry
| myself. However buses in the US normally run terrible
| routes that make them useless for getting around and so
| people who want to seem "green" need to find some excuse
| and not understanding the real problem blame safety and
| not that the route is useless.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In Ithaca we have crazy hills so it is a good plan to
| take the bus up and then ride down although E-bikes
| change that equation.
|
| In Ithaca we have great bus service between the Ithaca
| Commons, Cornell and the Pyramid Mall. Before the
| pandemic we had a bus every 15 minutes at the mall which
| was great -- it's still pretty good. There are 5 buses a
| day during weekdays to the rural area where I live. These
| are well timed for the 9-5 worker at Cornell and I'm
| going to be taking the late one back today because I'm
| going to go photograph a Field Hockey game over in Barton
| Hall and the timing is right -- it's OK but we did have
| more buses during the pandemic.
|
| Bus service is not so good to Ithaca College. When I've
| tried to make the connection with my bus I've concluded
| that I might as well walk up the hill the IC rather than
| wait for the bus.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| School buses are a distinctive bright yellow, there's no
| mistaking them for anything else. Charter and long distance
| buses don't stop at the city bus stops. City buses will still
| have a sign/screen displaying the route number/name.
| Jcowell wrote:
| There's a difference between spotting a bus at the stop and
| distance away and the actions you will take accordingly.
|
| You want the bus to be identifiable as possible.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yeah but the point is you want to look down the street and
| see if there's a city bus a few blocks away or not. If so,
| hurry up and walk the block to the bus stop. If not,
| quickly grab a coffee or decide to grab a Citibike or
| whatever else that depends on that information.
|
| Spotting buses a few blocks away is a crucial skill in
| cities.
| tallanvor wrote:
| It really isn't when many cities have apps that give you
| real-time information as to when to expect the next bus.
| crazygringo wrote:
| So you're telling me I shouldn't bother to take a split-
| second to glance down the street, but instead...
|
| ...grab my phone, unlock it, navigate to the app, wait
| for it to load, wait for it to figure out my location,
| wait for it to make an API call, try to figure out which
| of the two "34th and 7th" stops is the one going in the
| direction I want (since it's a two-way street with bus
| stops on both side of the intersection), click on one
| randomly, confirm from the first bus destination listed
| that I did click on the correct direction, otherwise go
| back and click on the other one, and _then_ look at its
| ETA?
|
| Sometimes it really is just better to use your eyes, to
| figure out that the bus is going to reach the bus stop in
| about 30 seconds, and that it'll take you 30 seconds of
| brisk walking to reach it in time, so you'd better start
| making a beeline now.
| stackskipton wrote:
| >Because you need to be able to recognize from a distance,
| hey that's a city bus.
|
| Sure, but fix here seems to be that DOT Regulations state
| that transit buses are painted "Lime Green" (example) and
| other companies should not use said color. People would
| quickly learn that Lime Green = transit bus in same way
| School Bus Yellow means school bus.
| crazygringo wrote:
| People already recognize their city bus colors just fine.
|
| I don't see any reason why it would need to be standardized
| to the same color in every city nationwide.
|
| School buses are the only ones that do that because it's a
| safety issue as opposed to a convenience isuse.
| conductr wrote:
| Buses typically have lit signage indicating their route
| number or next stop, it's kind of a dead giveaway and paint
| job can be ignored
| crazygringo wrote:
| When they're further away you can't read the signage, and
| long-distance buses have signage too.
|
| The paint job really is important because it's vastly more
| visible. It also often does things like distinguish between
| local buses and commuter buses, depending on your city.
| conductr wrote:
| I really don't understand why long distance
| visibility/visual identification is such an important
| feature. Care to elaborate?
| crazygringo wrote:
| You see a city bus 4 blocks away, and the bus stop is 1
| block away, and if you walk fast you can make it to the
| bus stop in time to catch it. If you didn't look and just
| walked at normal speed you'd end up having to wait 20
| more minutes for the next bus.
| conductr wrote:
| I half expected that answer and I personally feel it's
| not the responsibility of the buses to invest in custom
| paint to afford you this convenience. Obviously it would
| be nice if buses ran on time and I could just tell you to
| rush if you knew you were running late, but even without
| that, I feel haste is your responsibility if you're
| concerned with making the next bus and not having to wait
| by just missing it
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| get your own bus and you can do what you want with it! /s
| myrmidon wrote:
| I think this shows one of the downsides of trade barriers very
| well: You get stuck with undesirable industries (diesel bus
| manufacturing), binding capital and labor better used elsewhere
| (and you easily end up with underperforming, overpriced
| solutions, too).
|
| But I'm curious how much this actually affects transport costs.
| If such a bus is used 12h/day, then even overpaying 100% for the
| vehicle should get outscaled by labor + maintenance pretty
| quickly, long before the vehicle is replaced...
| mrits wrote:
| What is wrong with diesel bus manufacturing? Just the exhaust
| pedestrians have to breath in? It seems near the bottom of the
| list for things we'd need to solve for carbon emissions.
| uxp100 wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| They use hydraulic retarders in the transmission rather
| than engine brakes.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Modern diesels emit almost no particulates. The older ones
| yes, but few are still on the road in public transit
| service.
| xnx wrote:
| > 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.
| MisterTea wrote:
| I assume those are older busses in fleets that don't have
| the money to buy new cleaner busses. This is what I
| observe out on Long Island. You see maybe one or two
| people on a bus ant any given time because LI is
| dominated by the car. The busses are a total loss so
| there's no money to upgrade.
| paddy_m wrote:
| Busses are loud, but not nearly as load and polluting as
| cars in aggregate
| cocoto wrote:
| Completely false, buses are way louder than multiple
| cars. Buses make tons of noise when accelerating and many
| have obnoxious added sounds at stops for security
| reasons. As a full cyclist I would gladly prefer no bus
| and more cars. Moreover the bus are more dangerous for
| cyclists and pedestrians.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Moreover the bus are more dangerous for cyclists and
| pedestrians.
|
| Avid cyclist myself, personally I'd rather see the stiff
| necked 80 year olds in cars as old as them (so barely any
| safety features) with tiny tiny mirrors gone off the
| road.
|
| Bus drivers are at least regularly examined for their
| health, the buses themselves have a lot better
| maintenance done on them than the average private person,
| they got more mirrors than a disco ball, and at least
| here in Germany, the bus fleets are routinely updated to
| have allllll the bells and whistles. Lane keeps, dead-
| spot alerts, object tracking/warning and collision
| avoidance...
|
| As for the noise: yes a bus is louder, but (IMHO, having
| lived on a busy road that was suddenly not so busy at all
| during Covid) I can handle the occasional bus every 5
| minutes way better than the constant car noises.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I honestly don't think there is any future for them longer
| term (>10y). Long distance, diesel vehicles might hold out
| for a bit longer than a decade, but the situation looks kinda
| inevitable even there to me.
|
| CO2 wise, electrifying a bus like this should pay off much
| quicker than replacing individual vehicles, because
| utilization is higher (not a lot of people drive 12h a day).
| xethos wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| roryirvine wrote:
| Yep - and, in urban areas, buses are pretty much the best
| possible use case for BEVs, aren't they? Short distance,
| high utilisation, predictable routes with far more
| stop/start than normal traffic.
|
| Consider also that bus depots are the perfect site for
| big battery banks hooked up to their charging stations,
| and tend to have plenty of room for solar panels on the
| roof. So electrification is good for the grid too.
|
| It's one of those rare situations where everyone
| benefits.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > in urban areas, buses are pretty much the best possible
| use case for BEVs, aren't they?
|
| I'd argue that mail delivery is an even better use case -
| it starts and stops even more frequently than a bus,
| practically never needs to travel at high speeds, and
| only needs to make one run a day.
|
| But it's not a competition - they're _both_ good use
| cases.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I think existing electric locomotives are more powerful
| than existing diesel locomotives.
|
| The "most powerful diesel-electric locomotive model ever
| built on a single frame", the EMD DDA40X, provides 5MW.
|
| The EURO9000, "currently the most powerful locomotive on
| the European market" provides 9MW under electric power.
|
| USA-made locomotives are so far down the list on https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_powerful_locomoti...
| that I suspect there's some other reason they're not
| needed, e.g. spreading the braking force across multiple
| locomotives throughout the train.
| bombcar wrote:
| That electric locomotive has a really long cord attached
| to it - it only has about 2MW under diesel.
|
| Once you allow attaching an extension cord, electric wins
| ever time; there's zero competition.
| paddy_m wrote:
| citation needed.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Here you go: https://afdc.energy.gov/files/u/publication/
| financial_analys...
|
| My takeaway: No reasonable assumption exists that would
| make operating battery electric busses more expensive
| than diesel ones.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > On the other hand, he told us that without subsidies,
| the life cycle costs would be "diesel buses, followed by
| hybrids, and then with a huge difference, EV buses and
| then fuel cell buses." He asserts that, as things stand,
| "neither EV buses nor fuel cell buses would be profitable
| in terms of life cycle costs without subsidies."
| > Tai said, "Relying on subsidies to introduce EV buses
| and fuel cell buses cannot be considered a healthy
| business situation," and added, "I strongly hope that
| technological innovation and price competition will
| progress throughout the zero-emission bus market."
|
| "EV too cheap to meter ICE dead" is just hype. The
| realoty is it's not much more than another subsidy
| milking, yet. Cleaner air in the city is nice, though.
|
| 1: https://trafficnews-jp.translate.goog/post/587367/3
| myrmidon wrote:
| 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 already gets those for _less_
| than the US currently pays for diesel ones).
| hx8 wrote:
| There is nothing wrong with diesel bus manufacturing, but if
| you were to generate a list of the 1000 most desirable
| products to manufacture I don't think diesel bus would be on
| the list. We have companies and manufacturing expertise tied
| up in building buses when they could be building {X}.
| bluGill wrote:
| A bus - because of the issues with shipping is something
| worth building not "too far" from where used. There is
| value in scale manufacturing so it won't be every city, but
| making buses for a different continent probably isn't right
| either.
|
| Note that engineering can be done in one location for
| multiple factories.
| bombcar wrote:
| The cost to ship a bus anywhere in the world approaches
| the cost of shipping a container - $2 to 10k probably. A
| tiny fraction of the price.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is still a lot of money. There is only so much scale
| before you want a seperate factory anyway and shipping is
| a consideration then.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Sure, but if those $10k shipping costs get you labor at a
| quarter of the price, I don't think the financials ever
| become favorable for high-wage countries like the US
| (average salary in urban China is <$20k/year).
|
| Even in much more highly automated industries you have a
| shift towards lower wage regions (see eastern europe
| automotive industry as an example) because you still need
| labor to build and maintain the factories at the very
| least.
| melling wrote:
| Yes, the exhaust that people have to breathe.
|
| I realize they have improved but aren't natural gas buses
| better?
| Symbiote wrote:
| Yes, walking close to the exhaust of a CNG bus is like
| walking a bit too close to a gas grill/barbecue -- hot and
| a rather chemical, but not noxious and choking like a
| diesel bus.
| dgacmu wrote:
| It's a backwards-facing business. It would seen better to be
| investing in the success of the segment of the industry
| that's by this point obviously going to dominate in the not
| so far future (electric buses).
|
| (At least, globally. China and Europe are all in on electric
| buses; I doubt any of us have a good crystal ball for what's
| going to happen in the US.)
| supertrope wrote:
| 2/3 of public transit budgets in wealthy countries is hiring
| employees. Vehicle costs are not the headline cost. However
| this cost does needs to be managed. Transit agencies are
| running on shoe string budgets.
|
| Until recently the US Federal Government funded capital
| expenses but never operating expenses. This lead to outcomes
| such as the feds distributing grant money with the requirement
| that buses must last at least 12 years and transit agencies
| refreshing their buses on the 12 year mark. Buying a natural
| gas bus or battery electric bus lowers OPEX and the increased
| CAPEX is picked up by the feds.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I'm sorry but aren't these outcomes good? 12-year old buses
| should probably be replaced, and a natural gas bus or
| electric bus will be better than a diesel bus? I do not
| understand your point.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Aren't most busses CNG these days?
| comte7092 wrote:
| Most buses are diesel, and are transitioning to either
| battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell. Almost no fleets in
| the US are running majority CNG.
| toast0 wrote:
| Depends on fuel availability. Diesel is available everywhere.
| CNG has limited availability. In my county, we do have
| propane powered busses.
|
| CNG and propane have much better emissions profiles, and
| vehicle lifetime and compressed tank lifetime are a good
| match for transit, as opposed to personal vehicles where when
| the compressed fuel tank ages out, the otherwise servicable
| vehicle turns into a pumpkin.
|
| However, CNG ends up being expensive and may not save much
| versus diesel... The natural gas is usually not expensive,
| but compression requires a lot of energy input which is
| expensive.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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. If you think about
| how the US does things, every city will have its own procurement
| process. This is wasteful but is just more opportunity for
| corruption;
|
| 2. 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;
| and
|
| 3. Streamlined permitting. China has private property but the way
| private property works in the US is as a huge barrier to any
| change or planning whatsoever. China just doesn't allow this to
| happen.
|
| I keep coming back to the extortionate cost of the Second Avenue
| Subway in NYC. It's like ~$2.5 billion per mile (Phase 2 is
| estimated at $4 billion per mile). You may be tempted to say that
| China isn't a good comparison here because of cheap labor or
| whatever. Fine. But let's compare it to the UK's Crossrail, which
| was still expensive but _way_ cheaper than the SEcond Avenue
| Subway.
|
| California's HSR is hitting huge roadblocks from permitting,
| planning and political interests across the Central Valley,
| forcing a line designed to cut the travel time from LA to SF to
| divert to tiny towns along the way.
|
| There is a concerted effort in the US to kill public transit
| projects across the country (eg [3]). You don't just do this by
| blocking projects. You also make things take much longer and make
| the processes so much more expensive. In California, for example,
| we've seen the weaponization of the otherwise well-intentioned
| CEQA [4].
|
| I feel like China's command economy is going to eat us alive over
| the next century.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_hig...
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7gvr_U4R4w
|
| [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-
| pub...
|
| [4]:
| https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/s...
| rangestransform wrote:
| > 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
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| That's exactly what the person above was getting at.
|
| > They standardize rolling stock. The same stuff is used
| across the country. I think this is really important. If
| you think about how the US does things, every city will
| have its own procurement process.
|
| Having everything ordered piecemeal in smaller custom
| orders is more expensive and gives cities a disadvantage
| in negotiation power
| notatoad wrote:
| "standardizing" doesn't just mean ending up with the same
| stuff. it means making an up-front committment to a
| supplier that you will buy the same stuff, and getting a
| better deal in exchange for that committment.
|
| if you end up buying a whole bunch of units of the same
| stuff without planning to, you're wasting all that
| potential efficiency.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Not all New Flyer buses are the same in the same way not all
| Toyotas are the same.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The "nail house" phenomenon in China is counter-evidence to
| your point 3.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...
| jmyeet wrote:
| Actually I think it makes my point: a common attack on
| China's infrastructure development is to say that the
| government will just seize your land and that's just not true
| (eg [1]).
|
| China just doesn't let private property owners effectively
| delay and block everything.
|
| [1]: https://www.the-independent.com/asia/china/china-
| grandfather...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The "tiny towns" like merced where the HSR will stop are some
| of the fastest growing cities in California.
| jmyeet wrote:
| There's a whole host of concessions and project redesigns
| that occurred for essentially political reasons.
|
| Just look at the currently proposed route map [1]. It
| deviates to the east side of the valley because that's where
| these towns are vs the west side, which is more direct.
|
| Deviating a supposedly high speed route for small towns
| doesn't make a ton of sense. Not only does it increase the
| cost and travel time directly, but extra stops slow the
| overall travel time. This could've just as easily beeen on
| the west side of the Central Valley and had feeder lines and
| stations into a smaller number of stations.
|
| Look at any high speed rail route in Europe or China and
| you'll see fairly limited stops for this reason.
|
| The biggest and easiest win for a high speed rail should've
| been LA to Las Vegas. It's a shorter distance and through
| mostly desert and other uninhabited land. Ideally LAX
| would've been one of these stops but I'm not sure how viable
| that is. Then you add a spur that goes north to SF so you
| avoid building through LA county twice, which is going to be
| one of your most expensive parts.
|
| Instead we have a private company (Brightline) building a LA
| to Vegas route.
|
| As an aside, Vegas desperately needed to build a subway plus
| light rail from the airport up the strip. The stupid Teslas
| in tunnels under the strip was another of those efforts of
| billionaires proposing and doing projects to derail public
| transit. Like the Hyperloop.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_of_California_High-
| Speed...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 3a. The government in China does not accept no as an answer.
|
| We could move a lot faster here if we removed or severely
| limited the ability for individuals and small organizations to
| completely stall progress on major societal efforts. I think
| this is not at all unique to the US, either, it is a problem to
| varying degrees in most modern democracies.
| kccqzy wrote:
| As for the second avenue subway, you should take a look at the
| stations built. They are large, cathedral-like with full-length
| mezzanines full of grandeur. I'm not saying it's money well
| spent, but it's definitely a case where aesthetics is
| prioritized. In comparison most other subway stations are just
| overly utilitarian. Or take a look at the WTC Oculus station;
| that station alone cost $4 billion to build and is now so
| pleasing to look at that it's a tourist attraction on its own.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 wrong color which I guess
| they didn't customize but it means they can run the routes.
| taeric wrote:
| This is something I would honestly expect if you try and get
| cheaper from market pressure.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Some of it is that "legacy" products often involve more
| difficult engineering than people think. Circa 1980 this bus
| design was a notorious failure in NYC:
|
| https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php/Grumman_Flxible_870
|
| Buses get shaken really hard.
| taeric wrote:
| It is amusing/depressing to consider this as getting
| punished for having expensive engineering to avoid
| failures. If you do put in more engineering to get a more
| robust solution, you wind up not hitting the expensive
| failures and people start to assume you just spent more
| money in engineering than you needed to.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Coincidentally, it was just a couple weeks ago that a
| (non-technical, relatively younger) family member made a
| point me that Y2K was completely overblown.
|
| Sigh.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It worked back then because labor was expensive, because
| unions were waning, but still strong in the 80's. If
| labor is expensive, you make sure to do it right once.
|
| Nowadays with spending power way down, it may in fact be
| more "efficient" to get something out quick, and have
| frequent repairs. If you hit the expensive failure...
| welp, just throw it out and make a new one.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm not sure that is the reason, honestly. Used to, the
| government could spend a TON of money with relatively
| little resistance. Even programs that did get a lot of
| resistance could still be done without worrying about the
| political capital of fighting people that were largely on
| your side.
|
| At the federal level, this was somewhat easy to do,
| because the vast majority of government spending would go
| to domestic recipients. Yes, we were spending a lot, but
| local places would see and could celebrate in the
| results.
|
| At some point, though, we switched to the idea that
| taxation is punitive. And we stopped taking pride in big
| things the government can do. Quite the contrary, people
| are still convinced the F22 is bad. Meanwhile, many of us
| still revere the SR-71 as a beautiful thing. (Which, I
| mean, it is.)
| hamandcheese wrote:
| > Buses get shaken really hard.
|
| In America they do, since we don't take care of our roads.
| tdeck wrote:
| 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.
| roryirvine wrote:
| 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?
| tdeck wrote:
| I'm not sure? Perhaps the shocks are different, or the seats
| are just harder, or perhaps I'm imagining it.
| notatoad wrote:
| in my experience the rattle is usually from the fittings
| inside the bus, not the bus itself - mounting brackets for
| information screens or advertising panels, seatbelts on the
| accessible seating, that sort of thing. and part of the
| rattle is just down to under-use - a bus with all the seats
| filled shakes less, because the suspension is tuned for a
| full bus not an empty one.
|
| one of the buses i ride frequently has a ski rack installed
| in it that looks like a homemade contraption, and it rattles
| like crazy.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I once complained to Transport for London when a bus I was
| using regularly was rattling so much it made me feel ill.
|
| They said the driver can change gear (put it in neutral?)
| which reduces the rattle, and they are supposed to do this,
| but some drivers don't bother.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| The rattling I find on my TfL route is whilst it is moving.
| However I do think they are nearly the oldest busses in
| London 2008
| xnx wrote:
| Ultimately due to a lack of transit competition. Municipal
| transit will be bloated and inefficient on every level because no
| amount of failure will put them out of business. Indeed, most
| agencies' main goal is to increase budget (any increase in
| service or customer satisfaction is incidental) because more
| budget equals bigger projects and more staff which is more
| prestigious and higher paying.
| savanaly wrote:
| I'm with you at heart, but experience says government owned
| transit works just fine and even great in other countries.
| What's their secret sauce?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Perception, maybe? My local transit agency seems to do pretty
| well. There will always be critics, but they don't seem
| unnecessarily bloated, the vehicles are well maintained and
| clean, etc. Not any different than a typical bus in, for
| example, UK. And I would caution that if you think everybody
| other than the US does government-owned transit very well,
| you may be focusing in a small subset of wealthy first world
| countries.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Other countries provide transit as a transportation service
| for all. US politicians and voters view it as a charity for
| the temporarily carless.
|
| All the other issues are downstream of this mindset.
| xnx wrote:
| Historically denser cities.
| frollogaston wrote:
| I'm guessing that unlike here, some of those places _need_
| buses, and they simply can 't afford any waste.
| taeric wrote:
| The idea that you can leverage competition to build public
| infrastructure things feels dubious, to me. Will try to take a
| dive on some of that literature.
|
| At face value, though, public infrastructure is largely the sort
| of thing that enables many things with no obvious stakeholder
| that could have done it themselves. Certainly not in a way that
| would have an easy path to profits for the infrastructure.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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 bus route are the driver's labor. The
| other half needs to pay for maintenance, the cost of the bus, and
| all the other overhead.
| esafak wrote:
| I'm hearing you say we should have self-driving buses... which
| is feasible since their route is fixed.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Bus driver also does things like trigger ramp for handicapped
| people, strap in wheelchairs securely, answer questions about
| the route, and security surveillance.
| bluGill wrote:
| None of those should be needed. Get more people riding and
| they take care of security.
|
| wheelchairs are hard - but the driver strapping them in is
| robbing everyone else of their valuable time so we need a
| better soultion anyway
| Symbiote wrote:
| Every bus in Copenhagen has a button next to the door to
| lower the wheelchair ramp, but I have never seen anyone
| use it. I've never seen a wheelchair on a bus.
|
| The metro and suburban trains have level boarding (the
| platform is at exactly the same level as the floor of the
| train so it's very easy for a wheelchair user to wheel
| themselves in). I've still only seen wheelchairs users on
| these trains once or twice.
|
| I suspect wheelchair users prefer to call the disability
| taxi service. It's free for wheelchair users and blind
| people [1]. I don't know if this service is more or less
| expensive to provide than adapting buses and trains, but
| it is probably easier for everyone.
|
| [1, in Danish]
| https://www.moviatrafik.dk/flexkunde/flexhandicap
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That's relatively similar to how my local (US)
| municipality handles disabled passengers. All of the big
| infrastructure supports wheelchairs, but it is only
| occasionally used. Disabled people are served by mini-
| buses which operate point-to-point and charge them the
| same fare they'd pay for the big bus.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Wheelchairs, sometimes multiple, are on Chicago buses all
| the time. Also rolling grocery trolleys, walkers
| (especially for dialysis patients where they have a
| medical functions) and also old people whose legs don't
| work so good and need the bus lowered.
| cogman10 wrote:
| This honestly makes a lot of sense, particularly because
| the number of people that need wheelchairs is so much
| smaller than the general population.
|
| I visit hospitals pretty frequently and while it's not
| never that I see someone in a wheelchair, it's not every
| day and it's definitely not a majority of the visitors.
|
| When I'm out and about in public, I basically never see
| wheelchair users.
|
| It makes sense to simply have a taxi service instead. Far
| more convenient for the wheelchair user and you don't
| need to retrofit every bus with wheelchair access.
| xjlin0 wrote:
| Taking a look at NYC or SF bus, are you sure that more
| riders solve security issues?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yes, this is simply a well known fact.
|
| You can look up the NYPD report on crime for the month of
| june the total amount of reported crime was 427 for all
| forms of transport (metro, bus, etc). 3.6 million people
| use public transport in NYC daily.
|
| No matter where you are, you'll never drive that number
| to 0. But if you wanted to make it better then you'd stop
| positioning the police to catch turnstile jumpers and you
| start positioning police to ride public transport during
| low ridership times to prevent incident.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >the driver strapping them in is robbing everyone else of
| their valuable time
|
| Oh so we're now fine putting more of our tax dollars into
| specialized disability services? If our time is more
| valuable, this is a steal.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| It's paying either way. I'd rather pay with money.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm the same. When brought up for policy, the results
| tend to be very disappointing, though.
| cyberax wrote:
| You can have a fleet of specialized self-driving taxis for
| people with disabilities. They can have articulated ramps
| or other special accommodations.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You could have trams and trains with level boarding which
| helps people who don't have disabilities too, costs less,
| takes less space in the city, makes less noise, needs
| less maintenance, and moves more people.
| cyberax wrote:
| Except that they don't cost less. And are more
| inconvenient, especially if you can't move a lot. And
| they're slower, and will require you to make a transfer.
| And don't run at night.
|
| But otherwise,yeah. Sure.
| cyberax wrote:
| Once you have self-driving, you don't _need_ buses.
|
| Large buses are fundamentally inefficient, they can never be
| made competitive compared to cars. And the main source of
| inefficiency is the number of stops and fixed routes.
|
| You can easily solve all the transportation problems with
| mild car-pooling. Switching buses and personal cars to
| something like 8-person minibuses will result in less
| congestion and about 2-3 times faster commutes than the
| status quo. Only large dense hellscapes like Manhattan will
| be an exception.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Yeah I remember once doing the math, and it takes a
| relatively high level of ridership before a bus (or train)
| reaches the per-passenger efficiency of something like a
| Civic Hybrid carrying three passengers. We have a number of
| routes in my local area that I think could be more quickly
| and economically served by replacing the full size bus with
| something much smaller.
| bluGill wrote:
| general rule of thumb is 5 passangers for a but to break
| even. Now a civic is a smaller car so it will be better,
| and you specified 3 passanges whes single occupant is by
| far more likely - even with those unrealistic assumption
| a typical bus will do well overall.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I don't disagree, the typical use case isn't great for
| the car, this was just a thought experiment for what it
| would look like to use an efficient, reliable passenger
| car as an alternative to buses.
| cyberax wrote:
| > general rule of thumb is 5 passangers for a but to
| break even.
|
| "Break even" how? A bus has a road footprint of about 15
| cars (it's more than the physical bus length because it
| also occupies the road during stops and is less
| maneuverable).
|
| 15 cars have the occupancy of about 25 people.
|
| > even with those unrealistic assumption a typical bus
| will do well overall.
|
| Nope. Buses absolutely fail in efficiency. They pollute
| WAY more than cars, and they have fundamental limitations
| like the frequency.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They also contribute to pollution when they are stopped
| and you have 10 cars idling behind them because there's
| no room to pass. Repeat every 2 blocks.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > 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 the footprint of a 12m long bus is 20m. At
| highway speeds their footprint is almost equivalent to
| cars.
|
| > it also occupies the road during stops
|
| I've never seen a bus block a busy city road. Either way
| this is an easily solvable problem stemming from poor
| design and lack of investment and not some inherent issue
| with this mode of transportation.
|
| > They pollute WAY more than cars
|
| Citation?
| wat10000 wrote:
| And since the route is fixed, maybe we could install guides
| rather than needing a complicated steering mechanism. Then
| replace inefficient tires with much more efficient metal
| wheels rolling on the guides....
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| And with that, we can scale it up and have multiple chains
| of these buses used for mass transport. Heck, in some
| fantasy land we can really speed up the bus and have it
| trek across the the continent in a few hours!
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And then we need to make a change to the route.... oops.
| phinnaeus wrote:
| No we don't. Put another one in if need arises.
| oblio wrote:
| Predictability has value.
|
| For example because "we need to make a change to the
| route" type people are around, your bus line can be taken
| away from you.
|
| Because tracks aren't moved as easily, people rely on
| them, plan around them and you get things like increased
| property values because (and overall higher quality of
| life, especially around tram lines) due to that.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| e: after looking at the numbers again, i was wrong.
| Zagreus2142 wrote:
| 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).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i think main thrust, you are right that the numbers are
| less extreme than i had recalled. SF (which i imagine is
| the top end) is $31-$47 range or so. i see lower ($25)
| for greyhound than you do, but frankly that seems
| unreasonably low so i think "salary.com" is not giving me
| solid numbers there.
| Zagreus2142 wrote:
| It's not starting $31-$47 it's $31 starting and as you
| build seniority and tenure you can get up to $47. https:/
| /careers.sf.gov/classifications/?classCode=9163&setId...
|
| Indeed shows an active listing in SF for Greyhound for
| the same amount as Seattle. Greyhound appears to have a
| single national salary scrolling through different
| cities.
| https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=ad2e68b167688669
| burkaman wrote:
| 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.
| nenenejej wrote:
| You could help set up the self driving bus for success.
| Make bus stops a clearway for other vehicles. In other
| words, if you stop there you get fined and possibly towed.
| Bus dashcam can help here.
|
| The bike rack is an excellent feature where US beats my
| country. Well done. I think you'd need a button to ask for
| more time. And a Tokyo-like culture of respect for this all
| to work.
| angmarsbane wrote:
| If/when we get to self-driving buses I'd like to see them
| with a security guard on board or someone like the train
| ticket guy. I wouldn't feel comfortable as a woman
| getting on driver-less bus with strangers without a bus
| representative there too. With existing buses, I've had
| bus drivers stop the bus and kick someone off who was
| creating a dangerous situation and I feel even just the
| presence of a bus driver kept some people's behavior in
| check.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Probably true, but those are accounted for differently, and
| (I'd speculate) that public transit labor costs convert tax
| dollars into economic activity as efficiently as the route can
| possibly operate given the constraints on the rest of the
| system. The lower the overhead to buying busses and the more
| reliably you can run them, along with making them more usable
| by your regional population, the more efficiently you're moving
| people to their jobs and the more of the tax dollars allocated
| to transit can into the pool that's going into the economy.
|
| All the busses and tools required for maintenance are capital
| assets amortized and expensed over years, while the roads and
| the other infrastructure are hugely expensive and are rarely
| used as efficiently as they can be.
| mcflubbins wrote:
| I wonder if they take into account the fact that if there are
| no bus routes (or less of them) there is a certain population
| of people that won't be able to work, and those worker pay
| taxes and put money back into the economy. Probably impossible
| to know what the effect is in total and I wouldn't be surprised
| if its not part of the TCO formula.
| logifail wrote:
| > about half your costs are the bus driver
|
| (Genuine question) is this true around the globe, or is that
| US-specific?
|
| We were in Portugal over the summer and travelled with Flixbus
| (for the first time ever) to get from Porto to Lisbon. Were
| impressed by the high-quality service and great value for
| money. Wonder how much the driver makes per hour?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > We were in Portugal
|
| Notably, Portugal has the lowest income, by far, of any
| Western European country. I would expect their bus drivers
| make _considerably_ less than equivalent bus drivers in the
| US.
| bluGill wrote:
| US - though richer countries arounde the world have wages
| close to the us. Portugal as the other reply said will have
| different numbers. Still labor is going to be a large factor.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's true in developed and developing countries, it's
| probably not true in all poor countries. I'd guess the driver
| makes for a larger share of the cost in Portugal than in the
| US.
|
| But the one most important factor defining the total cost by
| trip is the number of passengers by trip. If 60 people all
| show up to pay the driver's daily salary, it gets quite
| cheap.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Those services are pretty different to local bus routes -
| people book ahead, tickets aren't covered by student passes
| or subsidized by employers, people care a lot more about
| comfort and are much less likely to be daily riders, etc.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| snip
| balozi wrote:
| Federal subsidies don't stop at paying for much of the bus
| purchase costs, they are also paying for much of the roads and
| bridges the busses run on. Subsides cover of the operating
| costs, especially labor and energy. And at the very end, the
| reason most localities are able to offer free rides or very low
| cost rides is because federal dollars are subsidizing the final
| ride fares.
| jlhawn wrote:
| One of the issues that AC Transit (SF East Bay bus agency) has is
| that it purchased a lot of Hydrogen Fuel Cell busses which have
| issues which dramatically impact their reliability. It's also
| very expensive technology. There's a decent argument that public
| agencies _should_ invest in early emerging technologies like that
| but the costs should not be borne by the transit agency alone, at
| the cost of poor service for its riders.
| dayvid wrote:
| Worth watching Modern MBA on the inefficiencies of transit in
| USA. Detailed analysis and comparison against Asian, European and
| Latin American systems along with private and government run
| operations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ3LSNXwZ2Y
| bryceacc wrote:
| unbelievably in depth channel, love all of the local business
| interviews (from other videos with restaurants and such)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Repeating the oft-cited but questionable assertion that car
| companies dismantled city rail systems makes me uncertain about
| how trustworthy the rest of their claims are. Though they did
| mention that the US is the most wealthy nation in the world --
| did they later offer an opinion whether that would still be
| true had we approached public transit and health care subsidies
| the same way European countries did?
| Aunche wrote:
| Modern MBA videos are like ChatGPT. They sound reasonable
| when he's talking about something you don't know, but you'll
| notice him getting basic facts wrong in topics that you're
| familiar with. For example, he diagnoses the growth of public
| storage as people from single family homes to apartments in
| big cities and having no place to store their things, citing
| that America's urbanization rate has increased. However, the
| increased urbanization was actually driven by the growth of
| suburbs and actually, home sizes actually significantly
| increased during that period.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| I would also love to know the real reason why US manufacturing
| seems to be so much more costly than it is anywhere else, even
| after adjusting for wage differences.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's not that drastic after wage differences, but bringing
| manufacturing costs down requires efficient, reliable supply
| lines. Nothing in the US has been that way for decades given
| the incentive structure of corporate America.
| klooney wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| There's also a bunch of PE money in the space for specialized
| vehicles, leading to the usual consequences. Fire trucks are the
| canonical example. Shittier trucks that take 3x longer to get and
| are dramatically less reliable.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| There are about as many concrete trucks as there are fire
| trucks in the US (and like fire trucks some of the fleet is
| purpose built and some of the fleet is specialty bodies on
| normal-ish trucks) and they don't have comparable problems with
| PE buying the manufacturing up.
|
| I think there's more to it than just evil PE
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm on a city e&a board. A couple of PE groups have rolled up
| the remaining fire truck manufacturers. 3 companies own 75%
| of the market. This is a well known issue... Google away and
| there's lots to read about. I know nothing about cement
| mixers.
|
| A rig that was $500k in 2010 is $2-2.5M now. That's "cheap"
| --- volunteer fire companies tend to pimp up the trucks
| (usually they are paid via grant), cities are cheap on
| capital spend.
|
| It's a squeeze play as if you don't keep the trucks up to
| date with modern gear, insurers will raise homeowners
| premiums. Bad look for the mayor.
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| >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.
|
| The issue here appears to be: Why is SORTA's purchasing so
| incompetent that they are buying 17 busses for the price of 35?
| They are over double the price of RTD.
|
| > That same year, Singapore's Land Transport Authority also
| bought buses. Their order called for 240 fully electric vehicles
| -- which are typically twice as expensive as diesel ones in the
| US. List price: Just $333,000 each.
|
| Singapore has a very efficient, highly trained, highly educated,
| highly paid administrative staff, and their competency is what is
| being shown here. They thought to get a reduction in price
| because of the large number of busses they are ordering.
|
| One solution the author doesn't point out is that Federal funds
| often come coupled with a large amount of bureaucratic red tape.
| It could be cheaper in the long run to have more tax collection
| and expenditure at the local level, and not rely as much on
| federal grants.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| We also don't know much about these so called purchasing
| contracts either.
|
| For example. do they contain sustainment services, maintenance
| equipment, storage facilities, or other sourcing requirements?
|
| When using federal funds, you're generally required to purchase
| all American products, I remember trying to furnish an office
| with just two desks and four chairs (nothing fancy), and the
| initial cost estimates were over six thousand dollars. When we
| acquired private funding, we were able to get everything under
| two thousand, you can see the same pricing with Zoom hardware
| as a service leasing prices as well, they're leasing some
| equipment almost at twice the cost due (as far as I know) to
| all American sourcing.
|
| I'm not questioning the sourcing restrictions, but trying to
| point out that it's a little more than the education level of
| the staff only.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| All the contract stuff is too muddled to even consider
| debating online.
|
| I'd start with one HUGE obvious waste. Why don't the buses
| anywhere have some sort of uber style pickup. My point. I see
| countless buses running empty all the time through the day
| where I live outside of busy hours. It is so depressing to
| watch 3 empty busses pull up to an empty stop to not pick
| anyone up then do it again and again and again.. I was once
| told it cost something like $250+ every time an empty bus
| drives one direction on its empty route. And there are
| hundreds of busses that do this for hours each day. Just so
| in case someone is there they can be picked up.
|
| It seems like a dynamic system for determining where where
| people that need the bus are would be a massive saving. Or
| really just changing to a taxi style system only using buses
| during rush hours. I think some cities are actually
| experimenting with this.
|
| Someone is gonna come at me about the reliability scheduling
| of transport for underprividged. But they have never actually
| rode a bus route so they don't know that the buses are as
| reliably late as they are on time in 90% of cities. This
| change would likely improve scheduling for people that need
| it.
| SpicyUme wrote:
| There are some variable pickup transit services, but you
| may not see them because of when/where they go. I know
| around me there are zones where you can call for pickup and
| they use small shuttle buses. I think they drop of within
| the zone or at other bus stops, but I haven't used the
| service so I'm not sure.
|
| My preferred way to solve bus lane reliability would be to
| shut down streets or lanes to only allow buses.
| milesvp wrote:
| I've thought about this a lot, and wonder if the last mile
| problem could be lessened with an uber style pickup you
| suggest. I have a civil engineer relative who follows this
| stuff better than I do, and he says all the pilot programs
| he's seen (in the US) tend to be wildly unprofitable.
|
| That said, I think that some program like this is essential
| to bootstrapping a really good transit system. The last
| mile problem really does stop a lot of would be commuters
| and is a huge, largely hidden cost, in regional transit
| planning. You could have fewer, more reliable trunks, that
| can run less reliably after core commuting hours, all
| because you have ways of alleviating the pain associated
| with difficulty getting to out of the way places. This
| allows people to make life decisions that they might not
| otherwise be able to make. And once you have a solid core,
| you can continue to grow it, by continuing to encourage
| long term ridership. Couple this with increasingly
| aggressive zoning changes to allow for density, and I think
| you could really grow out a transit system in 10-20 years.
|
| But this is a fantasy of mine. It would likely be wildly
| unpopular to run an unprofitable program long enough to
| make all of this possible, and would probably only work in
| regions that have the potential for good transit anyways.
| You'd also need a large cohort of YIMBYs, that while
| currently growing in many regions, aren't guaranteed to
| still vote that way in a decade when they have more to
| lose.
| treis wrote:
| Most bus systems in the US are wildly unprofitable and
| quite costly. My local system is just under $10 per
| unlinked trip (i.e. get one on bus). That makes getting
| from point A to point B not much cheaper to provide than
| Uber because it will usually involve a transfer.
|
| Everyone would be better off in an Uber type system but
| there's no appetite or budget to subsidize rides at the
| level people would use it
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| Yes, they're empty, but it's also a catch 22 because it
| takes urbanization, frequent bus services, and a lot of
| time for people to adjust to it. Anyone who spent enough
| time in Europe can tell you about how efficient,
| convenient, and efficient a bus network can get. Also, most
| people go to work, so buses tend to be very busy in the
| morning and at shift changes etc.
|
| It's not magic though, there are a lot of places where
| buses simply will not work and we need to find better ways
| to improve mobility. I don't have the slightest idea how,
| it's a generational effort.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| We solved that several generations ago with cars.
| kuschku wrote:
| Considering the amount of traffic jams, wasted space due
| to parking lots, and lost third places, I'd argue
| "solved" isn't exactly accurate.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Traffic jams are solved by congestion pricing. Parking
| lot congestion can be solved the same way with pay-
| parking lots. I don't know what cars have to do with
| "lost third places".
| estebank wrote:
| Congestion pricing works when there are alternatives. If
| you have both _no_ public transport _and_ congestion
| pricing, what you have is only increased tax collection
| with no behavioral change.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| That's false because everyone has alternatives (you can
| stay home, for example). Raising the price will always on
| margin reduce trips.
| Jensson wrote:
| How do you get to work when you stay home?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Just be a rich tech worker with a remote job /s
| baggy_trough wrote:
| If you have to go to work to keep your job, then staying
| home isn't a great alternative. But there are others!
| Carpooling for example. Or, maybe you're one of the
| people that will keep driving. But not everyone is like
| you, and some won't.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Someone is gonna come at me about the reliability
| scheduling of transport for underprividged. But they have
| never actually rode a bus route so they don't know that the
| buses are as reliably late as they are on time in 90% of
| cities. This change would likely improve scheduling for
| people that need it.
|
| So your justification for not having reliably scheduling
| comes down to "well we never had reliable scheduling", and
| your solution is to make the schedule more chaotic?
|
| Why do we just accept and the broken windows in order to
| try and make new buildings, instead of fixing the windows?
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Because buses are shared and follow a fixed-route and can't
| support an on-demand model. It may take a bus over an hour
| to complete the entire route.
|
| Would you rather have to call for a bus that might take an
| hour (or might take 2 minutes) to get to your stop when you
| call it, or would you like to know that it comes at 4:45,
| 5:45 and 6:45 so you can plan ahead to know when to get to
| your stop.
|
| (failing to run on schedule is a separate issue, but on-
| demand rides won't solve that). In cities, one solution to
| that problem is to run at such frequent headways that a
| late bus doesn't matter -- when I lived in SF, I had 2 busy
| bus routes that could take me to work, during peak hours a
| bus ran every 6 minutes, so even if they weren't on
| schedule I didn't care since I knew another would be along
| soon.
|
| If you want me to ride the bus to work every morning and
| home every evening, you still have to have buses in mid-day
| so I can go home early if I need to. Even if those buses
| are mostly empty.
| decimalenough wrote:
| > Why don't the buses anywhere have some sort of uber style
| pickup.
|
| They do.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-responsive_transport
| throw7 wrote:
| So in my area, believe it or not, there is experiments with
| uber-style point-to-point pickup/dropoff and electric car
| short term "rentals".
|
| https://www.cdta.org/flex https://drivecdta.org/
|
| The few flex areas are small and I've never tried the
| electric rentals.
|
| Every once in awhile I do use the bus system to check out
| how things are going and I get how depressive an empty bus
| is... I was just on an empty bus to the airport (which I
| have to take two routes to get there, another tough
| negative to solve).
| ojbyrne wrote:
| One of the interesting things I read in the article is that
| the industry is a duopoly, and one of the companies is a
| Canadian company, New Flyer Industries. I went on a tour of
| their factory many years ago, and they told us they do most
| of the assembly of the busses there, then ship them to
| Minnesota where the engine was installed. They did that in
| order to meet US content requirements.
| SpicyUme wrote:
| 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 designed to go through the tunnel under downtown on
| battery power to avoid causing air quality issues in a confined
| space.
| https://bsky.app/profile/noahsbwilliams.com/post/3lx4hqvf5q2...
|
| Maybe SORTA wanted more customization on the interior of their
| buses? I'm not sure but in the last year I've been riding buses
| to work much more than before and I've been interested in the
| different seating configurations on buses from the same service
| and route. That shouldn't explain $8 million in differnce but
| I'm sure that semi custom work isn't cheap. A friend worked on
| airline interiors which might be reasonably analogous, I wonder
| what the cost for say Lufthansa seats/upholstery is vs
| Southwest?
| cenamus wrote:
| 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)
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| No, they certainly don't all come with AC and heat.
| decimalenough wrote:
| I haven't seen a non-AC bus in ages, even in developing
| countries.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| My public school buses in a decent Midwestern suburb had
| no AC cooling as recently as a decade ago (only heat,
| since heat comes free with an engine). I wouldn't expect
| them to have AC cooling today.
|
| Buses you pay directly to ride may be a bit different,
| but I'd also expect AC isn't ubiquitous in those, or
| wasn't until very recently.
| hibikir wrote:
| 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.
| goalieca wrote:
| In Vancouver the climate generally does not need them.
| Some days it gets hot and those suck.
| dmbche wrote:
| The vast majority of buses in Montreal, Canada do not
| have AC. Crack a window in the summer.
|
| Does have heat in the winter though.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > Seattle has buses with electric trolley lines above, and
| buses that were designed to go through the tunnel under
| downtown on battery power to avoid causing air quality issues
| in a confined space.
|
| And then the city government, in its infinite wisdom, decided
| to shut the tunnel down and make it light rail-only, forcing
| the buses up onto the surface and clogging up the street
| grid.
| SpicyUme wrote:
| I go back and forth on that, the bus tunnel was useful. But
| a tunnel with 3(4?) stops seems like a good place for a
| train of some sort. I guess the buses are why there are no
| center stops in there? It seems like a missed opportunity.
| Not sure about the history of the tunnel but there were
| tracks there years ago so they must have planned to put
| trains in eventually.
| vkou wrote:
| 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 was bad enough when it
| affected end-of-line service, but would be an absolute
| nightmare when it affects middle-of-line service.
|
| Sorry, downtown single-occupant vehicle drivers, you're
| just going to have to deal with the consequences of
| spending tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars on your
| choice of the least space-efficient, gridlock-inducing form
| of transportation.
| axiolite wrote:
| 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.
| itsmek wrote:
| 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?
| MrMorden wrote:
| Only because the current mayor hates non-drivers and is
| sandbagging bus lanes. Seattle's buses will become a lot
| faster in January once the Wilson administration starts
| putting bus lanes everywhere.
| vkou wrote:
| 1. Priority bus lanes are solving that problem.
|
| 2. If getting through downtown by bus is slow, getting
| through it by car isn't any faster.
|
| Anyways, Seattle's transit problem isn't bad downtown bus
| service, it's godawful spoke-and-last-mile coverage,
| which eviscerates ridership, makes the overall network
| less efficient, and forms a negative-feedback-loop that
| blocks transit improvements.
|
| Nobody likes sitting around for half an hour waiting for
| a bus that will take them to another bus.
| SpicyUme wrote:
| It is too bad the Rapidride R line is so far away from
| being finished. I think it would be good to have it and
| allow for more E/W routes possibly between there and the
| train. Having regular, quick bus service on the rapidride
| lines makes connections easier to decide on the bus.
|
| Not many people per bus are needed for a bus to be better
| than the equivalent number of cars. And no, carpooling is
| not a useful option to rely on to reduce the impact. At
| least not until some of the occupancy rules are enforced.
| cwmma wrote:
| < 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.
|
| Off the top of my head, road salt, used in the northern areas
| of America to melt snow can cause corrosion of metal pieces on
| the underside of the bus. So Chicago or Boston might need to
| take that into account but Miami probably doesn't.
| bradfa wrote:
| Yearly fluid film or woolwax treatment solves the rust
| concern in salt states. Roughly $1k/year/bus in operating
| expense. Schools do this to their buses already, it's totally
| common.
| closeparen wrote:
| San Francisco continues to use trolleybuses (powered by
| overhead wires) after the most of the country has moved onto
| hybrid and battery-electric vehicles because the energy demands
| from climbing hills are beyond at least the earlier generations
| of batteries.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I don't know much about bus procurement, but I'm not sure I
| believe you just based on the fact that you've ridden on lots
| of busses.
|
| I'd expect that things like tire choice, engine, and
| transmission choices could be dependent on weather and
| geography. I'd expect any expensive differences to show up
| there, and I don't really see how a passenger would gain much
| insight.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > Singapore has a very efficient, highly trained, highly
| educated, highly paid administrative staff,
|
| Or it's just literal economy of scale. 10 buses, 17 buses, vs
| 240, that difference changes economics completely.
|
| You will be buying 500 of headlights, little under 1k tyres and
| wheels, couple thousands of seats, etc. Those are all whole lot
| numbers. That will save tons of overheads.
| freeopinion wrote:
| 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 there
| are legitimate reasons for one product to cost more than its
| twin. The U.S. should not allow twin products to be sold on the
| same shelf if one was not manufactured under the same rules as
| the domestic product. If all three of these products played
| under the same rules, then we can point fingers. Without that
| you are just ridiculing the company who knowingly takes a hit
| for purchasing from responsible vendors. If that is what you
| are doing, shame on you.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > Are they required by law to treat the water from their
| cooling towers before they dump it in the river?
|
| Why would a bus manufacturer have a cooling system that takes
| in water from a river and discharges it back into a river?
| I'm not aware of any bus manufacturers operating a coal or
| natural gas fired power plant or smelting steel and aluminum,
| but perhaps I'm just unaware though.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The 2 bus contracts were with the same manufacturer, which is
| headquartered in California.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Thank you. That's informative. What about the third
| contract?
| snthd wrote:
| Similar data on police vehicles could be interesting.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Firefighting vehicles too, more expensive than European
| counterparts by a factor of 10.
| snthd wrote:
| Started googling and found this:
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/americas-new-police-cars-are-taxpay...
|
| >...features specifically designed for policing come standard
| including Police Perimeter Alert, a technology that detects
| moving _treats_ around a vehicle and automatically activates
| the rear camera, sounds a chime...
|
| Anyway...
| potato3732842 wrote:
| They're protecting and serving so well they're worried about
| getting jumped.
| logifail wrote:
| Ever since I first looked at the Oshkosh NGDV for the USPS I
| couldn't help but wonder WHY there was a need for a custom
| vehicle?*
|
| European parcel delivery firms and postal systems (Deutsche Post
| DHL, La Poste, Royal Mail, PostNL and all the non-legacy
| competitors) generally do not commission purpose-built vehicles,
| they buy off the shelf small vans and light commercial vehicles.
|
| * of course I do know why, "because jobs and politics"...
| pkaye wrote:
| The USPS is an US federal agency. At one time it even had a
| cabinet level position though not so any more. Its not private
| like in most countries. At the scale they buy these vehicles,
| it probably makes sense to get a custom one. Even Amazon has
| custom EVs built for them.
| wolrah wrote:
| > Even Amazon has custom EVs built for them.
|
| Eh, sort of. Amazon partnered with Rivian to help design the
| EDV and had an initial exclusivity agreement as long as they
| ordered a certain number of them, but this agreement has
| since been terminated so anyone can buy them now. The USPS
| actually tested one in early 2024.
| pkaye wrote:
| Its not clear what your point is? Both USPS and Amazon got
| heavily customized vehicles made for them. In the US the
| USPS is a government agency so any kind of government
| contracts get heavily securitized by the public but nobody
| cares what trucks Fedex and Amazon buy just like in
| countries where the mail service is privatized.
| wolrah wrote:
| How common are individual streetside mailboxes elsewhere in the
| world. That's really the only thing where I could see a real
| need for specialized vehicles for, otherwise for neighborhoods
| that have on-foot delivery or centralized boxes I totally agree
| any ordinary delivery van should be just as good for USPS as it
| is for UPS, FedEx, Amazon, etc.
| p_l wrote:
| USPS has drastically different approach to mail deliver _and
| pickup_ than most countries. Including as mentioned street-
| level mailboxes for both pickup and delivery, and general idea
| that really rural mail gets delivered direct still.
|
| In comparison, polish postal system although it's pretty much
| standard european approach:
|
| - postal trucks deliver mail _between post offices_
|
| - in cities and more built-up rural areas, on-foot postman
| delivers mail from post office
|
| - in very sparse rural areas or for households far from village
| center, mailboxes are placed in centralized location and you
| have to go to pick up them on your own.
|
| Mail pickup is done from dedicated sending boxes usually on
| outside of post offices, sometimes one might be placed further
| away in rural areas. No curb-side pickup.
|
| Such differences mean that normal cargo vehicles can be easily
| used between post offices, and even for rural areas you arrive,
| park once, handle unloading, and drive again, instead of
| constantly starting and stopping to access road-side mailboxes.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The frame and overall design of these buses is not custom (and
| often changes little year to year). The drivetrain,
| accessories, and so on are selected from options.
| RobKohr wrote:
| "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 eat buffet.
|
| The second you detach the consumer from the price of something,
| even through an intermediary such as health insurance, that is
| when they stop caring about how much something costs, and so the
| price jumps.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Shouldn't insurance care about the pricing though? I get why
| federal govt isn't sensitive, given 0 competition.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Insurance profit is limited to a percentage of what they pay
| out. So the more they pay, the more money they make.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Oh, that's important info. Also such a rule suggests that
| health insurance isn't a competitive market.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| There's no such thing as a "competitive market" in the
| real world.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Yes there is.
| itsmek wrote:
| Global commodities are not competitive?
| estearum wrote:
| Also the largest insurers increasingly own the doctors
| you're seeing too.
|
| Also the pharmacy you get your drugs from.
|
| Also the entity that negotiates prices between pharma
| companies and your insurer.
|
| More healthcare consumption = better, across the board
| hibikir wrote:
| Even when it's not the insurer, it's at least a hospital.
| Many a doctor around me that used to have a private
| practice sold to one of the hospital chains, as they
| promised more money than by owning, solely due to
| superior collective action advantages. A large insurer
| can bully a private practice into cutting costs, but a
| hospital network that handles 40% of ERs in the metro
| area? The insurance company can lose. So everyone makes
| more money but the people paying insurance.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > More healthcare consumption = better, across the board
|
| no
|
| more _paid money_ for less healthcare consumed = better
| for insurence
|
| thus all the declined treatments
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| wow, why would they cap it that way? that makes no sense.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| If the feds are mandating USA manufacture in order to secure
| the funding for the muni.. then it just really amounts to
| welfare for the bus manufacturer.
|
| Which is probably the right way to support american
| manufacturing.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| massive proportions of utilization come from govt subsidized
| plans
| foolswisdom wrote:
| As noted by sibling comments, the arm of the Healthcare
| company that wons the doctor's office wants to collect as
| much as possible, while the insurance arms are anyway capped
| at how much they can make. Incentives (conflict of interest)
| are towards paying more.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Governments of countries that have public health care
| generally _are_ price sensitive. The competition is from
| other governmental functions that need the budget.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Or how government bailouts go to corporations
| Y_Y wrote:
| 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...
| airstrike wrote:
| How about the ten thousand learning about "today's lucky ten
| thousand"?
| wyre wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| phil21 wrote:
| 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.
| theologic wrote:
| Throw in confirmation bias
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias and you have
| a lot of inertia from changing. Not only do they not have the
| right info, but because they have invested in the ongoing
| solution, it is difficult to get any change going because
| humans tend to simply see everything as supporting their
| current viewpoint.
| trollbridge wrote:
| And watch out for troublesome agents who often propose
| themselves as the answer to the principal-agent problem they
| created in the first place.
| ericmcer wrote:
| It's even worse, I will use my healthcare just because it is
| free. I would feel like a moron not get my free physical,
| bloodwork and other labs every year. If it was $20 I wouldn't
| bother but its almost obligatory to take something "because its
| free".
|
| Once I learn something is free it is like I already own it, so
| now I don't get it if I take it, I lose it if I don't.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Preventative care is free because it saves a tremendous
| amount of money for the insurance company and physical and
| emotional hardship for yourself by catching bad things early.
| nickff wrote:
| Your view is a commonly-held one, and makes a lot of sense;
| unfortunately there is very little support for it. One data
| point to the contrary is the Oregon Health Care Study,
| which showed that 'free' preventative care increased
| healthcare spending, but did not improve lifespan or reduce
| long-term cost.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I'm not sure they determined that it did not improve
| lifespans. Here's some snippets from the Wikipedia
| article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_he
| alth_experim...):
|
| > On average, Medicaid coverage increased annual medical
| spending by approximately $1,172 relative to spending in
| the control group. The researchers looked at mortality
| rates, but they could not reach any conclusions because
| of the extremely low death rate of the general population
| of able-bodied Oregon adults aged 19 to 64.
|
| > In the first year after the lottery, Medicaid coverage
| was associated with higher rates of health care use, a
| lower probability of having medical debts sent to a
| collection agency, and higher self-reported mental and
| physical health. In the 18 months following the lottery,
| researchers found that Medicaid increased emergency
| department visits.
|
| > Approximately two years after the lottery, researchers
| found that Medicaid had no statistically significant
| impact on physical health measures, but "it did increase
| use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes
| detection and management, lower rates of depression, and
| reduce financial strain."
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| But it only looked at two year outcomes, yet you made a
| claim about long-term health and cost outcomes.
|
| For example, it found that diagnoses and medication
| increased. If you are diagnosed with heart disease and
| you begin an intervention, you probably see no change in
| mortality in two years especially since it took decades
| for you to progress to that point in the first place.
| barchar wrote:
| In two years maybe you have a different insurance co
| though.
|
| Otoh this is why we invented reinsurance
| tehjoker wrote:
| Such a counterintuitive study, when there are highly
| motivated political actors trying to deprive people of
| social benefits, makes me highly skeptical. Catching bad
| things early is almost always better. Diabetes, cancer,
| heart disease, etc, cost hundreds of thousands to
| millions of dollars to treat caught late and prevent
| people from working or doing things they like to do, and
| mere thousands to treat early while preserving their
| quality of life.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Cancer, in particular, can be practically free to
| insurance if caught early. Colon and skin cancer are the
| poster children. Colon cancer can be treated in the
| process of doing the screening when caught early. And
| skin cancer is a pretty minor "just lop off that mole"
| procedure that also ends up being the treatment.
|
| Letting it grow and catching it when symptoms arise is
| terribly expensive. The chemo, surgery, scans, and
| frequent doctors visits are all crazy expensive.
|
| About the only way I could see preventative care not
| costing less is if you just let the people die and call
| it god's will rather than calling it a death that could
| have been prevented.
| theologic wrote:
| Another variation of this are GLP 1 drugs.
|
| _Obesity costs USA $1.75T
| (https://milkeninstitute.org/content-hub/news-
| releases/econom..., grossed up for inflation)
|
| _ Number of people that are obese: 100M
|
| Annual economic impact from obesity per person: $17,500
| per year
|
| GLP-1 "For All": $6,000 per year (assuming multiple
| vendors, and some will be over vs under)
|
| Savings: $11,500 per year per person.
|
| Economic impact: Around $1T
|
| This should free up around 3% of GDP for better uses of
| money rather than just fixing up people.
|
| Obviously, the devil is in the details, but the potential
| impact is so massive that it should be deeply studied.
| sagarm wrote:
| The study is looking only at healthcare spending and two-
| year outcomes, so it doesn't really address people's
| intuition that healthcare spending is lower in the long
| term with preventative care.
|
| That said preventative probably does result in more
| dollars being spent on healthcare; presumably
| significantly, if not completely, offset by economic
| benefits like increased productivity and quality-of-life
| benefits. Analyses that only look at the cost side of the
| equation IMO are unhelpful.
| johnQdeveloper wrote:
| Anecdotally, if I hadn't gotten tested as part of a long
| term physical I wouldn't know about stuff that would
| cause my body to fail much younger than it would
| otherwise and lead to an early death.
|
| So hey, at least in my case, it worked as the commonly
| held belief states.
|
| And that study doesn't look at multi-decade long term
| effects like diabetes, etc. where you need it for a
| decade (or longer!) untreated (or poorly managed) before
| it kills ya. But it still kills ya years early.
|
| So even the "raising rates of diabetes detection" in
| combination with your belief from that study proves you
| incorrect when people talk long term.
| barchar wrote:
| It's usually cheaper to die
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| It's not fee though is it. How many hours does it take do go
| somewhere and have a checkup? Almost certainly more than $20
| worth.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| These free things are preventative. If you take them, the
| insurance company expects you to need less healthcare in the
| future, so actually this is a good thing (and not a problem
| as in the op)!
| thegreatpeter wrote:
| Posts like these on Hacker News are quite interesting bc if
| this scenario comes up in any "left vs right" debate, it's
| _always_ shot down as a terrible concept and idea to keep the
| government out of it.
| marbro wrote:
| We need to shut down the government until buses and other
| wasteful borrowing and spending is eliminated. Local
| governments should pay for 100% of their buses rather than 20%.
| avar wrote:
| > The second you detach the consumer from the > price
| of something, even through an > intermediary such as
| health insurance, that > is when they stop caring about
| how much > something costs, and so the price jumps.
|
| In reality, this claim doesn't survive a cursory glance at the
| OECD's numbers for health expenditure per capita[1].
|
| You'll find that (even ignoring the outlier that is the US
| health care system) that in some countries where consumers bear
| at least some of the cost directly via mandatory insurance and
| deductibles, the spending per capita (and which survives a
| comparison with overall life expectancy etc.) is higher than in
| some countries where the consumer is even further detached from
| spending, via single-payer universal healthcare systems.
|
| Or, the other way around, it's almost like it's a very complex
| issue that resists reducing the problem to an Econ 101 parable.
|
| 1. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-
| gla...
| trollbridge wrote:
| If consumers actually directly paid the whole cost for health
| services (as opposed to a fixed price, like a $20 copay,
| etc.), the prices charged would become far more regular.
|
| An easy way to examine this is to compare the price of over-
| the-counter versus pharmaceuticals. If a third party weren't
| paying for them, the price would have to either come down to
| something affordable to the average person, or else the
| market for it would shrink to only the wealthy.
| avar wrote:
| I'm aware of your and the GP's claim, I'm saying it doesn't
| survive contact with reality.
|
| If you look at e.g. the per-dose price of insulin it's as
| low or lower in countries with single-payer universal
| systems, where someone requiring insulin is never going to
| have any idea what it even costs, because it's just
| something that's provided for them should they need it.
|
| In that case it's usually some centralized state purchaser
| that has an incentive to bring prices down, or a government
| that has an overall incentive to keep the inflation of its
| budgetary items down, which ultimately comes down to public
| elections etc.
|
| In any case, a _much more indirect_ mechanism than someone
| who 'd be directly affected paying the costs associated
| with the product, which directly contradicts this
| particular argument.
| barchar wrote:
| I mean if it's a strict 80/20 split the incentives are the same
| as a 0/100 split no?
| 1024core wrote:
| This reminds me of the "trash can fiasco" that went down in San
| Fracnsico.
|
| https://sfpublicworks.org/trashcanredesign
|
| TL;DR: San Francisco government decided to go with custom-
| designed, bespoke, artisanal public trash cans. Each can ended up
| coming in at around $20K.
|
| When, in fact, if you buy a typical run-of-the-mill public trash
| can that most other cities do, it would cost them less than
| $1000.
| avree wrote:
| You are conflating two things with that story. The prototypes
| cost $20,000. The designed can cost $3,000. Higher than your
| "$1,000" can, but it also had a bunch of "features". If you've
| ever worked at a hardware company, you probably know that the
| price of DVT units, or any prototype, ends up being
| significantly higher than the production unit.
| 1024core wrote:
| So you're saying the designed can cost 3X the COTS one.
| Similar idea to the story, no?
| Exoristos wrote:
| Isn't this kind of thing always tacitly by design? Federal and
| local funding streams diffuse throughout the economy.
| silexia wrote:
| Outsourcing is not a good solution, we should support our local
| manufacturers who have to follow our ethical rules on labor
| treatment, safety, and environmental damage. Outsourcing just
| allows the worst abuses to happen elsewhere. We should get rid of
| labor and environmental rules if we want to allow outsourcing.
| tclover wrote:
| Well, what did you expect? if competition is banned, they can
| churn out whatever, charge whatever they want, and it'll still
| get bought with tax money.
| ge96 wrote:
| One day when I needed to take the bus I realized it was free, you
| used to have to pay for the rides. I thought that was great to
| help people out in need, but then they reverted it...
| bgnn wrote:
| 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.
| balderdash wrote:
| 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.
| sweeter wrote:
| Who could've guessed that the "public private partnership" was
| extremely ineffective and only serves to funnel tax payer dollars
| to private owners while giving kick backs to politicians. Wow.
| Who knew.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| bulk price
|
| 200 buses equal cheaper buses, nothing surprise here
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