"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.
I'm convinced that a great majority of problems in the US these days fundamentally boils down to principal agent problems. The 2008 financial crisis is a great example. Once banks no longer kept mortgages on their own books, it just became a matter of time until that was going to blow up. The incentives change.
Your personal life is abundant with meaningful human activity that cannot at all be explained by money incentives. The principal agent problem has this same problem: once we stop talking about money, “interests” can be vague and overlapping, making the problem disappear with scrutiny.
To me, a great majority of problems in the US fundamentally boils down to people looking for markets and money where there aren’t any. Great examples include rising healthcare costs (what is the right price to pay for saving a child’s life, for example? Culturally, it’s basically unlimited!) whereas rising legal costs are NOT seen as a crisis (suing other people over BS grievances, unlike saving lives, is not compulsory); infrastructure investment (cars don’t make financial sense everywhere and everything all the time, but they’re REALLY cozy, so we will spend exorbitant amounts of money on infrastructure for them compared to everything else); the obesity crisis (eating feels GOOD, even if it costs EXORBITANT amounts of money); worsening education outcomes; lack of growth of alternatives to single family homes…
> To me, a great majority of problems in the US fundamentally boils down to people looking for markets and money where there aren’t any.
Your examples are mostly things where there are, though, e.g.:
> rising healthcare costs (what is the right price to pay for saving a child’s life, for example? Culturally, it’s basically unlimited!)
This is confusing value with cost. If you had to pay a million dollars to save a child's life, maybe that's worth it, but that's not the problem. The problem is that so often we could have saved the child's life for $100 but for various bad reasons it ends up being $100,000 instead, and the people getting the other $99,900 want to keep it that way.
> whereas rising legal costs are NOT seen as a crisis (suing other people over BS grievances, unlike saving lives, is not compulsory)
Isn't the problem with the rising legal costs mostly on the defense side? You can't prevent someone from filing an unmeritorious lawsuit against you, or avoid hiring compliance lawyers to tell you what to do to prevent that from happening, so it matters when those things get more expensive. But then the compliance lawyers and their lobbyists like it to get more expensive because they're the ones getting the money.
> infrastructure investment (cars don’t make financial sense everywhere and everything all the time, but they’re REALLY cozy, so we will spend exorbitant amounts of money on infrastructure for them compared to everything else)
People who hate cars say this but we mostly spend money on cars because everything is too spread out for mass transit, which brings us to this one:
> lack of growth of alternatives to single family homes
Markets are great at solving this. If it wasn't literally banned in most of the relevant places, developers would be replacing single family homes with higher density housing all over and people would be buying it.
> the obesity crisis (eating feels GOOD, even if it costs EXORBITANT amounts of money)
Government subsidizes the production of high fructose corn syrup, which does this:
I don't think I do. Are you going to run a bus every 15 minutes down a road that would have one passenger an hour? Mass transit isn't viable at the density of the suburbs but building higher density there is banned.
We've incentivized cities to develop around highways and the automobile infrastructure instead of building them for mass transit. You need cars because we build for cars.
It's not that we've incentivized cities to develop around highways, it's that we've prohibited them from doing anything other than that.
Zoning boards put a tiny little strip of commercial and high density residential in the downtown and then require the whole rest of the map to be single-family homes. At that point it doesn't even matter what the downtown actually looks like, people are still going to be in cars because it's the only way to get there from the suburbs.
These zoning board decisions were made largely to accommodate cars. For example, in many places, we can't have dense urban housing or commercial unless the developer pays to park all of the cars associated with the new development (so the cars don't consume public street parking). But this means we end up surrounding buildings with these giant parking lots which creates more space between each building, putting downward pressure on walking/transit and upward pressure on driving. This also means you need more lanes to accommodate the cars (the additional lanes also create more space between buildings and make pedestrian traffic considerably less desirable, putting more upward pressure on driving).
Tangentially, the additional length and width of roads as well as the traffic lights all constitute an increase in infrastructure costs while also reducing the amount of revenue generated per unit space (because so much more of the space is for streets and parking).
The space between buildings thing is a red herring. If you want an area full of tall buildings, there must be a significant amount of space between them to let in light and fresh air. You could hypothetically use that space for greenery or something instead of lanes and parking but you can't get rid of it and use it to increase density. Moreover, it isn't actually a density limit anyway because you can make the buildings taller instead of wider, and you can build a parking garage under the building rather than beside it.
The real thing minimum parking requirements do is increase cost, because building parking floors costs money. But that isn't nearly as much as the cost increase from zoning most of the map exclusively for single family homes, because that's the thing that makes the land expensive, and on top of that requires you to use 15+ story buildings in the limited area that allows them when you could have the same average density by using 3-5 story buildings over a wider area.
Moreover, you can't put the cart before the horse. If people currently live in the suburbs and arrive in cars, you can't expect them to walk before you allow anyone to build them housing within walking distance.
> The space between buildings thing is a red herring. If you want an area full of tall buildings, there must be a significant amount of space between them to let in light and fresh air.
First of all, I don't think anyone's goal is "an area full of tall buildings"; that's certainly not what I mean by "density" (although it is _one kind_ of density). Secondly, even in urban areas full of tall buildings, there's frequently much less space between buildings than a CostCo parking lot.
> Moreover, it isn't actually a density limit anyway because you can make the buildings taller instead of wider, and you can build a parking garage under the building rather than beside it.
Building vertically is expensive, and in many places land is cheaper, so it's easier to meet the legal requirement by surrounding the building with pavement than it is to build a parking garage beneath the structure. This is why you rarely see a Walmart with an underground parking garage (and when you do, it's usually in a dense city with more lax parking regulations).
> Moreover, you can't put the cart before the horse. If people currently live in the suburbs and arrive in cars, you can't expect them to walk before you allow anyone to build them housing within walking distance.
I think you're confused about what is being advocated. No one is suggesting we make everyone walk to work. I don't think that's a realistic outcome, and probably not a desirable one for many people (who wants to work close to a factory, airport, etc)? More importantly, relaxing parking requirements on developers doesn't make the existing parking lots go away, so it doesn't really affect the current crop of commuters; it just means that future suburban commuters will lean more on public transit to get to work.
You are right but in a roundabout way. It’s true that most problems in US can be explained by this but it’s also true that the west and US particularly are successful because they can bypass the principal agent problem to an extent.
You just have to look at India or Africa a bit to understand the severity to which this problem permeates day to day in these countries.
No matter how poorly one thinks of westerners and their leaders, it is clear that in general they can look beyond themselves and their immediate surroundings when optimising their impact.
The same cannot be said about Indians and other poor people from poor countries. Their optimisation lies solely on themselves or immediate family. This has consequences at every level and even at the political level.
It is just the case that the west and its leaders have had the luxury of choice and have only seen relative poverty but not absolute poverty for various reasons.
When your are poor and basic necessities are difficult to meet, its natural to optimize for self and not care about the big picture.
This is not correct. First, in crisis situations people tend to cooperate more, even though naive model predicts that people would act in self-interest. Second, there have been cases of countries that collectively decided not to be poor, and they stopped being poor once external pressure has been removed. Case in point is a huge part of Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
“America’s sophistication is reflected in the depth of its financial markets. It is unusually good at creating tradeable claims on the profits and revenues that its economy generates. In a more primitive system, these spoils would mostly accrue to the state or tycoons; in America, they back a vast range of financial assets.”
It takes more than just misaligned incentives to get a banking crisis -- you have to have structural corruption preventing the transfer of
the loss gradient back to the "misaligned" decision makers. It's somewhat disingenuous (or overly innocent) to reimagine the pathways which power structural corruption as "innocent ignorance in the face of bad incentives".
The real world has "actually bad" actors -- not just misaligned incentives.
> It takes more than just misaligned incentives to get a banking crisis -- you have to have structural corruption preventing the transfer of the loss gradient back to the "misaligned" decision makers.
Nah, you can do it just on the basis of information asymmetries.
Banks can sell mortgages. People think buying mortgages is safe, because banks don't loan money to people they don't think can pay it back, and even if they did, the mortgage is backed by the house so in the worst case you can foreclose and get back your principal. So lots of people buy mortgages.
Then banks figure out that it's easy to sell mortgages, and that if they sell them it doesn't matter that much if the people they loan the money to can pay it back. Plus, the less creditworthy people pay higher interest rates, and you can still foreclose if they default. So banks make a lot of loans to people who can't afford them, and then sell the mortgages, and people still buy them.
Except that if this happens at scale, the people taking out mortgages they can't afford bid up the price of houses. And then when they start to default and you want to foreclose, you'd have to sell the house to get back the money, which at scale means that the prices would go back down to where they were before they got bid up, which means you wouldn't even recover your principal.
If everybody realizes that this is what's going to happen then people wouldn't buy bad mortgages from banks and then banks wouldn't issue them. But if enough people don't notice until after the bubble is inflated...
You can sit them down and explain precisely why buying something, like a new car, is a bad financial decision and that they cannot afford it anyway, and then watch them go buy it anyway. To the point where I have seen people laugh about how dumb of an idea it is, while in the act of doing it.
The "I wish someone explained to me..." that comes later when it all falls apart is largely just licking the wounds of their damaged ego.
> You can sit them down and explain precisely why buying something, like a new car, is a bad financial decision and that they cannot afford it anyway, and then watch them go buy it anyway. To the point where I have seen people laugh about how dumb of an idea it is, while in the act of doing it.
And this is actually fine because it comes with its own integrated stupidity penalty. We only need the government to impose a penalty if the person who needs the disincentive when making a decision is different than the person being affected by it.
This is a big "hell yes" for me! Some seem to think that mortgaging themselves up to their eyebrows with huge houses and the latest vehicles is a good idea. As an example: I needed a pickup truck back in 2021. I settled on a ram and purchased the base model. The only options were a towing package and the medium level smart audio/display system for a cost of $27K. I could have easily spent $50K and got a whole lot of other options, but determined the extra cost was too much and the options weren't needed. (The only reason I purchase a new one is people tend to drive like maniacs in trucks where I live, so I didn't trust a used one.)
I digress, the numbers alone are the reason for the base model, because I could use the extra money somewhere else. And yes, new vehicles do depreciate too much. However, if you keep the vehicle for it's entire lifespan, the hit isn't so bad.
You skip over a very important step here, where people keep buying the MBSes because the ratings agencies are knowingly rating the securities incorrectly. If that didn't happen, the market would be too small to blow up in the way that it did, all of the safe money can't invest if the MBSes aren't AAA.
It's not that no-one noticed in time, it's that the people responsible for noticing were paid to pretend they hadn't. That is the corrupt part.
What they were doing was, they'd take a bucket of high risk mortgages and apply a contract to them to retroactively sort them. So, if you bought the 30th percentile of the bucket and then anything more than 70% of the people in the bucket paid their mortgages you would get paid, and if fewer than that did then you wouldn't.
Then they were rating the highest percentiles in the bucket as AAA because even for borrowers with bad credit, the probability that such a high percentage of them would default was considered very low. Even for people with bad credit, default rates are usually only something like 10%.
But that doesn't work out if you haven't noticed that banks have stopped caring about the default rate when issuing mortgages.
I disagree with the characterization of structural corruption. Every rationale actor will seek to capture all the benefits and pass on the risks. The real corruption is when decision makers know that they can’t be held responsible through corporate or political structures. See also [moral hazard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Why do you even argue against someone that doesn't think "insurance" should exist? Its a troll, not even most serious libertarian freaks are that idiotic. Our goal should be to make sure these freaks have no power.
OF COURSE single-payer means lower prices, the government has a shit ton of power in negotiating prices if they want to. They don't want to because they are corrupt, freaks like the above are only there to rationalize the theft. They need to be defeated politically.
> OECD's numbers for health expenditure per capita[1].
Interesting that the graphs use PPP, but that the age-adjusted graph still shows the richer OECD countries spend more than the poorer ones. I wonder what's up with that.
These reports tend to ignore how fast you can get a specific service or test done. There is plenty of anecdotal data out there that in US you can get CT or MeI the next day, while in many countries in the EU you have to wait months.
I think looking only on the spending per capita tells us nothing about accessibility of service, and its quality. Once you start to consider those things, imo, the whole thing is not as a clear cut as it looks.
It's also a mechanism for some governments to cheat, because medicine is R&D-intensive.
Suppose that to devise some treatment for 10 million people worldwide, it costs a billion dollars once for R&D, i.e. $100 each, and then $10 more per person to actually manufacture it. So the average person will have to pay no less than $110.
Then some countries say "that costs you $10 to manufacture, we won't pay more than $40" and if you don't take the $40 you can't sell there at all. So, if you don't recover $30 of your R&D per person there then you recover $0, even though you need to average $100.
If everybody does that it doesn't work; they go out of business. But suppose that half the patients live in those countries and the rest live somewhere that the company can charge enough to sustain themselves, i.e. in those countries people have to pay an average of $180 instead of $40 so the total average can stay $110. Then they don't go out of business, but the countries not paying their share are cheating the people in the other ones.
And to add insult to injury, you then hear the people in the countries paying $40 saying "why are you paying $180 instead of doing it like we do"?
Yeah that’s the story people tell. On the other hand, I need to take a brand name version of a medicine that was patented in the early 20th century, and in the US the co-pay alone costs me $200/mo or more (not including what insurance pays) while I can buy it from Canada for $30 without insurance. (The generics cost a similar amount, but don’t work as well due to bioavailability issues.) So while I appreciate the idea that high US prices are all about R&D, I also have pretty visible evidence that US pharma will just charge whatever the market will bear, even for drugs that are long out of patent and inexpensive to manufacture.
The trouble is that it's both things at the same time. Countries that fix prices are paying less than their share of the R&D and the US market has bad regulations that unnecessarily limit competition.
The situation you're describing can happen in one of two ways. The first is that the more bioavailable version wasn't patented in the early 20th century, only the less bioavailable version, and then the version you like is still under patent and that's exactly what's supposed to happen. They get to charge a lot until the patent expires as the incentive to invent the more bioavailable version to begin with, and then Canada isn't paying their share and the US will be paying less when the patent expires, and if you don't like what they're charging then you can use the old version until the patent expires.
The second is that nobody is making a generic of the more bioavailable version even though the patent is expired. The US could and ought to fix that by remediating whatever regulation is impeding other companies from entering the market even though they should be able to. But then we're into a different problem because it can't be other countries not paying their share for something still under patent if it isn't still under patent.
>The second is that nobody is making a generic of the more bioavailable version even though the patent is expired.
I've been taking this drug since 1995 and the brand-name version has been in production (in its current format) since 1938. I don't think there have been any substantial improvements in the formulation in decades (as evidenced by my dosage, at least.) It certainly isn't expensive due to patents.
What's happening here is that in the US generic alternatives are supposed to demonstrate bioequivalence (meaning the same bioavailability), but the standards are lax and not well-enforced. Insurance formularies aren't going to spring for a brand-name drug formulation that costs 10x when the government has certified the cheap generic as bioequivalent. Manufacturers of the unpatented (but more bioavailable) brand-name drugs know that in reality some subset of their patients will need their formulation to keep blood levels stable, which means that in the US they can crank their prices way up and soak a bunch of sick people. In Canada they can't do this. Nothing about this is really defensible.
Which brings me back to the larger issue. High US drug prices can be due to both (1) recouping R&D costs and (2) greed, but the greed is enough to render our current system unworkable. You can't just assign manufacturers a monopoly and the right to charge whatever they want, and expect that they won't abuse this to soak desperate sick people with prices far in excess of their costs (as they are clearly doing.) So yes, you can point to the cost of R&D as one reason we should all (globally) pay more for some drugs, but you can't really use the need for R&D to justify the US system, which is inefficient and dangerous.
Here's the part where it seems like we're still missing some information. There is an unpatented formulation of the drug which is better enough that patients are willing to pay a large premium for it, but there is only one company making it. It can't be that the other companies don't like money, so what's the actual reason?
I think you misunderstand how US drug purchases work. There is very little competitive market whatsoever anywhere in the prescription med system; there are simply "brands" and "patented meds" and "generics" plus various underserved niches where pharma companies can extract high prices from desperate patients (see e.g., Martin Shkreli and Daraprim.)
With respect to generics, there's little incentive to make a better formulation. If patients have insurance, they'll get whatever "bioequivalent" generic is available from the pharmacy if it matches the insurance provider's formulary price requirements. That manufacturer can change any time, since by law they're all deemed equivalent. It's like buying generic store-brand ibuprofen: you have no idea which factory is actually making the stuff, and it can change from package to package.
There's also very little benefit to having a "brand name" generic that has better bioavailability since you really can't charge more for it: insurance companies and pharmacies will just switch to another generic brand with lower costs. Trying to argue better bioavailability could also involve admitting that your existing bioequivalence studies are bunk, which would require an expensive new certification process. Plus, even in a functioning and truly competitive market, trying to experiment with different formulations to figure out which "gets better results" is a dangerous game for individuals; it's not like buying different Kleenex and deciding which holds together better. You have to do a lot of risky trial and error and get frequent blood tests.
So basically we have a system that ensures a completely non-functioning non-competitive market, and then we throw in an exclusive term where new medication can be sold at any price and we expect market forces to somehow constrain manufacturers. But the market forces are very weak and limited here. When we clearly end up paying dozens of times more than other countries (even for unpatented medicine) people raise the R&D issue to justify the costs. But that's sort of like saying "hey, the Mafia spends a lot on churches, so their extractive business model is fine." If you really want churches (or R&D) we should find a more rational way to come up with those funds.
I was kind of curious if there was some specific failure with this outside of the general brokenness of US healthcare competition, but it's starting to sound like the classic one:
The biggest problem with US health insurance is that it's not actually insurance. The purpose of insurance is to cover major claims. If a storm does $30,000 in damage to your house, you file an insurance claim. If it does $30 in damage, you go to the hardware store and pay $30. But we expect health "insurance" to cover the little stuff. Health insurance should be for if you get cancer or need major surgery, not for a generic drug that ought to cost $30.
Which in turn is what messes up what could otherwise be a competitive market. Instead of picking who you want to buy the drug from, most people have insurance, and the insurance company picks. And then most people get insurance from their employer so they also don't get to pick their insurance which makes the insurance company unresponsive because the patient can't easily switch.
And then it sounds like what happened is that the manufacturers make nearly all of their sales through insurance, who only care about regulatory compliance, and there aren't enough people paying out of pocket to get them to compete on actual quality.
But the other problems shouldn't be there if we could get people actually buying what ought to be cheap generics themselves instead of through insurance:
> Plus, even in a functioning and truly competitive market, trying to experiment with different formulations to figure out which "gets better results" is a dangerous game for individuals; it's not like buying different Kleenex and deciding which holds together better. You have to do a lot of risky trial and error and get frequent blood tests.
This wouldn't be something most people would have to do themselves. If there are five companies making the same drug then forums for people with the condition it treats would have people already taking each of them, and if some of them are actually not right then aggregate data should show that, and then everybody would find out without each person having to do their own trials.
And somebody needs to be doing that anyway or you're going to have a lot of people whose medication is wrong who don't realize that it's because they're not getting what they paid for while the one that works is available from someone else.
> When we clearly end up paying dozens of times more than other countries (even for unpatented medicine) people raise the R&D issue to justify the costs.
But then we're back to, the trouble is that it's both.
And then people propose to have the government set prices, which is only trading one problem for another. Whereas what we ought to do is address the things causing the markets that are supposed to be competitive to not.
Well, US health insurance is insurance. That’s one function. But it’s also managed healthcare. The management is being performed by a series of large corporations with somewhat broken incentives, with the government backstopping and certifying everything and filling in all the gaps. That’s why other countries achieve such better results with government-managed healthcare, because our system genuinely has very little relationship with the free market and already is a kind of planned system; it’s just an exceedingly inefficient planned system.
But the lesson you should take from this is not “we should just deregulate it a bit and hope the free market takes hold.” This is the planned system we designed in one of the most capitalist countries on earth: it got to the state of being a planned system because the truly competitive market systems kept failing. I’m not sure where you can go to find a truly competitive system that isn’t in some way underpinned and supported by the government (and the US government specifically.) People often point to third world countries where they can pay cash, but I think that’s mostly just rich US people buying luxury healthcare at lower prices, not a real working free-market health system that delivers broadly-shared results.
You have to entertain the hypothesis that when the ideal “free market system” exists nowhere, the reason is because the free market system was tried (here in the US, even) and it worked so poorly that it was replaced with one of the systems that survived. Because that’s the pattern we see everywhere with healthcare (and with roads and fire departments, too, outside of a few exceptions.)
The pharma investment problem is a problem, but just to be clear: it’s a question of financial allocation. There are many ways to solve it that aren’t what we have right now.
I have a $6500 deductible. I definitely care what things cost because my insurance almost never actually helps pay for anything unless I have an unbelievably bad year.
The problem is that literally nobody can tell me how much anything is going to cost until I get the bill in a month. Not even because they don't want to tell me. Nobody at the desk even knows what my price is going to be because it's all numberwang.
Not defending insurance but theoretically you do also get a better rate than the uninsured rate just by having it go through the health insurance.
I say “theoretically” because I’ve also heard they’re often willing to cut some pretty good deals if you don’t have insurance and pay cash. And I mean “good” relative to the initially billed amount, not “good” relative to what it should actually cost.
Yeah, I suspect this is very country and region specific.
In my country I don't have health insurance. I've noticed that medical providers charge me less on discovering that. Party (I suspect) because I'll pay immediately so there's no financial cost (ie cost of delayed cash flow) and much lower admin cost (ie they don't need to deal with insurers.)
In some places I've seen signs advertising 30% discount if you "pay now, claim back from your insurance yourself". This informs my hypothesis that providers see the insurance system as a major overhead.
No, it’s the opposite actually. There are a couple of reasons why:
1. You have a deductible. Insurance is incentivized to make things more expensive so you don’t use it. With a $10,000 deductible, are you going to pay $500 for a service outside insurance or $2,000 with insurance?
2. Hospitals really have no idea what anything costs. Nobody does. There is a maze if agreements between providers, contractors, hospitals and insurance companies. If you have insurance, hospitals are more likely to throw out a higher random number;
3. There is more process and paperwork for the hospital with insurance; and
4. You are more likely to be able to negotiate down a bill without insurance.
I was told it's also illegal in the US for a hospital to bill you as uninsured if you have insurance.
You won't get in trouble but the hospital will, but if they ask if you have insurance and you say no when you do, that could change the situation.
Again, I'm not a lawyer but this was they told me once a few years ago because I got charged a ridiculous amount for something and wanted to see if it would be cheaper if I just paid without insurance considering my deductible was many thousands of dollars.
This is correct. I have been in situations where I am told the cash price and then "I cant tell you how much it will be with your insurance". Come to find out cash was A LOT cheaper. They cant undo it.
I have also been in a situation where insurance price was cheaper.
Thereinlies the problem..without know the price people CANNOT make an informed decision. There is no freemarket. This done on purpose and only happens in America.
I always view the initial billed amount as the MSRP for a really shady industry.
While it’s often 2x-3x the allowed amount, I’ve even seen it closer to 20x-40x one — an amount for a simple outpatient procedure the would lead to financial ruin if it had to be paid in full.
I really don’t understand why there is any math in the initial amounts.
Why don’t they just bill $1M for every single item and then see what they get?
Every time I’ve gotten a large bill that hit my deductible, going back to the provider and asking to pay cash without insurance has resulted in a lower bill.
You care about small costs but not the large ones. Even with a relatively large deductible it’s irrelevant to you if your hospital charges $50k or $90k for a surgery.
$6500 is nothing once surgery, radiation, and/or anesthesiology enters the picture.
Absolutely, there is room for price shopping for a subset of medical treatments. https://surgerycenterok.com is a well-known cash-pay surgery center. If you look through the procedure list, you can see the types of things that lend themselves to this model: lots of orthopedic surgeries, things that are fixes for chronic issues that don't really need to be dealt with on any specific timeframe.
But when you get into the really big, serious, time-sensitive things. Cancer treatment, heart disease, anything that starts with an ER visit... you don't really have an ability or time to "shop around". The demand is inelastic.
The funny thing is there are only a few insurance companies (BCBS, Aetna, United, …) and types of plans (PPO, HMO, EPO).
I could be misinformed but I feel like there are only a few possible combinations of one’s actual coverage.
A simple spreadsheet could easily track everything. The providers even know how much they get from each company, so they know the allowed in-network cost for a patient.
My understanding is that this is only really true for straightforward things like, say, a therapist. If they only have a couple of codes that they bill and they accept a limited number of insurance providers, then they can probably tell you what you'll pay (although I believe there are still a lot of edge cases).
However, if it's something like a surgery at a major health system, then it's way more complicated. The health system can't be as selective about what insurance they take, so they're dealing with medicare, medicaid, plans sold on the individual/small business market, and employer-sponsored plans. So way more than a few providers and a few types of plans. I checked the stats for my state and just the individual/small business market is 12 providers and 250+ plans. Medicare Advantage is at least 14 providers. A major hospital system probably accepts thousands, if not tens of thousands of different types of plans. Then you have to consider that the anesthesiologist, the surgeon, and the facility are all separate providers who may not all take the same insurance.
Different plans from the same company, even of the same type, don't always cover the same things at the same rates. This is especially true of self-insured plans for large employers - there's certain mandatory things they legally have to cover, but anything beyond that is all up to the individual employers' discretion (since they're paying all the claims directly, as opposed to paying a monthly per-participant fee).
> Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance.
If your argument were correct, socialized medicine would lead to higher costs, but it usually does the opposite. Insurance profit margins are a small portion of the overall cost in the US. In inelastic markets, when profit is removed, often you can see lower costs because profit by itself is purely extractive and in an inelastic market competitive forces are weaker.
One of the controlling factors for socialized healthcare is that prices are negotiated down by the people paying for the medicine. In countries where private healthcare is extremely rare, pharmaceutical companies can choose between "less profit" or "no sales in that country at all". Sometimes they bluff and in rare cases that means public healthcare has to go without certain medication or certain vendors, but on the whole the price is kept under control (until corruption kicks in, at least).
When the people handing out cheques don't get a chance or don't bother to demand lower prices, things become incredibly expensive. Even if a party like a private insurer tries to negotiate the price down, the healthcare provider can always say "tough shit, guess your customers aren't insured then" as long as there's at least one insurance company willing to pay the full price.
You also see this with electric vehicle incentives. Governments incentivising people to buy electric cars by giving money directly to the consumer just end up with electric vehicles rising in cost because the money is essentially free anyway.
Subsidies, depending on the market, often produce some degree of the effect you’re talking about, but it’s not black and white. The term is pass-through and full pass-through is rare with partial pass-through being typical. Often with subsidies (like for EVs) prices rise (showing pass-through) but it rarely cancels out, for example this study showing every $1000 of subsidy in California lowering the post-subsidy cost by around $800 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... - so only around $200 pass-through.
But this is a more elastic market than healthcare. To your point about negotiating power - it’s elasticity that gives negotiating power to consumers vs not.
I don't know. I live in a country with excellent healthcare, excellent public transport, overall excellent quality of life - yeah, and so much of it is funded from our taxes. Granted, the country was rich to begin with, but it seems to be perfectly sustainable.
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.
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.
To be fair, this is because there's long-standing [but disputed] evidence that healthcare providers drive up costs/utilization when they can refer to hospitals they have equity stakes in.
Not quite true. If you own the providers, getting people to pay deductibles and copays (i.e. getting treated) will yield way more money than just having them pay premiums.
Correct, which is another reason why they are buying the healthcare providers. It allows the insurers (“pay-viders”) to strong arm independent doctors and smaller insurers out of the market.
The insurers are legally obligated to pay out 80-95% of their premiums for treatment. So the only way to grow profits is to spend 2x and much and charge 2x as much. Sure you only make the same 5-20% margin, but it's on 2x the revenue so it's 2x the gross profits.
Uh, no… they want to deny claims. The best situation for insurers is that you are healthy for a while, then abruptly die of something that cannot be treated.
Uh no, they don't. Not if they're also the ones who provide healthcare. Simply denying claims isn't even remotely close to the financially (and obviously not the politically) optimal strategy.
The optimal strategy if you own both the insurer and the provider is a combination of premiums, copays, deductibles, and maybe even some totally unnecessary care to drive up volume.
Lower margin on dramatically higher volume is still dramatically more money. Lower margin actually provides political cover for your $400 billion revenue years.
You first have to agree on a definition of free in this context. When Adam Smith was writing the Wealth of Nations most of the transactions in the market were between entities with more or less comparable power. Local people bought stuff from local suppliers. This is very much not the case any more when it comes to transactions involving private individuals on one side and corporations on the other.
It makes a ton of sense in theory. In a fair market, you would want to prevent the insurer from charging super high premiums that let them make a large profit relative to the cost of care provided.
The problem is that it doesn't stop there. There is a second order effect.
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.
Governments of countries that have public health care generally are price sensitive. The competition is from other governmental functions that need the budget.
That's less a matter of price sensitively and more that other countries usually have price controls on healthcare. That's why doctors make so much less and drugs are so much cheaper outside the US: it's literally illegal to charge more.
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.
Isnt it a little onesided to put blame on the payers for price insensitivity?
> The second you detach the consumer from the price of something, that is when they stop caring about how much something costs, and so the price jumps.
Why should nobody care about prices? The customer gets subsidizes by another payer, in this case governments that have to authorize budgets.
The reverse could be true too, companies raise their prices in lock step because they want to 'detach' more profits off of production and so, the government steps in to subsidize. So what is the causality chain here? Still the government not caring?
IMO you are putting blame onesidedly on payers and not on the ones in charge of price policy, which would include companies too. I dont understand why people dont apply their critizism of large organisations, like a government, to other large organisations, like a company.
Companies are incentivised to keep costs low and the feedback loop for this incentive is much smaller. What I mean by feedback loop is: the cost of running the company directly affects the stake-holders in a meaningful way. The CEO is probably has stock options and has to hit a target so that they can be paid well. To do so they need to be more sensitive with prices or shareholders or the board will be on the CEO’s behind. There is a direct monetary incentive relation here.
There is one for the government too but the feedback loop is much bigger. If some one in the government makes a suboptimal decision, what incentives exist to penalise them?
It could also be like health care, where the cost goes down when the government is paying for it. In fact my knee jerk reaction to the title of the thread was: Let the government buy generic buses in volume and give them to the localities.
- Govt beaureucreats spending taxpayer money
- Availability of cheap credit for the US govt (the spender is other countries buying the debt)
- Availabiulity of cheap student loans
> 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.
That's not the only problem with health. It's a very inelastic resource.
If you and your neighbor's have cancer, and I promise to treat whoever pays most, I can safely assume I'm going to be filthy rich. After all, money is pointless if you die, so barring money for descendants, the logical thing is to give me as much money as you can.
It's not just about not caring. It's a system that is wide open for grift. For example, the mayor awards the contract to X, and X in return donates to his campaign reelection.
Fairly accurate assumption to make in this case. Incentives around government spending are structured against close scrutiny of how much gets spent on what and why.
Politicians love splashing their names on papers on how they got a bill passed to spend $X on $GOOD_SOUNDING_PROJECT, and the bigger the X, the better. Government employees are strongly incentivized against the reduction of their own employment should that spending go away. Lobbyists and service providers obviously have a direct interest in ensuring those contracts continue.
Nobody but the taxpayer has any interest at all in ensuring that money gets spent on things worth spending on and, moreover, that the spent money actually achieves the outcomes desired and intended behind those projects. And how much influence does the average taxpayer have on any of that? It rounds to zero.
> Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance.
This seems different. A healthcare consumer (in the US) is overpaying in large part because (1) they need the coverage (2) they lack the expertise to distinguish between offerings and (3) there simply aren't more affordable offerings.
Single payer healthcare systems feature significantly lower costs and better quality despite that the payer is not the consumer.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
The challenge is that we have a rapidly evolving GLP/GIP/Other landscape being developed. In other words, you take a risk that the government buys the wrong thing. However, I think with a little push, you could have a highly competitive field to lower the federal cost, and the ROI should be easy to plot.
Actually, you don't need to do everybody all at once. Target the biggest (no pun intended) opportunities first.
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.
The Oregon Health Care Study followed patients for 2 years initially, then it was expanded out to 3 years. That's an absurdly short interval.
The idea is that increased primary care services will have benefits 10 or 15 years down the line by preventing chronic disease from reaching a critical state. For example, preventing prediabetes from reaching diabetes and then diabetic end stage renal disease (which would require dialysis at a cost of 5 figures per person per month). You're not going to see that over 2 to 3 years.
Only if nobody does anything to help you. Truly LBJ's "Great Society" That also completely discounts the value (economic, social, and moral) of human life and all the attendant problems a dying person creates.
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)!
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.
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?
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)
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.
Buses in places like Ireland, Scotland, much of Scandinavia, etc will never need air conditioning.
Places a little warmer (England, Denmark, Netherlands, northern Germany) might be warm enough for a few days per year, but the cost of purchase and maintenance of A/C might not be worthwhile.
How many of those places have you been to? They might not need year-round A/C like some other countries, but the increasingly-common heat waves definitely require them. The buses are almost intolerable with air conditioning, there's no way in hell they'd ever purchase them without it.
The additional purchase cost is a rounding error, and you're far worse off if cooking people alive during the summer means losing customers year-round as they switch to less-hostile transit options. Maintenance isn't a dealbreaker either: sure, it's extra work, but the equipment is rarely needed. This means the occasional breakage isn't a huge deal, and big maintenance can be deferred to the spring and fall.
I live in the UK and most of our buses in my city don’t have air conditioning as far as I can tell since they usually have open windows, except some the very newest ones
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.
Irish buses don't have AC (rarely hot enough here to need it) and the electric ones only have heating adequate for about 0 degrees and up (rarely colder than that, though they're unpleasant when it is).
they should, also with air filters, noise and air quality are big issues, keeping windows closed would help a lot
yes, it's expensive, yes, people's revealed presences indicate they don't care for these things, they rather give up QALYs than sitting hours every day in "rush hour traffic"
One way that China keeps the cost of subways down is by standardizing the train sets.
They have three types of trains (A, B, C) that are used in almost all subway systems across the country. You need a high-capacity train? A. You have a smaller line with fewer passengers? C. Something in-between? B.
There are a few variants for cities with special circumstances. Chongqing uses variants that can handle steeper slopes, because the city is incredibly hilly (like San Francisco).
By standardizing, prices can be kept down. Cities don't have to come up with custom solutions. Just define your needs and pick the standard variant that matches them.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> If getting through downtown by bus is slow, getting through it by car isn't any faster
This isn’t true at all.
Busses stop continuously along the route, which adds a ton of time. Cars go straight to the destination.
You also have to add the time spent waiting for the bus, and the time to walk to the bus stop.
Busses usually aren’t going to take as direct a route as a car can. You will likely have to walk once you get to your destination, too, or switch buses.
I am all for public transportation, and take it all the time, but let’s not pretend it is always faster than cars.
> 2. If getting through downtown by bus is slow, getting through it by car isn't any faster.
If the buses and cars are on the same roads, going the same speed, the car will get you to your destination faster, and everyone will go by car. Buses only get ridership if they have dedicated lanes where they can go faster than regular car traffic:
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.
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.
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.
The tunnel belonged to King County, not the city government, and transferring it to Sound Transit was in fact a wise decision. It would not be possible to run a train every six minutes during peak hours if they still had to share the tunnel with buses, and the 3rd Ave transit corridor sees more bus throughput than the tunnel ever did.
> But a bus isn't just a bus, there are differences in what is needed in different cities
That's sometimes true but often not. Utah might need buses to go up the canyons, but might have passed some requirement at some point that said that all the buses need to be able to do this because someone got burnt once by not having enough of those buses. Or some well-meaning (or vote seeking?) city councillor might have put through a bill to put USB-A chargers in all the seats, which will stick around far longer than those coming as standard making them an expensive custom option.
What you end up with is requirements that make the buses custom purchases, which massively inflates their costs, when any reasonable person would say that such custom attributes aren't (always) needed. By having a strong opinion about something, the city will pay far more than if they bought an off-the-shelf solution.
Much of "the west" is particularly affected by this sort of attitude. Everywhere and everyone is convinced that they are special in some way and need something specific, but end up paying for it. This is part of why India can send a probe to Mars for $72m, or why Singapore can buy busses at $300k instead of $1m. And to be clear, I say this having grown up in the UK and moved to Australia, both places with a certain amount of this attitude.
My point about the buses is about "missing the forest for the trees", so the fact that you've focused on getting a specific citable example while missing the point is quite ironic.
PHEV drivetrain with a 50 mile all electric range: would handle virtually all of the situations.
Climbing a steep hill? EV drivetrains don't care and provide great torque. Start/stop? perfect. Regenerative braking? There you go. Need all-electric for a spell? Gas to extend range? Gas for AC/Heat? ok ok ok. Smooth operation? Low noise? Low/no emissions? yes yes yes Less wear? Less gas? Lower operating costs? Simpler drivetrains? Simpler repairs? yes to all of it.
Every bus should have been forced to be a PHEV drivetrain within a decade of the Prius/Insight being released in 1997. The USPS should have been all PHEV by then too.
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.
Something from this article doesn't add up. In 2023 the SORTA board approved purchase of buses with a base price of $530,000.
Gillig LLC was the sole responding vendor and is recommended for award.
The contract will be a firm fixed price contract with a 5-year term
beginning immediately upon contract execution and ending on June 30, 2028.
Back in 2012 SORTA estimated that hybrid buses would cost an additional $240,000.
Assuming that $530,000 is for diesel only buses you'd have to more than double the premium to get to Bloomberg's figure as not all of the order was for hybrid buses.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
No, you'll get car sharing and even if just because you swing by a spot your friend recommended to pick up passengers to near you office, on days you feel like driving yourself, and likely become one such passenger yourself after a couple weeks of that, provided you're not amongst those who couldn't do it without their own car.
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.
A typical household would have 4-5 people in it and only two cars if you’re lucky. A person needs mobility from the age of roughly 7 to at least 70 for all kinds of reasons.
Please travel the Europe and see how they treat their people and how increased mobility creates a great environment and freedom for everyone. I assure you that it’s not a backwards place as some people claim.
As a side note: All this car craze coincided with baby boomers (roughly) and now that they’re losing their physical and cognitive abilities we’re seeing a lot more accessibility support from them (duh) and I wouldn’t be surprised if they started pushing for free public taxi service for themselves but nothing that would serve the public. And we’re not talking about heavily subsidized industries like cars, but something that can be profitable and worthwhile because it allows people to go to work, school, shopping, hospital, theater, and more.
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.
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
Don't calculate the amortized (over a reasonable 30 years if you also ignore inflation and major maintenance/refurbishment costs) capex of the proposed Dallas red line northern extension, seen in a per-passenger-mile figure.....
(I got 54ct per passenger mile just in capex (well, a capex-based view on the cost of having the track there and operable; costs from direct wear and tear of running trains and electricity and the trains themselves are additional)...)
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.
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.
>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?
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).
What you're talking about does exist, but it is specialized. For example, UTA (Utah Transit Authority) has both UTA On Demand - a "microtransit" service that's basically an Uber run by the bus company - as well as Flex buses that will deviate on request for a slightly higher fare (although you do have to set it up in advance). UTA uses these services for two specific niches of transit riders:
1. People who live in transit-poor suburbs
2. People with physical disabilities
To be fair, these have significant overlap. The common factor being "demand that can't be aggregated to a fixed bus route".
Once you have enough demand to have a fixed bus route, however, the most important thing is frequency. Schedule anxiety is the worst part of taking any public transit system. I find that if a bus or train comes every 15 minutes, I stop checking the schedule. Additionally, once you start scheduling frequent buses, then transfer times go down, which makes the bus network dramatically more usable.
Think about it this way: if you need to take a trip that involves a transfer between two buses, and the buses come hourly, you have an average transfer time of... 30 minutes, where you won't be doing anything to progress towards your destination. Your transit operator can futz with scheduling to try and make that transfer tighter, but buses infamously have to share infrastructure with private cars, which means they'll never actually come on time. The worst case scenario being you schedule tight transfers on an infrequent bus, then the first bus gets delayed enough to turn that tight transfer into an hour long wait[0].
Alternatively, you can just run more buses, and so long as they all make progress in the road grid you get tight transfers naturally. Miss your transfer? Oh no... anyway, here's the next bus.
On the other hand, if you're seeing three empty buses pull up to the same stop all at once, that sounds like you have bunching, which is the most catastrophic failure mode of any transit system. What happened is that your transit agency scheduled frequent buses at reasonable times, but some blockage along the route - traffic, construction, etc - delayed a bus long enough to arrive alongside the next bus in the sequence. The front bus will be nearly full and the next buses on will be almost empty. And as the day continues this can continue delaying buses until you have destroyed almost all the capacity and frequency in the system unless they take emergency action to pull buses out of the system and reinsert them at different parts of the route.
The way you prevent this is to give the bus dedicated lanes. The whole BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) concept involves moving bus stops to the center of streets, having offboard fare payment[1], level boarding, digital signage, signal priority at stoplights, and so on. Some of this is just to make BRT feel more "train-like", but a lot of it also lets buses maintain a tight schedule and not bunch up.
[0] I am aware of some bus systems where the bus drivers will actively radio one another to request a delay specifically so that riders don't miss their transfers. AFAIK, Suffolk Transit will do that, but only if the two buses are on the same part of the network, since ST is actually four bus companies wearing a trenchcoat.
[1] When bus drivers are responsible for fare collection, riders have to all enter from the front and all other doors on the bus are exit only. Which increases dwell time (the amount of time you spend at each stop). In fact, this is why Zohran Mamdani wants to make NYC buses free - specifically to speed them up.
Also, while I'm talking about bus boarding, I have rode buses in Japan that had people paying with IC cards enter from the rear, or worse, enter from the front and then tap your IC card at the back exit while the bus driver is trying to explain this to you in incomprehensibly mumbly Japanese.
> 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.
It definitely depends. The traditional yellow school buses here (Canada) use diesel, so they need things like glow plugs [0] and block heaters [1] to be able to run in the winter. But even that only helps so much, so when the nighttime lows are below –40°C, they cancel the busses since they know that they won't run.
Most of the city busses here use natural gas, and they're considerably more reliable in the cold weather but if they're parked for too long on a really cold day (even while running), the brakes will freeze up and they won't be able to move [2].
Similarly, the busses need a fairly powerful heating system, since it's tricky to heat a large space when it's really cold and the front door is open half the time. But conversely, most of the busses have no A/C.
Adding glow plugs, and block heaters, and brake dryers shouldn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a more reliable natural gas bus might be double the price of an unreliable diesel one.
> 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.
That’s because your job was passenger.
From the drivers perspective: configuration should absolutely match the terrain and the expected route. For example: an Allison AT545 transmission without a lockup torque converter will be hell in the mountain and hill climbs of Colorado, possibly even dangerous. Whereas it may serve perfectly fine in Nebraska.
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.
As far as I can tell the author is making a bad faith argument. SORTA's purchase was about one third diesel-electric hybrids, while RTD's was almost certainly diesel only. AFAICT the RTD buses don't have air conditioning while the SORTA buses do.
SG vs the US? Economies of scale, simpler drivetrains (hybrid vs non), and less expensive smog equipment.
> 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.
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.
< 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.
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.
> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.
Hmm, not sure about that. I live in Dublin, which is, generally, very flat, and where the temperature rarely goes far outside the 0 to 20 degrees C range. The buses can be fairly unpleasant on rare very hot days (no air conditioning), the electric ones can be unpleasantly cold on rare extremely cold days (heating not specced for it; this isn't an issue for the diesel ones as those produce so much waste heat anyway), and when I was a kid I lived in one of the few hilly parts of Dublin, and bus breakdowns going uphill were somewhat common (in fairness I think this is less of a thing now). Geography absolutely matters; Dublin's buses would be basically unusable anywhere very hot or cold.
There's other stuff, too. Buses here are almost always double-decker, but one specific new bus route requires single-decker buses, because the double-deckers won't fit under some of the older railway bridges. This will also require modifications to some road infra, which won't currently take long buses (to have a decent capacity single-deckers need to be longer; the single-deckers will be about 13m long vs 11m for the normal buses). Some cities use articulated buses; those wouldn't work here at all.
> 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.
Yes, but that's exactly the point the article is making: stop doing expensive one-off purchases! Rather than having 20 cities each buy their own set of 10 custom buses, have them place a shared order of 200 identical buses.
> 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.
There's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma here in that even if a city decides to go this route, their citizens are still paying Federal taxes and contributing to the programs used to buy busses.
So you're not going to save your citizens any money unless everyone stops using the programs. From an incremental standpoint, where everyone has already defected, you want your local governments to be grabbing every grant they can.
A very common problem in Metro Phoenix involves government or corporate procurement. They just purchase whatever is used everywhere else and end up with something that lasts well under is rated life time or doesn't even make it though a single summer.
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.
The 2 bus contracts were with the same manufacturer, which is
headquartered in California.
The wikipedia entry for SORTA claims that in 2024 they took delivery of 19 buses: 7 diesel-electric hybrid and 12 diesel. They also list four more hybrid coaches on order. Presumably some or all of these are the 2023 order.
RTD's web site shows far more than 10 buses delivered in 2023 and nothing beyond that. They talk a bit about diesel hybrids but from what I can tell RTD does not operate any 40 ft hybrids.
Unsure what to say about the Bloomberg article but it smells like bullshit to me. Regardless, hybrid drivetrains will increase the unit cost significantly.
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.
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.
(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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The outcome of that approach is that an important service has uniform low costs to direct consumers, many of whom rely on the service for their quality of life, and many of whom would be unable to afford the service if its costs were passed along to them instead of subsidized via government debt and taxes.
In other words, a public service. That’s a good thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean it's already illegal to stop in the bus stop, and in some cities the buses have cameras to catch offenders, but people still do it. What would help is bus rapid transit (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit), which involves a lot of dedicated and separated bus lanes to make it a bit more like a train, but that only solves some of the problems I mentioned.
Bus driver also does things like trigger ramp for handicapped people, strap in wheelchairs securely, answer questions about the route, and security surveillance.
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.
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.
Slower? In top speed maybe, but not in time-to-destination (or, given congested streets, average speed).
Trains “require” you to make a transfer? Depends on your city, I guess; many train systems are hub-and-spoke-like enough (and dense enough) that common commutes don’t require any transfers. Also, I’m curious whether bus-centric mass transit requires more or fewer transfers than train-centric or hybrid.
> Slower? In top speed maybe, but not in time-to-destination (or, given congested streets, average speed).
Yep. Transit is ALWAYS slower on average compared to cars. It is faster only in a very narrow set of circumstances.
Try an experiment: drop 10 random points inside a city, and plot routes between them for cars and transit (you can use Google Maps API). Transit will be on average 2-3 times slower, even in the rush hour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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!
Driving a city bus is much, much, _much_ harder than driving a car. Shuttle bus in an airport or something, sure, maybe. But (with the exception of BRT systems with mostly/all segregated routes), I'd expect city buses to be about the most difficult form of transport to automate.
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.
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).
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.
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
The main cost of running a bus system is drivers, not buses. So that would be horribly expensive.
Also... how small are you imagining buses are? Standard buses here have a capacity of around a hundred people. If you broke them out into cars there simply wouldn't be space on the roads.
That is worse service. A tesla has low capacity and so cannot handle multiple groups randomly showing up at the same time. The point of great transit is you don't think, the system is ready for you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning. You can verify by looking at the maximum lane throughput in vehicles per hour.
> At higher speeds it's even less as the footprint of each vehicle equals "vehicle length + following distance".
The commercial speed of buses in cities is around 10-15 mph. There are no "higher speeds" when talking about the city traffic.
> 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.
I've seen buses blocking multiple cars for a traffic light cycle because buses take so much space. These days, it is apparently considered a feature in the pro-misery community...
This is a very loaded topic. The average raw bus pollution is about 75g CO2e per kilometer, and a passenger EV is around 50g. However, these calculations neglect that a bus needs about 3.5 drivers per bus to be viable. And these drivers become by far the most polluting factor.
> A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning.
I've never heard anything of the sort and I don't believe it at face value - that's roughly the length of a football field. Perhaps this is true in a specific area with terrible bus infrastructure but where I live, and the majority of places where I've been, bus stops are off the main road so they never block traffic.
> I've seen buses blocking multiple cars for a traffic light cycle because buses take so much space.
As I said, a consequence of bad infrastructure, not an inherent flaw of this mode of transportation. And even if some cars get held up that doesn't necessarily mean that the throughput has been affected - in heavy traffic this gap will be filled by other cars.
This table lists "Coach (bus)" at 27g CO2e/passenger-km. I don't know why buses are listed three times and they don't clarify, but it sure seems like the figure for passenger EVs represents the average for all types of trips whilst bus service is broken down into long-distance (coach) and local city service, making direct comparison impossible.
Additionally, carbon footprint is one small part of pollution and arguably it's not even the most important one. Ultrafine particles, PM2.5, and noise pollution matter just as much to the local population.
> I've never heard anything of the sort and I don't believe it at face value
Perhaps you should stop listening to propaganda from the ubranists and start digging past the images of happy smiling cyclists riding the bike lanes in perfect weather with the sun shining on them?
> that's roughly the length of a football field.
Yep. That's how bad buses are. Want another fun fact? One bus does the same amount of road damage as 1000-5000 cars. If you have a bus lane, look at it and you'll see that it is much more damaged compared to the nearby lanes, even though it carries far fewer vehicles.
> As I said, a consequence of bad infrastructure, not an inherent flaw of this mode of transportation.
Yes. A well-designed city like Houston will have enough road space so that buses are do not affect the traffic disproportionately. But then it means that such a city does not _need_ buses.
> This table lists "Coach (bus)" at 27g CO2e/passenger-km
It's a UK term for long-distance buses. Yes, they are indeed more efficient than cars. If you can get a bus to drive at freeway speeds without frequent stops, then it becomes extremely efficient.
> Additionally, carbon footprint is one small part of pollution and arguably it's not even the most important one. Ultrafine particles, PM2.5, and noise pollution matter just as much to the local population.
Ok. Let's talk about PM25. If we're talking about the _brake_ _dust_ then buses are absolutely the worst. They emit way more dust per passenger. But I don't believe that this is a problem long-term, EVs barely use frictional brakes and future EV buses should also be able to mitigate the brake wear.
For _tire_ wear, it's more complex. There are no good studies of tire wear that control for the average speed. In most studies, tire wear is simply calculated by weighing the tires and dividing the lost mass by the number of miles traveled. A few studies that tried to measure the direct particulate emissions near highway exits produced results with error bars that make them useless.
Noise pollution is a solved problem, btw. EVs are now required to make _artificial_ noise because they are so quiet. Ditto for brake dust, regenerative braking takes care of that.
> Perhaps you should stop listening to propaganda from the ubranists
I know this site is US-centric but excuse me if I don't take anti-public-transport propaganda at face value. I've lived in Europe all of my life and I've been to major US cities on the west coast so I've seen great public transport as well as the car-centric culture with my own eyes.
> Yep. That's how bad buses are.
No, that claim is ridiculous and obviously incorrect - It's laughable, really. Care to [try to] substantiate it?
> One bus does the same amount of road damage as 1000-5000 cars.
Sure, buses do cause more road damage than personal vehicles, but that's hardly a significant factor. Care to list all of the externalities for personal cars? Does parking build and maintain itself? How about all of the opportunity cost for space occupied by parked cars? Injuries caused by impaired drivers?
> A well-designed city like Houston will have enough road space so that buses are do not affect the traffic disproportionately. But then it means that such a city does not _need_ buses.
I have no idea what you meant by this. That doesn't logically follow.
> I've lived in Europe all of my life and I've been to major US cities on the west coast so I've seen great public transport as well as the car-centric culture with my own eyes.
So you're telling me that you've never seen a well-run people-oriented city like Houston?
And I grew up in Europe. I got my driving license around the age of 25, and my first car at 29.
> No, that claim is ridiculous and obviously incorrect - It's laughable, really. Care to [try to] substantiate it?
See?
> Care to list all of the externalities for personal cars? Does parking build and maintain itself? How about all of the opportunity cost for space occupied by parked cars? Injuries caused by impaired drivers?
Care to list all the externalities of buses? Do bus drivers spring out of sea foam and dissolve after the shift? How about all of the opportunity cost for people who can't make commutes that are forbidden by the bus network? The entire human lifetimes wasted every day while waiting for buses?
> Injuries caused by impaired drivers?
Self-driving solved it?
> I have no idea what you meant by this. That doesn't logically follow.
If buses don't affect your traffic flow, then you have enough road space so that residents can just use cars.
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.
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.
Something that strikes me as a bit odd is that most US electric buses seem to come from companies who just make electric buses. The electric buses here are made by conventional bus companies who've been making buses for, in one case, 80 years an in another over a century. Do none of the traditional US bus companies make electric ones?
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:
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.
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.
I mean, it was. It was also a genuinely big problem, but given the scope for hype, even massive problems can be overblown as well.
(And the media is pretty good at it. I'm pretty sure if a comet was about to hit the planet tomorrow and wipe out humanity there would still be an article that somehow manages to make it sound worse)
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.
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.)
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.
Make the argument why the bus company that provides bus-based transportation near one's home/work should spend marginal income on fancy emerging technologies instead of on higher-quality service (or lowering ticket prices if somehow service quality has reached an upper limit)?
Sure if the state or feds want to pay the extra costs to get such technology out there into production, make them an offer as the local bus company how much they'd have to chip in for you to deploy that.
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...
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.
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.
Imagine if they could just order from vendors like "Solaris Bus & Coach sp z o.o."...
They're even running some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Urbino_12_hydrogen over here that I at least hope have their hydrogen premium costs paid for by the EU grant the decals claim.
Riding them I can't note a difference between what I would expect from a battery only version.
But I can't imagine it's cheaper to take the hit of hydrogen roundtripping and the cost of hydrogen infrastructure just to avoid some 400 kW DC fast chargers at some strategic extended-stay bus stops where they take their lunch break (kick the last passenger out, walk outside, plug it in, lock the door and take a walk or go back inside and read the newspaper, and at the end unplug and hang it back on the electricity-vending-machine).
Unless it's different for bus drivers than for truck drivers, there is plenty mandatory break time under German rules to allow fast charging of such style to give enough range.
And it's easy to set up by just fitting route-after-route with the charging spots and keeping a few diesel busses in reserve to handle broken chargers until there are enough chargers to maintain bus schedules even if some of them go offline.
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.
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.
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.)
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}.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
My experience is tainted by the fact that the battery electric busses are new and the diesel busses are (comparatively) old, but our battery electric busses are far more comfortable to ride. Diesels are uh, jerky. Maybe the drivers fault, but that’s how it is.
It's probably more the brakes than the engine. Diesel engines don't provide much of an engine braking effect (unless fitted with additional mechanisms a/k/a "Jake Brake" to provide this) so the vehicles use friction brakes any time they need to slow down, which can be jerky especially with air brakes. Electric buses would have regenerative braking which is probably smoother.
The vibration of the running engine is a big part of it. Very noticeable on diesel-electric battery hybrids; the whole feel of the thing changes when it's running on battery power.
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).
Even more damning, diesel is objectively, inarguably more expensive to run, costing more than four times as much as [Vancouver's] battery-electric busses in fuel/electricity.
Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.
Diesel’s last remaining benefits are of no value for a bus (locomotive-class horsepower possibilities and rapid refueling) as a bus never weighs much and goes in a circle.
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.
> 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.
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.
Trains run on rails, which doesn't exactly allow them to go off-highway. If you're already spending a fortune on building the rail infrastructure, why wouldn't you spend a few bucks extra to install the extension cord?
> 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.
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).
> Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.
> My takeaway: No reasonable assumption exists that would make operating battery electric busses more expensive than diesel ones.
The problem here is that these were your initial opinions that aren't supported by the reality. Diesel is fucked, long term, and that's good, but that's also long term future, not the reality right now like you were arguing. The matter of time is sometimes the matter.
Note how the whole thread has been about cost of diesel fuel vs electricity from the start, and how I'm explicitly talking about operating costs for them.
From the linked analysis you will also find that the higher price example for diesel bus in the article ($980k) is already more expensive than a typical BEV alternative and likely a net drain on the operator (by comparison) within the first year.
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.
So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production. As if that doesn’t carry any negative side effects.
This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing. Everyone is now fully aware that offshoring for a cheap sticker price comes with higher, harder to price costs elsewhere.
> If we needed the existing NA producers to build military busses it sounds like we’d be screwed!
I only really skimmed the article, and didn't even load the underlying paper. But it seems like a big issue was custom orders. If we need wartime vehicle production, like in WWII, there would most likely be a single or small number of designs that a facility would produce. I would expect a lot more coordination between ordering, production, and supply chain as well --- if we need mass production, tradeoffs change.
> If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them? Are busses really critical national security concerns?
Busses are likely not really the national security concern, the concern would be having large vehicle manufacturing. It may be easier to retool a bus factory line to build large military vehicles than a compact car factory.
I'd imagine this is something like the Jones Act, where if it works, we keep the doors open for rapid changeover to military production. That's not really working for ships... the market has chosen alternate transportation rather than building large vessels for domestic transport, and so we don't really have large shipyards that could be pressed into building military vessels if needed --- the shipyards that can are the ones that build them in peace time and they don't have much excess capacity.
It's primarily a jobs program. We do not really care about a competitive domestic bus manufacturing industry, but we care more than this uncompetitive industry is hiring workers.
A literal bus factory may not be critical for national security, but the ability to manufacture a vehicle is. So the know-how, the supply lines, and the manufacturing facility are important. The ability to manufacture a fuel injector, a transmission, a windshield is going going to apply to a bus, a plane, a tank..
So subsidise the bus manufacturers to make competitive products directly, rather than an indirect subsidy via forcing transport authorities to buy uncompetitive junk.
Forcing transport authorities etc to buy local seems like clearly the worst way to subsidise industry; there is little incentive for the manufacturers to make a good or cost-competitive product.
Sure that's why the Hummer was a great vehicle with all the institutional knowledge from GM. /s Also modern engines in tanks and planes are turbine engines with nothing in common to lighter vehicles (APCs trucks etc). Tanks don't have windshields either.
> If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them?
The contention is always around the debt that is created when you let them. If China never calls the debt, that's a huge win — you just got something for free! You'd be crazy not to take that deal. But others are concerned about what happens if they do call the debt. You might not like what you have to give up in return (e.g. houses, farmland, etc.). Just ask Canada.
Of course, there is always the option to stonewall their attempts to collect on the debt, but that creates all kinds of other negative effects when the USA can no longer be trusted to make good on its promises.
> So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production.
No, their recommendation are transit subsidies with strings attached aimed at driving domestic economies of scale. Of course, depending on how a model is defined, 100 offshore unit cap can absolutely be gamed by making a "custom" model for each city or year.
> Finally, they recommend that foreign bus manufacturers be allowed to sell up to 100 vehicles of a given model, at which point they would need to establish a US manufacturing facility to expand sales further.
> To reduce costs, the researchers suggest that the federal reimbursements for bus purchases be capped at the 25th percentile cost of similar vehicles
There's more than one way to accomplish the goals of protectionists, and the different options are usually not created equal. Some economic policies have worse side effects than others to accomplish similar tasks.
In this case, I think that placing a tax on imports (tariff) is always preferable to an inflexible ban on imports. This is not an unusual approach in economics; it is in fact very common that economists recommend replacing bans with taxes. In fact, even the current administration, which is radical by modern standards, basically always prefers tariffs to bans.
The left? The US doesn't have a leftist party. Any time a leftist starts looking like they are gaining both parties do everything possible to shut them down.
In American parlance, Joe Biden is "the left" and Nancy Pelosi is "the far left". I'm guessing both are probably considered center-right from an international perspective?
> This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against
Hardly. Less than two thirds of Americans actually bothered to vote. And a slight minority of those voted for the current government.
In any case, why does this need to be about identity politics? And if so, why are you suggesting that only the left is committed to an open, free market? Isn't that more traditionally a right-wing position?
All fun and games to point out seeming contradictions! Especially here.
Unfortunately GP is right - optics matters more than factual correctness, and the optics here is mixed - yes gov is overspending, but the solution is to offshore more jobs.
"Government is spending the amount required for developed world jobs to build buses." would be a better title than "US cities pay too much for buses." The macro of deflationary globalization due to enormous surplus labor in the developing world are mostly over.
Someone's comment said "why not let China subsidize US bus deployment?" I think that's a fine argument, as long as we're still spending to keep the US manufacturing muscle strong. The cost is the cost to have domestic skilled manufacturing labor at the ready, and someone is going to have to pay it, because you're not going to be able to buy warships from China for war with China. No different than the US auto and aerospace industries retooling from civilian to military production rapidly during previous world wars.
Corporate America cares about quarterly profits, not capability readiness. This is an incentive alignment and capital efficiency issue requiring policy improvement.
China is neither an open or free market. Opening the door to China and their industrial policy is exactly what distorts traditionally free and open markets.
Blaming this on the amorphous "left" is extraordinary, when offshoring has been a 40 year project of corporate America and "shareholder returns at any cost". A neoliberal global order has been the traditional Republican platform.
This is confusing. If I accept your statement, then it seems:
1) The democrats hypocritically supports offshoring while claiming to support workers
2) The republicans explicitly (prior to Trump, but MAGA is not very similar to traditional Republicans) support corporations and offshoring as a mechanism for increased profits
No they aren't exclusively to blame. But they were a big part of elimination of manufacturing jobs in the 90s, and were huge critics of attempts to bring them back. I don't want people thinking that the left are some kind of "underdog" that is championing the people. Also their fiscal policy doesn't depend on manufacturing jobs. They can just print more cash and hand it out in various "programs". They, as a party, profit off suffering of Americans because they are always there to sell their voters a solution. The worst thing that could happen for them is people doing well. Because they won't be needed anymore.
That's not refuting my claim. It's turning the claim into an ad-hominem by attacking my character. You can research who donates to Democratic candidates if you want to see evidence of my claim.
by and large, US Democrats are center-right by policy. relatively leftward from your rank and file GOP goosesteppers, sure. maybe we feel the same way, but i wouldn't make the mistake of categorizing someone like Chuck Schumer as a left politician.
> This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing.
They voted against trans rights and they voted to cause harm to people they dislike. It had absolutely nothing with buss prices or generic this. The vote for conservatives and Trump is ideological, about wish to wage culture war. It is about cruelty being the goal.
And I mean this 100% seriously. It is absurd to pretend it was about something like this.
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
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?
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.
> whether that would still be true had we approached public transit and health care subsidies the same way European countries did?
Why wouldn’t it? I’ve heard many different explanations for the US’s wealth, but never that it’s wealthy because it saves on expenditures. There is also a solid case to be made that healthcare specifically would, if socialized, drive up productivity, earning power, and reduce fiscal risk (and risk aversion) for many demographics, all of which are good for GDP and other measures of a country’s wealth.
As for mass transit? It has costs and benefits too, but they’re a drop in the bucket compared to healthcare costs.
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.
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.
Because US manufacturers/investors demand high profit margins and expect it to increase every year, if not every quarter. If a company makes the same profits year after year, US investors consider it a dead end if not a complete failure, despite the fact that everybody involved in the business is making money
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.
RE volume, a couple of years back, Ireland, a country of a little over 5 million people, recently made an order for 800 electric buses over five years via the national transport authority. Meanwhile, the transport authorities in the article, in a country with 340 million people, made orders for 10 and 17 buses respectively.
Now, I think Ireland's extreme centralisation on this is unusual, but the US's approach of having loads of absolutely tiny transport authorities is, too.
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.
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?
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.
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"...
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.
> instead of constantly starting and stopping to access road-side mailboxes
Q: What's the (average) distance between deliveries to road-side mailboxes?
I'm thinking of the average driving time between them, compared with the time to get out of a vehicle, put mail in a mailbox, and get back in the a vehicle...
I know "mounted delivery routes" sound and feel more efficient, but just how much more efficient are they actually?
We should note that USPS letter volumes are falling (just like everywhere else in the world) and somehow parcel/packet delivery services do not need to have "mounted routes", the delivery crew appear to be able to just get out of their vehicles(?)
USPS normal letter volumes are falling, but due to various stupid crap they are forced to deliver a lot of junk mail at low price. Political issue rather than technical.
The difference for parcel services is that, statistically, they do not deliver a parcel to everyone every time, making it way easier to do "p2p" because you're not canvassing a whole street.
I don't know how it is done in the rest of the US, but in my state rural mail services are 95% of the time delivered using the mail carrier's personal vehicle, not the custom mail trucks. I usually only see them inside towns or moving between post offices.
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.
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.
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.
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.
IMO a LLV or NGDV is a custom-designed vehicle for USPS, the EDV is a delivery-optimized electric step van that happens to have been designed with the input of one specific delivery vendor.
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.
This problem is not unique to buses it's in almost all markets or industries in the US. Almost every industry has monopolies or virtual monopolies. Incubants pay/finance politicians to make rules that make it harder for new entrants to get into the market or use false free market narrative to hamper community inniatives. The attack on wind and solar by the current administration is part of the same play.
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.
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’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.
I assume buying from the European supply is federally banned due to truck import rules? Or would the insurance companies not recognize their capabilities?
There's at least some difference in design and requirements due to different assumptions about how high one needs to go on external rig, equipment in use, and fire codes.
None of it insurmountable but essentially means european vendors would need to make US-custom trucks which wouldn't make for cheap option at least for starters
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.
The biggest killer are all the specific changes each city decides they need.
If a standard feature set could be achieved mass production would be easier to arrange.
Perhaps with a module system to remove or add some subset of feature that are easily to adapt to it.
The 80% of federal funding¹ should be based on a "universal common standard",
and cities pay 20% plus the city pays 100% for various customisations they
need.
¹ I have not made any effort to verify this data but it's in hte article. It seems more generous than the federal government tend to be.
Similar to another comment here: the principle agent issue here is the person designing the spec for busses is not the person paying for the buses. If it was the case then the market would settle on a common standard as everyone seeks the lowest price.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each.
Huh. TFI, the Irish transport authority, currently has a deal to pay 400 million euro for 800 electric buses, mostly double deckers (so a lot bigger than these ones). Diesel double deckers cost them significantly less (about 250-350k IIRC), but obviously cost more to operate. That's for custom jobs (in particular TFI has weird beliefs about what shape windscreens should be).
I wonder if part of it is just that these US transit agencies are buying them on such a small scale; a state-level agency responsible for sourcing the buses might be more effective.
In many municipalities, it would be cheaper to run on demand van service for people than run busses. Not only would it get people to and from their actual homes and work, vans are cheap and readily available. Paying more drivers is cheaper than buying and maintaining multi million dollar busses that are empty a lot of the time.
In most of CA, most homes are far from bus lines. Making their use prohibitive for all but those who must use them. I know they do something like this in LA. People love it.
Metro micro doesn’t scale at all. It is still limited to pilot study areas. Cost per trip is absurd compared to traditional bussing. One of the stated goals of the next gen bus plan in LA was to get a bus stop in a 10 min walk of 85% of the workers in LA county and this was achieved.
The real trouble with transit is people choose where they live based on car convenience rather than transit convenience. So they open an app and go “gee I can drive to work in 30 mins but I have to take two or three busses and three times the time on transit.” And write it off forever, rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work. The way LA county is developed is that there are apartments basically in every neighborhood anyhow without very strong neighborhood specific effects on pricing. Housing a little more neighborhood specific but that changes as townhomes and other sort of not-detached-sfh buying opportunities come to bear generally in neighborhoods with demand for a song compared to detached housing.
> rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work
In many places I've lived, this optimization would need to be re-done every job change and you would probably need to move, because it's as much about where the job is as where your house is.
The thing about optimizing for a good commute in a car is that you're way more likely to be at least average or better even if your job location changes.
With the way traffic works in LA county that isn’t so much the case. Rush hour speeds are like 15mph or less no matter surface streets or freeways. Really large geographic area too. Other metros where you can move at more or less 60mph even in rush hour I agree.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> China had a long term strategy to building its own trains (and, I assume, buses). They first imported high speed trains from Japan and Germany but ultimately wanted to build their own
Interestingly, this process has now somewhat gone into reverse. Alexander Dennis, say, built their first-gen electric buses on BYD tech (China was the leader in this space), but their second-gen on their own design.
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.
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
"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.
Standard means you buy stuff that is similar to everyone else in ways that matter. paint is easy to do custom - and since everyone wants it they put in paint booths for any scheme. you want them to invest in jigs which costs money but pays off in volume - so work with the engineers to figure out what matters.
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.
The central valley is where growth is expected. See growth projections into the middle of the century. It is expected to double in population. Look at the rate of growth already. These "little towns" of 100k people basically double in size every 20 years. Greenfield is where the growth happens because CA urban politicians are against meaningful amounts of infill development. If they built it along the 5 in 50 years when the central valley has over 15 million people, you'd say it was foolish not serving these communities when they had a chance.
Brightline is building a victorville to vegas train. They have no plan to reach LA. Maybe as close as Rancho Cucamonga. In either case no work has been done yet on that project while construction on the HSR is ongoing.
>...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...
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.
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.
Public transit is intersectional. It helps poor and elderly people while also being climate friendly (assuming enough ridership). It’s often not used enough to satisfy either goal. California’s high speed rail boondoggle comes to mind as a great example.
The article focuses on purchase price -- and buying from BYD in China will be a lot cheaper.
But I'm curious of the downstream effects of forcing cities to buy local, even at a higher price. After all, that money will get taxed many times over and could potentially change the equation?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
>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.
If you read the article, one of the reasons the cost has gone up is supporting all the different bus colors because they have to keep 20 of same panel in different colors for different governments. If they had single color, then they could unlock better economies of scale.
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.
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.
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
I didn’t ask for your help other than accepting other opinions exist. In some cases the distinction is of high value. In some cases it’s at low cost. I’m of opinion this is low value and high cost, thus the cost benefit analysis fails. You’re free to disagree.
Cop uniforms are low cost and serve a significantly higher purpose. Taxis being a distinct color is unnecessary too. If I can identify a Dominos delivery vehicle from a distance, than they just need to try harder with their lit signs. A simple redesign could render vehicle paint job obsolete. Just because it’s been that way doesn’t mean it is the best or only solution and it certainly doesn’t mean it has to remain that way.
> I didn’t ask for your help other than accepting other opinions exist.
Perhaps you don't understand how HN works. When you give an opinion, other people can disagree.
If you don't like what they say, don't complain that you "didn't ask for their help". If that's your attitude, perhaps internet forums are not the place for you.
Telling someone "If you don't understand this, I don't know how to help you." is unnecessary snide that I was addressing. It is an passive aggressive attempt to assert your opinion as the only valid opinion.
> Perhaps you don't understand how HN works.
You continue with unnecessary attempts at belittling, while thinking you're in the 'right'. Perhaps take your own advice regarding internet forum usage.
> When you give an opinion, other people can disagree.
Yes, I'm disagreeing politely. You're the one having trouble accepting it.
> 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?
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
Good example. That budget behavior is common. Fortunately, if that has true negative effects, the market corrects by putting one company out of business.
I mean could be, maybe their stock would be a touch higher, but it doesn't stop them from being some of the biggest players in their markets. A far cry from being "put out of business" as the commenter I replied to promised.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More things should be like the Interstate System when federal money is involved: locally budget, appropriate, source, build/implement, and when it meets federal guidelines, you get reimbursed.
I’m all for mass transportation m, but city buses blocking a busy two-lane road for several minutes waiting at a stop has got to end. Even when not stopped, they do a pretty good job at impeding traffic.
The bus system has one set of costs. But it has another set of external costs on the rest of society.
In contrast, I’ve seen British short trains arrive + unload + load + depart in far less than 5 minutes total, and that involves a far greater number of passengers than a crawling bus.
Yeah, trains require more infrastructure, but I think the public could grow to like them.
Transit violence is not limited to outlier cases like the nyc immolation or Iryna's horrific slaughter. Women in particular may never feel safe on public transit and avoid it entirely at night and alone. Daily harassment, stalking, threats and verbal abuse are "facts of life" for the majority of female passengers in metro areas. They will all move up or out to safer environments and take their car or private transportation everywhere. Pretending like Americans are instinctually averse to public transit is an absurd contention when they've been behaviorally conditioned by the insanely dangerous environment and a justice system that works to inflict it upon them until they give up or die.
Whatever solution to increase competition and bring down prices - great. The solution should also either increase bus capacity and/or bus routes to more desirable locations so people would _want_ and _need_ to take the bus.
Are 40 foot buses the right option when ridership is so low in the states? Europe has small van-like busses but more of them. Sure less people fit on one sitting, but routes are tighter, more frequent, and transferring between bus lines doesn't require going waaay out of the way to a hub to transfer. 40 ft busses are great once riders are dependant on it... Seems like a classic case of over optimization.
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.
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.
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
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).
I don't believe labor is that much of the cost of a bus, unless you are talking about the "labor" of investors and high level administrators. Ive worked in many many different manufacturing jobs, and labor of building things has always been the lowest cost of concern despite managers trying to harp on about it. Labor costs are the easiest to control, which is why they get the most attention, but material procurement, administrative bloat and bureaucracy, and marketing or bribes always top the scale above the workers actually producing what is being sold.
First: I'm not blaming US workers for being unreasonably expensive.
But those higher wage levels are not just affecting a products core-labor working at the assembly line-- you'll have project managers, sales, purchasing, contractors, even the construction workers building your factories: All of them are affected by this (and those people exist in China, too!). I would assume that the total sales price of a bus contains a larger fraction proportional with hourly wages than you might expect at first glance.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
> "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!"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
> 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 war we're seeing in Ukraine right now. Europe has by far not enough tanks, especially heavy self-propelling artillery, to counter Russia. And for whatever reason, despite us actually having manufacturers for vehicles, we still haven't spun up large scale production, it's absurd.
IMHO, when WW3 hits, the situation will be like WW2, Europe relying on the US yet again - but I'm not certain that this time, even if the US wanted to support us, if they actually could. Not because of current political issues, but because the factories, the supply chains are all broken these days, tracing back to China far too often for my liking.
> 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.
I'm not advocating for full isolation amongst Western countries but for as much isolation from China and India as reasonably possible. We don't need to produce everything ourselves all the time, but if Covid has showed us one thing, it is that each country should at least have important industries running on low scale and people with knowledge around that can be expanded quickly in time of need. The US in particular should know the danger of knowledge literally dying out - what was it, about a decade was needed to replicate Fogbank [1]?
What is your threat scenario? Russia marching on EU capitals? After the showing in Ukraine I'm fairly confident that Poland alone with moderate support could put a complete stop to that. They are still growing and modernizing their land forces, but Russia has plenty of losses to recover from, too.
But I feel that argument almost supports my point: If you think Poland/Germany urgently needs more armored vehicles, then spending taxes specifically on that is way more efficient than subsidising the local bus industry.
Isolating yourself is also straight up painful economically, and you also lose a soft way of de-escalation/prevention. I'm not convinced that's a net gain.
Aggregate numbers also don't look that bad to me from a Europe vs Russia point of view; if you sum up vehicle numbers for European countries the gap is no longer that big, and European inventories are on average more modern/capable, too.
How much growth in those numbers would you like to see to be able to sleep at ease?
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.
> 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.
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.
The biggest problem with the private sector is that the tradeoff is always resiliency. Be it a product that isn't resilient to damage from everyday use, a supply chain that isn't resilient against erratic governments or pandemics, or the capacity and capability to rapidly upscale production.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
"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.
And congratulations to any of today's lucky ten thousand who are just learning of the Principal-Agent Problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
I'm convinced that a great majority of problems in the US these days fundamentally boils down to principal agent problems. The 2008 financial crisis is a great example. Once banks no longer kept mortgages on their own books, it just became a matter of time until that was going to blow up. The incentives change.
Your personal life is abundant with meaningful human activity that cannot at all be explained by money incentives. The principal agent problem has this same problem: once we stop talking about money, “interests” can be vague and overlapping, making the problem disappear with scrutiny.
To me, a great majority of problems in the US fundamentally boils down to people looking for markets and money where there aren’t any. Great examples include rising healthcare costs (what is the right price to pay for saving a child’s life, for example? Culturally, it’s basically unlimited!) whereas rising legal costs are NOT seen as a crisis (suing other people over BS grievances, unlike saving lives, is not compulsory); infrastructure investment (cars don’t make financial sense everywhere and everything all the time, but they’re REALLY cozy, so we will spend exorbitant amounts of money on infrastructure for them compared to everything else); the obesity crisis (eating feels GOOD, even if it costs EXORBITANT amounts of money); worsening education outcomes; lack of growth of alternatives to single family homes…
> To me, a great majority of problems in the US fundamentally boils down to people looking for markets and money where there aren’t any.
Your examples are mostly things where there are, though, e.g.:
> rising healthcare costs (what is the right price to pay for saving a child’s life, for example? Culturally, it’s basically unlimited!)
This is confusing value with cost. If you had to pay a million dollars to save a child's life, maybe that's worth it, but that's not the problem. The problem is that so often we could have saved the child's life for $100 but for various bad reasons it ends up being $100,000 instead, and the people getting the other $99,900 want to keep it that way.
> whereas rising legal costs are NOT seen as a crisis (suing other people over BS grievances, unlike saving lives, is not compulsory)
Isn't the problem with the rising legal costs mostly on the defense side? You can't prevent someone from filing an unmeritorious lawsuit against you, or avoid hiring compliance lawyers to tell you what to do to prevent that from happening, so it matters when those things get more expensive. But then the compliance lawyers and their lobbyists like it to get more expensive because they're the ones getting the money.
> infrastructure investment (cars don’t make financial sense everywhere and everything all the time, but they’re REALLY cozy, so we will spend exorbitant amounts of money on infrastructure for them compared to everything else)
People who hate cars say this but we mostly spend money on cars because everything is too spread out for mass transit, which brings us to this one:
> lack of growth of alternatives to single family homes
Markets are great at solving this. If it wasn't literally banned in most of the relevant places, developers would be replacing single family homes with higher density housing all over and people would be buying it.
> the obesity crisis (eating feels GOOD, even if it costs EXORBITANT amounts of money)
Government subsidizes the production of high fructose corn syrup, which does this:
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/03/22/sweet-problem-prin...
> worsening education outcomes
And then people make school choice arguments.
Which one of these isn't a situation where we would benefit from a competitive market but the existing laws prevent us from having one?
I think you have the cars issue backwards
I don't think I do. Are you going to run a bus every 15 minutes down a road that would have one passenger an hour? Mass transit isn't viable at the density of the suburbs but building higher density there is banned.
We've incentivized cities to develop around highways and the automobile infrastructure instead of building them for mass transit. You need cars because we build for cars.
It's not that we've incentivized cities to develop around highways, it's that we've prohibited them from doing anything other than that.
Zoning boards put a tiny little strip of commercial and high density residential in the downtown and then require the whole rest of the map to be single-family homes. At that point it doesn't even matter what the downtown actually looks like, people are still going to be in cars because it's the only way to get there from the suburbs.
These zoning board decisions were made largely to accommodate cars. For example, in many places, we can't have dense urban housing or commercial unless the developer pays to park all of the cars associated with the new development (so the cars don't consume public street parking). But this means we end up surrounding buildings with these giant parking lots which creates more space between each building, putting downward pressure on walking/transit and upward pressure on driving. This also means you need more lanes to accommodate the cars (the additional lanes also create more space between buildings and make pedestrian traffic considerably less desirable, putting more upward pressure on driving).
Tangentially, the additional length and width of roads as well as the traffic lights all constitute an increase in infrastructure costs while also reducing the amount of revenue generated per unit space (because so much more of the space is for streets and parking).
The space between buildings thing is a red herring. If you want an area full of tall buildings, there must be a significant amount of space between them to let in light and fresh air. You could hypothetically use that space for greenery or something instead of lanes and parking but you can't get rid of it and use it to increase density. Moreover, it isn't actually a density limit anyway because you can make the buildings taller instead of wider, and you can build a parking garage under the building rather than beside it.
The real thing minimum parking requirements do is increase cost, because building parking floors costs money. But that isn't nearly as much as the cost increase from zoning most of the map exclusively for single family homes, because that's the thing that makes the land expensive, and on top of that requires you to use 15+ story buildings in the limited area that allows them when you could have the same average density by using 3-5 story buildings over a wider area.
Moreover, you can't put the cart before the horse. If people currently live in the suburbs and arrive in cars, you can't expect them to walk before you allow anyone to build them housing within walking distance.
> The space between buildings thing is a red herring. If you want an area full of tall buildings, there must be a significant amount of space between them to let in light and fresh air.
First of all, I don't think anyone's goal is "an area full of tall buildings"; that's certainly not what I mean by "density" (although it is _one kind_ of density). Secondly, even in urban areas full of tall buildings, there's frequently much less space between buildings than a CostCo parking lot.
> Moreover, it isn't actually a density limit anyway because you can make the buildings taller instead of wider, and you can build a parking garage under the building rather than beside it.
Building vertically is expensive, and in many places land is cheaper, so it's easier to meet the legal requirement by surrounding the building with pavement than it is to build a parking garage beneath the structure. This is why you rarely see a Walmart with an underground parking garage (and when you do, it's usually in a dense city with more lax parking regulations).
> Moreover, you can't put the cart before the horse. If people currently live in the suburbs and arrive in cars, you can't expect them to walk before you allow anyone to build them housing within walking distance.
I think you're confused about what is being advocated. No one is suggesting we make everyone walk to work. I don't think that's a realistic outcome, and probably not a desirable one for many people (who wants to work close to a factory, airport, etc)? More importantly, relaxing parking requirements on developers doesn't make the existing parking lots go away, so it doesn't really affect the current crop of commuters; it just means that future suburban commuters will lean more on public transit to get to work.
You are right but in a roundabout way. It’s true that most problems in US can be explained by this but it’s also true that the west and US particularly are successful because they can bypass the principal agent problem to an extent.
You just have to look at India or Africa a bit to understand the severity to which this problem permeates day to day in these countries.
That's an interesting line of thought. How would you say the US/west are able to bypass this problem more effectively?
No matter how poorly one thinks of westerners and their leaders, it is clear that in general they can look beyond themselves and their immediate surroundings when optimising their impact.
The same cannot be said about Indians and other poor people from poor countries. Their optimisation lies solely on themselves or immediate family. This has consequences at every level and even at the political level.
It is just the case that the west and its leaders have had the luxury of choice and have only seen relative poverty but not absolute poverty for various reasons.
When your are poor and basic necessities are difficult to meet, its natural to optimize for self and not care about the big picture.
This may explain the phenomenon but it certainly doesn’t excuse it - just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s smart or morally correct
This is not correct. First, in crisis situations people tend to cooperate more, even though naive model predicts that people would act in self-interest. Second, there have been cases of countries that collectively decided not to be poor, and they stopped being poor once external pressure has been removed. Case in point is a huge part of Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
“America’s sophistication is reflected in the depth of its financial markets. It is unusually good at creating tradeable claims on the profits and revenues that its economy generates. In a more primitive system, these spoils would mostly accrue to the state or tycoons; in America, they back a vast range of financial assets.”
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21598651...
It takes more than just misaligned incentives to get a banking crisis -- you have to have structural corruption preventing the transfer of the loss gradient back to the "misaligned" decision makers. It's somewhat disingenuous (or overly innocent) to reimagine the pathways which power structural corruption as "innocent ignorance in the face of bad incentives".
The real world has "actually bad" actors -- not just misaligned incentives.
> It takes more than just misaligned incentives to get a banking crisis -- you have to have structural corruption preventing the transfer of the loss gradient back to the "misaligned" decision makers.
Nah, you can do it just on the basis of information asymmetries.
Banks can sell mortgages. People think buying mortgages is safe, because banks don't loan money to people they don't think can pay it back, and even if they did, the mortgage is backed by the house so in the worst case you can foreclose and get back your principal. So lots of people buy mortgages.
Then banks figure out that it's easy to sell mortgages, and that if they sell them it doesn't matter that much if the people they loan the money to can pay it back. Plus, the less creditworthy people pay higher interest rates, and you can still foreclose if they default. So banks make a lot of loans to people who can't afford them, and then sell the mortgages, and people still buy them.
Except that if this happens at scale, the people taking out mortgages they can't afford bid up the price of houses. And then when they start to default and you want to foreclose, you'd have to sell the house to get back the money, which at scale means that the prices would go back down to where they were before they got bid up, which means you wouldn't even recover your principal.
If everybody realizes that this is what's going to happen then people wouldn't buy bad mortgages from banks and then banks wouldn't issue them. But if enough people don't notice until after the bubble is inflated...
Let me tell you something about people...
You can sit them down and explain precisely why buying something, like a new car, is a bad financial decision and that they cannot afford it anyway, and then watch them go buy it anyway. To the point where I have seen people laugh about how dumb of an idea it is, while in the act of doing it.
The "I wish someone explained to me..." that comes later when it all falls apart is largely just licking the wounds of their damaged ego.
> You can sit them down and explain precisely why buying something, like a new car, is a bad financial decision and that they cannot afford it anyway, and then watch them go buy it anyway. To the point where I have seen people laugh about how dumb of an idea it is, while in the act of doing it.
And this is actually fine because it comes with its own integrated stupidity penalty. We only need the government to impose a penalty if the person who needs the disincentive when making a decision is different than the person being affected by it.
This is a big "hell yes" for me! Some seem to think that mortgaging themselves up to their eyebrows with huge houses and the latest vehicles is a good idea. As an example: I needed a pickup truck back in 2021. I settled on a ram and purchased the base model. The only options were a towing package and the medium level smart audio/display system for a cost of $27K. I could have easily spent $50K and got a whole lot of other options, but determined the extra cost was too much and the options weren't needed. (The only reason I purchase a new one is people tend to drive like maniacs in trucks where I live, so I didn't trust a used one.)
I digress, the numbers alone are the reason for the base model, because I could use the extra money somewhere else. And yes, new vehicles do depreciate too much. However, if you keep the vehicle for it's entire lifespan, the hit isn't so bad.
I’m always amazed at the number of 20-30 year olds driving luxury SUVs and souped up trucks.
Feels like I’m in a bizarro world where logic and math no longer apply.
Even if I could easily afford it, it seems crazy between the purchase cost and the yearly insurance cost.
They could still have a new car and use the money saved to pay down mortgage or invest it.
Most humans have to learn the hard way no matter the age.
> and people still buy them
You skip over a very important step here, where people keep buying the MBSes because the ratings agencies are knowingly rating the securities incorrectly. If that didn't happen, the market would be too small to blow up in the way that it did, all of the safe money can't invest if the MBSes aren't AAA.
It's not that no-one noticed in time, it's that the people responsible for noticing were paid to pretend they hadn't. That is the corrupt part.
It's not obvious that this was corruption though.
What they were doing was, they'd take a bucket of high risk mortgages and apply a contract to them to retroactively sort them. So, if you bought the 30th percentile of the bucket and then anything more than 70% of the people in the bucket paid their mortgages you would get paid, and if fewer than that did then you wouldn't.
Then they were rating the highest percentiles in the bucket as AAA because even for borrowers with bad credit, the probability that such a high percentage of them would default was considered very low. Even for people with bad credit, default rates are usually only something like 10%.
But that doesn't work out if you haven't noticed that banks have stopped caring about the default rate when issuing mortgages.
I disagree with the characterization of structural corruption. Every rationale actor will seek to capture all the benefits and pass on the risks. The real corruption is when decision makers know that they can’t be held responsible through corporate or political structures. See also [moral hazard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard)
Try to think of corruption as inefficiency to get the desired effect instead of some dude accepting some money under the table.
Sometimes a dude getting some money does not yield the worst outcome which is why some countries still run despite the corruption.
How about the ten thousand learning about "today's lucky ten thousand"?
https://xkcd.com/1053/
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.
You've got me wondering about if and to what extent AI could alter the dynamic
AI is used by agents to rationalize to principals why they're not actually being scammed.
I didn't know this had a name! Thank you!
And watch out for troublesome agents who often propose themselves as the answer to the principal-agent problem they created in the first place.
there's no reason to be patronizing or condescending
This is an example of the agent thinking it has to defend the principal but misunderstanding context.
It's an xkcd reference. Sadly, not explicitly mentioning it is xkcd sends the exact opposite message to the one in the comic to those unaware of it.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
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...
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.
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.
Why do you even argue against someone that doesn't think "insurance" should exist? Its a troll, not even most serious libertarian freaks are that idiotic. Our goal should be to make sure these freaks have no power.
OF COURSE single-payer means lower prices, the government has a shit ton of power in negotiating prices if they want to. They don't want to because they are corrupt, freaks like the above are only there to rationalize the theft. They need to be defeated politically.
If it "would have" to happen, how do you explain the data cited by the comment you're responding to where it clearly hasn't?
Reasoning about things abstractly without taking in into account actually measured phenomena that conflict with your conclusions; just ask Aristotle.
> OECD's numbers for health expenditure per capita[1].
Interesting that the graphs use PPP, but that the age-adjusted graph still shows the richer OECD countries spend more than the poorer ones. I wonder what's up with that.
These reports tend to ignore how fast you can get a specific service or test done. There is plenty of anecdotal data out there that in US you can get CT or MeI the next day, while in many countries in the EU you have to wait months.
I think looking only on the spending per capita tells us nothing about accessibility of service, and its quality. Once you start to consider those things, imo, the whole thing is not as a clear cut as it looks.
Wouldn't that be a latent variable in health outcome data?
Markets with prices fixed by the government have fixed prices. This isn’t interesting for markets
It's also a mechanism for some governments to cheat, because medicine is R&D-intensive.
Suppose that to devise some treatment for 10 million people worldwide, it costs a billion dollars once for R&D, i.e. $100 each, and then $10 more per person to actually manufacture it. So the average person will have to pay no less than $110.
Then some countries say "that costs you $10 to manufacture, we won't pay more than $40" and if you don't take the $40 you can't sell there at all. So, if you don't recover $30 of your R&D per person there then you recover $0, even though you need to average $100.
If everybody does that it doesn't work; they go out of business. But suppose that half the patients live in those countries and the rest live somewhere that the company can charge enough to sustain themselves, i.e. in those countries people have to pay an average of $180 instead of $40 so the total average can stay $110. Then they don't go out of business, but the countries not paying their share are cheating the people in the other ones.
And to add insult to injury, you then hear the people in the countries paying $40 saying "why are you paying $180 instead of doing it like we do"?
Yeah that’s the story people tell. On the other hand, I need to take a brand name version of a medicine that was patented in the early 20th century, and in the US the co-pay alone costs me $200/mo or more (not including what insurance pays) while I can buy it from Canada for $30 without insurance. (The generics cost a similar amount, but don’t work as well due to bioavailability issues.) So while I appreciate the idea that high US prices are all about R&D, I also have pretty visible evidence that US pharma will just charge whatever the market will bear, even for drugs that are long out of patent and inexpensive to manufacture.
The trouble is that it's both things at the same time. Countries that fix prices are paying less than their share of the R&D and the US market has bad regulations that unnecessarily limit competition.
The situation you're describing can happen in one of two ways. The first is that the more bioavailable version wasn't patented in the early 20th century, only the less bioavailable version, and then the version you like is still under patent and that's exactly what's supposed to happen. They get to charge a lot until the patent expires as the incentive to invent the more bioavailable version to begin with, and then Canada isn't paying their share and the US will be paying less when the patent expires, and if you don't like what they're charging then you can use the old version until the patent expires.
The second is that nobody is making a generic of the more bioavailable version even though the patent is expired. The US could and ought to fix that by remediating whatever regulation is impeding other companies from entering the market even though they should be able to. But then we're into a different problem because it can't be other countries not paying their share for something still under patent if it isn't still under patent.
>The second is that nobody is making a generic of the more bioavailable version even though the patent is expired.
I've been taking this drug since 1995 and the brand-name version has been in production (in its current format) since 1938. I don't think there have been any substantial improvements in the formulation in decades (as evidenced by my dosage, at least.) It certainly isn't expensive due to patents.
What's happening here is that in the US generic alternatives are supposed to demonstrate bioequivalence (meaning the same bioavailability), but the standards are lax and not well-enforced. Insurance formularies aren't going to spring for a brand-name drug formulation that costs 10x when the government has certified the cheap generic as bioequivalent. Manufacturers of the unpatented (but more bioavailable) brand-name drugs know that in reality some subset of their patients will need their formulation to keep blood levels stable, which means that in the US they can crank their prices way up and soak a bunch of sick people. In Canada they can't do this. Nothing about this is really defensible.
Which brings me back to the larger issue. High US drug prices can be due to both (1) recouping R&D costs and (2) greed, but the greed is enough to render our current system unworkable. You can't just assign manufacturers a monopoly and the right to charge whatever they want, and expect that they won't abuse this to soak desperate sick people with prices far in excess of their costs (as they are clearly doing.) So yes, you can point to the cost of R&D as one reason we should all (globally) pay more for some drugs, but you can't really use the need for R&D to justify the US system, which is inefficient and dangerous.
Here's the part where it seems like we're still missing some information. There is an unpatented formulation of the drug which is better enough that patients are willing to pay a large premium for it, but there is only one company making it. It can't be that the other companies don't like money, so what's the actual reason?
I think you misunderstand how US drug purchases work. There is very little competitive market whatsoever anywhere in the prescription med system; there are simply "brands" and "patented meds" and "generics" plus various underserved niches where pharma companies can extract high prices from desperate patients (see e.g., Martin Shkreli and Daraprim.)
With respect to generics, there's little incentive to make a better formulation. If patients have insurance, they'll get whatever "bioequivalent" generic is available from the pharmacy if it matches the insurance provider's formulary price requirements. That manufacturer can change any time, since by law they're all deemed equivalent. It's like buying generic store-brand ibuprofen: you have no idea which factory is actually making the stuff, and it can change from package to package.
There's also very little benefit to having a "brand name" generic that has better bioavailability since you really can't charge more for it: insurance companies and pharmacies will just switch to another generic brand with lower costs. Trying to argue better bioavailability could also involve admitting that your existing bioequivalence studies are bunk, which would require an expensive new certification process. Plus, even in a functioning and truly competitive market, trying to experiment with different formulations to figure out which "gets better results" is a dangerous game for individuals; it's not like buying different Kleenex and deciding which holds together better. You have to do a lot of risky trial and error and get frequent blood tests.
So basically we have a system that ensures a completely non-functioning non-competitive market, and then we throw in an exclusive term where new medication can be sold at any price and we expect market forces to somehow constrain manufacturers. But the market forces are very weak and limited here. When we clearly end up paying dozens of times more than other countries (even for unpatented medicine) people raise the R&D issue to justify the costs. But that's sort of like saying "hey, the Mafia spends a lot on churches, so their extractive business model is fine." If you really want churches (or R&D) we should find a more rational way to come up with those funds.
PS this paper is a good (old) study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8026413/
I was kind of curious if there was some specific failure with this outside of the general brokenness of US healthcare competition, but it's starting to sound like the classic one:
The biggest problem with US health insurance is that it's not actually insurance. The purpose of insurance is to cover major claims. If a storm does $30,000 in damage to your house, you file an insurance claim. If it does $30 in damage, you go to the hardware store and pay $30. But we expect health "insurance" to cover the little stuff. Health insurance should be for if you get cancer or need major surgery, not for a generic drug that ought to cost $30.
Which in turn is what messes up what could otherwise be a competitive market. Instead of picking who you want to buy the drug from, most people have insurance, and the insurance company picks. And then most people get insurance from their employer so they also don't get to pick their insurance which makes the insurance company unresponsive because the patient can't easily switch.
And then it sounds like what happened is that the manufacturers make nearly all of their sales through insurance, who only care about regulatory compliance, and there aren't enough people paying out of pocket to get them to compete on actual quality.
But the other problems shouldn't be there if we could get people actually buying what ought to be cheap generics themselves instead of through insurance:
> Plus, even in a functioning and truly competitive market, trying to experiment with different formulations to figure out which "gets better results" is a dangerous game for individuals; it's not like buying different Kleenex and deciding which holds together better. You have to do a lot of risky trial and error and get frequent blood tests.
This wouldn't be something most people would have to do themselves. If there are five companies making the same drug then forums for people with the condition it treats would have people already taking each of them, and if some of them are actually not right then aggregate data should show that, and then everybody would find out without each person having to do their own trials.
And somebody needs to be doing that anyway or you're going to have a lot of people whose medication is wrong who don't realize that it's because they're not getting what they paid for while the one that works is available from someone else.
> When we clearly end up paying dozens of times more than other countries (even for unpatented medicine) people raise the R&D issue to justify the costs.
But then we're back to, the trouble is that it's both.
And then people propose to have the government set prices, which is only trading one problem for another. Whereas what we ought to do is address the things causing the markets that are supposed to be competitive to not.
Well, US health insurance is insurance. That’s one function. But it’s also managed healthcare. The management is being performed by a series of large corporations with somewhat broken incentives, with the government backstopping and certifying everything and filling in all the gaps. That’s why other countries achieve such better results with government-managed healthcare, because our system genuinely has very little relationship with the free market and already is a kind of planned system; it’s just an exceedingly inefficient planned system.
But the lesson you should take from this is not “we should just deregulate it a bit and hope the free market takes hold.” This is the planned system we designed in one of the most capitalist countries on earth: it got to the state of being a planned system because the truly competitive market systems kept failing. I’m not sure where you can go to find a truly competitive system that isn’t in some way underpinned and supported by the government (and the US government specifically.) People often point to third world countries where they can pay cash, but I think that’s mostly just rich US people buying luxury healthcare at lower prices, not a real working free-market health system that delivers broadly-shared results.
You have to entertain the hypothesis that when the ideal “free market system” exists nowhere, the reason is because the free market system was tried (here in the US, even) and it worked so poorly that it was replaced with one of the systems that survived. Because that’s the pattern we see everywhere with healthcare (and with roads and fire departments, too, outside of a few exceptions.)
The pharma investment problem is a problem, but just to be clear: it’s a question of financial allocation. There are many ways to solve it that aren’t what we have right now.
I have a $6500 deductible. I definitely care what things cost because my insurance almost never actually helps pay for anything unless I have an unbelievably bad year.
The problem is that literally nobody can tell me how much anything is going to cost until I get the bill in a month. Not even because they don't want to tell me. Nobody at the desk even knows what my price is going to be because it's all numberwang.
Not defending insurance but theoretically you do also get a better rate than the uninsured rate just by having it go through the health insurance.
I say “theoretically” because I’ve also heard they’re often willing to cut some pretty good deals if you don’t have insurance and pay cash. And I mean “good” relative to the initially billed amount, not “good” relative to what it should actually cost.
Yeah, I suspect this is very country and region specific.
In my country I don't have health insurance. I've noticed that medical providers charge me less on discovering that. Party (I suspect) because I'll pay immediately so there's no financial cost (ie cost of delayed cash flow) and much lower admin cost (ie they don't need to deal with insurers.)
In some places I've seen signs advertising 30% discount if you "pay now, claim back from your insurance yourself". This informs my hypothesis that providers see the insurance system as a major overhead.
No, it’s the opposite actually. There are a couple of reasons why:
1. You have a deductible. Insurance is incentivized to make things more expensive so you don’t use it. With a $10,000 deductible, are you going to pay $500 for a service outside insurance or $2,000 with insurance?
2. Hospitals really have no idea what anything costs. Nobody does. There is a maze if agreements between providers, contractors, hospitals and insurance companies. If you have insurance, hospitals are more likely to throw out a higher random number;
3. There is more process and paperwork for the hospital with insurance; and
4. You are more likely to be able to negotiate down a bill without insurance.
I was told it's also illegal in the US for a hospital to bill you as uninsured if you have insurance.
You won't get in trouble but the hospital will, but if they ask if you have insurance and you say no when you do, that could change the situation.
Again, I'm not a lawyer but this was they told me once a few years ago because I got charged a ridiculous amount for something and wanted to see if it would be cheaper if I just paid without insurance considering my deductible was many thousands of dollars.
This is correct. I have been in situations where I am told the cash price and then "I cant tell you how much it will be with your insurance". Come to find out cash was A LOT cheaper. They cant undo it.
I have also been in a situation where insurance price was cheaper.
Thereinlies the problem..without know the price people CANNOT make an informed decision. There is no freemarket. This done on purpose and only happens in America.
I always view the initial billed amount as the MSRP for a really shady industry.
While it’s often 2x-3x the allowed amount, I’ve even seen it closer to 20x-40x one — an amount for a simple outpatient procedure the would lead to financial ruin if it had to be paid in full.
I really don’t understand why there is any math in the initial amounts.
Why don’t they just bill $1M for every single item and then see what they get?
Every time I’ve gotten a large bill that hit my deductible, going back to the provider and asking to pay cash without insurance has resulted in a lower bill.
You care about small costs but not the large ones. Even with a relatively large deductible it’s irrelevant to you if your hospital charges $50k or $90k for a surgery.
$6500 is nothing once surgery, radiation, and/or anesthesiology enters the picture.
Absolutely, there is room for price shopping for a subset of medical treatments. https://surgerycenterok.com is a well-known cash-pay surgery center. If you look through the procedure list, you can see the types of things that lend themselves to this model: lots of orthopedic surgeries, things that are fixes for chronic issues that don't really need to be dealt with on any specific timeframe.
But when you get into the really big, serious, time-sensitive things. Cancer treatment, heart disease, anything that starts with an ER visit... you don't really have an ability or time to "shop around". The demand is inelastic.
You are the best customer, thinking you’re a smart customer!
The funny thing is there are only a few insurance companies (BCBS, Aetna, United, …) and types of plans (PPO, HMO, EPO).
I could be misinformed but I feel like there are only a few possible combinations of one’s actual coverage.
A simple spreadsheet could easily track everything. The providers even know how much they get from each company, so they know the allowed in-network cost for a patient.
It’s just utter laziness and stupidity.
My understanding is that this is only really true for straightforward things like, say, a therapist. If they only have a couple of codes that they bill and they accept a limited number of insurance providers, then they can probably tell you what you'll pay (although I believe there are still a lot of edge cases).
However, if it's something like a surgery at a major health system, then it's way more complicated. The health system can't be as selective about what insurance they take, so they're dealing with medicare, medicaid, plans sold on the individual/small business market, and employer-sponsored plans. So way more than a few providers and a few types of plans. I checked the stats for my state and just the individual/small business market is 12 providers and 250+ plans. Medicare Advantage is at least 14 providers. A major hospital system probably accepts thousands, if not tens of thousands of different types of plans. Then you have to consider that the anesthesiologist, the surgeon, and the facility are all separate providers who may not all take the same insurance.
Different plans from the same company, even of the same type, don't always cover the same things at the same rates. This is especially true of self-insured plans for large employers - there's certain mandatory things they legally have to cover, but anything beyond that is all up to the individual employers' discretion (since they're paying all the claims directly, as opposed to paying a monthly per-participant fee).
> Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance.
If your argument were correct, socialized medicine would lead to higher costs, but it usually does the opposite. Insurance profit margins are a small portion of the overall cost in the US. In inelastic markets, when profit is removed, often you can see lower costs because profit by itself is purely extractive and in an inelastic market competitive forces are weaker.
One of the controlling factors for socialized healthcare is that prices are negotiated down by the people paying for the medicine. In countries where private healthcare is extremely rare, pharmaceutical companies can choose between "less profit" or "no sales in that country at all". Sometimes they bluff and in rare cases that means public healthcare has to go without certain medication or certain vendors, but on the whole the price is kept under control (until corruption kicks in, at least).
When the people handing out cheques don't get a chance or don't bother to demand lower prices, things become incredibly expensive. Even if a party like a private insurer tries to negotiate the price down, the healthcare provider can always say "tough shit, guess your customers aren't insured then" as long as there's at least one insurance company willing to pay the full price.
You also see this with electric vehicle incentives. Governments incentivising people to buy electric cars by giving money directly to the consumer just end up with electric vehicles rising in cost because the money is essentially free anyway.
Subsidies, depending on the market, often produce some degree of the effect you’re talking about, but it’s not black and white. The term is pass-through and full pass-through is rare with partial pass-through being typical. Often with subsidies (like for EVs) prices rise (showing pass-through) but it rarely cancels out, for example this study showing every $1000 of subsidy in California lowering the post-subsidy cost by around $800 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... - so only around $200 pass-through.
But this is a more elastic market than healthcare. To your point about negotiating power - it’s elasticity that gives negotiating power to consumers vs not.
A more important factor is that socialized healthcare often acts like a single buyer instead of each hospital being a buyer.
This can make even small countries into relatively large buyers which can make better and more long term deals.
I don't know. I live in a country with excellent healthcare, excellent public transport, overall excellent quality of life - yeah, and so much of it is funded from our taxes. Granted, the country was rich to begin with, but it seems to be perfectly sustainable.
Just my €0.03.
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.
Shouldn't insurance care about the pricing though? I get why federal govt isn't sensitive, given 0 competition.
Insurance profit is limited to a percentage of what they pay out. So the more they pay, the more money they make.
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
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.
On top of that the ACA prevents new physician owned hospitals from being established and placed restrictions on expansions of existing ones
Are you talking about Certificates of Need? Those have been around for a lot longer than the ACA [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need#History
To be fair, this is because there's long-standing [but disputed] evidence that healthcare providers drive up costs/utilization when they can refer to hospitals they have equity stakes in.
Messy business!
> More healthcare consumption = better, across the board
no
more paid money for less healthcare consumed = better for insurence
thus all the declined treatments
Not quite true. If you own the providers, getting people to pay deductibles and copays (i.e. getting treated) will yield way more money than just having them pay premiums.
But undercutting the other insurers/providers should earn you more, if it were competitive, which I guess it's just not
Correct, which is another reason why they are buying the healthcare providers. It allows the insurers (“pay-viders”) to strong arm independent doctors and smaller insurers out of the market.
The insurers are legally obligated to pay out 80-95% of their premiums for treatment. So the only way to grow profits is to spend 2x and much and charge 2x as much. Sure you only make the same 5-20% margin, but it's on 2x the revenue so it's 2x the gross profits.
Uh, no… they want to deny claims. The best situation for insurers is that you are healthy for a while, then abruptly die of something that cannot be treated.
Uh no, they don't. Not if they're also the ones who provide healthcare. Simply denying claims isn't even remotely close to the financially (and obviously not the politically) optimal strategy.
The optimal strategy if you own both the insurer and the provider is a combination of premiums, copays, deductibles, and maybe even some totally unnecessary care to drive up volume.
Lower margin on dramatically higher volume is still dramatically more money. Lower margin actually provides political cover for your $400 billion revenue years.
Oh, that's important info. Also such a rule suggests that health insurance isn't a competitive market.
There's no such thing as a “competitive market” in the real world.
Global commodities are not competitive?
What commodity isn't ruled by intergovernmental agreements, a cartel, a monopsony or something else?
Please name just one.
Gold
Gold isn't really a commodity. It's mostly used and traded as an asset.
Yes there is.
You first have to agree on a definition of free in this context. When Adam Smith was writing the Wealth of Nations most of the transactions in the market were between entities with more or less comparable power. Local people bought stuff from local suppliers. This is very much not the case any more when it comes to transactions involving private individuals on one side and corporations on the other.
Name a single one then.
It's funny to see that this was my most downvoted comment ever on HN.
Looks like blasphemy against the “free market” religion isn't tolerated here.
All the other kinds of insurance
Ah yes, like the health insurance market, so competitive it took a CEO murder to fix abusive practices from the dominant actor.
How compelling of an example, really.
wow, why would they cap it that way? that makes no sense.
It makes a ton of sense in theory. In a fair market, you would want to prevent the insurer from charging super high premiums that let them make a large profit relative to the cost of care provided.
The problem is that it doesn't stop there. There is a second order effect.
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.
Governments of countries that have public health care generally are price sensitive. The competition is from other governmental functions that need the budget.
That's less a matter of price sensitively and more that other countries usually have price controls on healthcare. That's why doctors make so much less and drugs are so much cheaper outside the US: it's literally illegal to charge more.
massive proportions of utilization come from govt subsidized plans
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.
Isnt it a little onesided to put blame on the payers for price insensitivity?
> The second you detach the consumer from the price of something, that is when they stop caring about how much something costs, and so the price jumps.
Why should nobody care about prices? The customer gets subsidizes by another payer, in this case governments that have to authorize budgets.
The reverse could be true too, companies raise their prices in lock step because they want to 'detach' more profits off of production and so, the government steps in to subsidize. So what is the causality chain here? Still the government not caring?
IMO you are putting blame onesidedly on payers and not on the ones in charge of price policy, which would include companies too. I dont understand why people dont apply their critizism of large organisations, like a government, to other large organisations, like a company.
Companies are incentivised to keep costs low and the feedback loop for this incentive is much smaller. What I mean by feedback loop is: the cost of running the company directly affects the stake-holders in a meaningful way. The CEO is probably has stock options and has to hit a target so that they can be paid well. To do so they need to be more sensitive with prices or shareholders or the board will be on the CEO’s behind. There is a direct monetary incentive relation here.
There is one for the government too but the feedback loop is much bigger. If some one in the government makes a suboptimal decision, what incentives exist to penalise them?
It could also be like health care, where the cost goes down when the government is paying for it. In fact my knee jerk reaction to the title of the thread was: Let the government buy generic buses in volume and give them to the localities.
Also (I think?):
- Govt beaureucreats spending taxpayer money - Availability of cheap credit for the US govt (the spender is other countries buying the debt) - Availabiulity of cheap student loans
> 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.
That's not the only problem with health. It's a very inelastic resource.
If you and your neighbor's have cancer, and I promise to treat whoever pays most, I can safely assume I'm going to be filthy rich. After all, money is pointless if you die, so barring money for descendants, the logical thing is to give me as much money as you can.
It's not just about not caring. It's a system that is wide open for grift. For example, the mayor awards the contract to X, and X in return donates to his campaign reelection.
You’re assuming the federal government rubber stamps their 80%
Fairly accurate assumption to make in this case. Incentives around government spending are structured against close scrutiny of how much gets spent on what and why.
Politicians love splashing their names on papers on how they got a bill passed to spend $X on $GOOD_SOUNDING_PROJECT, and the bigger the X, the better. Government employees are strongly incentivized against the reduction of their own employment should that spending go away. Lobbyists and service providers obviously have a direct interest in ensuring those contracts continue.
Nobody but the taxpayer has any interest at all in ensuring that money gets spent on things worth spending on and, moreover, that the spent money actually achieves the outcomes desired and intended behind those projects. And how much influence does the average taxpayer have on any of that? It rounds to zero.
> Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance.
This seems different. A healthcare consumer (in the US) is overpaying in large part because (1) they need the coverage (2) they lack the expertise to distinguish between offerings and (3) there simply aren't more affordable offerings.
Single payer healthcare systems feature significantly lower costs and better quality despite that the payer is not the consumer.
I mean if it's a strict 80/20 split the incentives are the same as a 0/100 split no?
The transit agency will choose more expensive features that do not meet a 1x ROI but do meet a 5x ROI.
Or how government bailouts go to corporations
I actually don't see how that follows from OP.
Exactly. Same for Universities. Thank you.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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_health_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."
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.
In two years maybe you have a different insurance co though.
Otoh this is why we invented reinsurance
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could US gov just buy out one the patents and make it free for all?
The challenge is that we have a rapidly evolving GLP/GIP/Other landscape being developed. In other words, you take a risk that the government buys the wrong thing. However, I think with a little push, you could have a highly competitive field to lower the federal cost, and the ROI should be easy to plot.
Actually, you don't need to do everybody all at once. Target the biggest (no pun intended) opportunities first.
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.
The Oregon Health Care Study followed patients for 2 years initially, then it was expanded out to 3 years. That's an absurdly short interval.
The idea is that increased primary care services will have benefits 10 or 15 years down the line by preventing chronic disease from reaching a critical state. For example, preventing prediabetes from reaching diabetes and then diabetic end stage renal disease (which would require dialysis at a cost of 5 figures per person per month). You're not going to see that over 2 to 3 years.
It's usually cheaper to die
Only if nobody does anything to help you. Truly LBJ's "Great Society" That also completely discounts the value (economic, social, and moral) of human life and all the attendant problems a dying person creates.
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)!
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.
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.
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?
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)
No, they certainly don’t all come with AC and heat.
I haven't seen a non-AC bus in ages, even in developing countries.
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.
Buses in places like Ireland, Scotland, much of Scandinavia, etc will never need air conditioning.
Places a little warmer (England, Denmark, Netherlands, northern Germany) might be warm enough for a few days per year, but the cost of purchase and maintenance of A/C might not be worthwhile.
How many of those places have you been to? They might not need year-round A/C like some other countries, but the increasingly-common heat waves definitely require them. The buses are almost intolerable with air conditioning, there's no way in hell they'd ever purchase them without it.
The additional purchase cost is a rounding error, and you're far worse off if cooking people alive during the summer means losing customers year-round as they switch to less-hostile transit options. Maintenance isn't a dealbreaker either: sure, it's extra work, but the equipment is rarely needed. This means the occasional breakage isn't a huge deal, and big maintenance can be deferred to the spring and fall.
Here in Germany many passengers are even against air conditioning in buses and open the windows in summer so the AC doesn't work.
The windows often contain labels like "Fahrzeug klimatisiert" (Vehicle is air conditioned) so it is not that people are unaware.
I've been to all of them, and lived/live in two of them.
I live in the UK and most of our buses in my city don’t have air conditioning as far as I can tell since they usually have open windows, except some the very newest ones
https://www.ratp.fr/decouvrir/coulisses/au-quotidien/des-sol...
In 2020, 5% of bus in Paris had AC.
In 2026, they aim for 75%. And a 100% rollout by 2035.
Even subway lines don't all have AC.
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.
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.
They are exactly the same busses. I've never heard of a school bus with AC in the US. (Please, someone from Arizona correct me.)
In Vancouver the climate generally does not need them. Some days it gets hot and those suck.
It's been a while since I've been on Muni but most of their bus fleet did not have AC as of 2019.
Busses without AC drive kids to school everyday out here in the American Midwest.
The number of places in the US that will never need both at some point is vanishingly small.
Irish buses don't have AC (rarely hot enough here to need it) and the electric ones only have heating adequate for about 0 degrees and up (rarely colder than that, though they're unpleasant when it is).
they should, also with air filters, noise and air quality are big issues, keeping windows closed would help a lot
yes, it's expensive, yes, people's revealed presences indicate they don't care for these things, they rather give up QALYs than sitting hours every day in "rush hour traffic"
One way that China keeps the cost of subways down is by standardizing the train sets.
They have three types of trains (A, B, C) that are used in almost all subway systems across the country. You need a high-capacity train? A. You have a smaller line with fewer passengers? C. Something in-between? B.
There are a few variants for cities with special circumstances. Chongqing uses variants that can handle steeper slopes, because the city is incredibly hilly (like San Francisco).
By standardizing, prices can be kept down. Cities don't have to come up with custom solutions. Just define your needs and pick the standard variant that matches them.
Something similar could be done with buses.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> If getting through downtown by bus is slow, getting through it by car isn't any faster
This isn’t true at all.
Busses stop continuously along the route, which adds a ton of time. Cars go straight to the destination.
You also have to add the time spent waiting for the bus, and the time to walk to the bus stop.
Busses usually aren’t going to take as direct a route as a car can. You will likely have to walk once you get to your destination, too, or switch buses.
I am all for public transportation, and take it all the time, but let’s not pretend it is always faster than cars.
> 2. If getting through downtown by bus is slow, getting through it by car isn't any faster.
If the buses and cars are on the same roads, going the same speed, the car will get you to your destination faster, and everyone will go by car. Buses only get ridership if they have dedicated lanes where they can go faster than regular car traffic:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22143...
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.
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.
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.
The Link light rail uses it.
The tunnel belonged to King County, not the city government, and transferring it to Sound Transit was in fact a wise decision. It would not be possible to run a train every six minutes during peak hours if they still had to share the tunnel with buses, and the 3rd Ave transit corridor sees more bus throughput than the tunnel ever did.
> But a bus isn't just a bus, there are differences in what is needed in different cities
That's sometimes true but often not. Utah might need buses to go up the canyons, but might have passed some requirement at some point that said that all the buses need to be able to do this because someone got burnt once by not having enough of those buses. Or some well-meaning (or vote seeking?) city councillor might have put through a bill to put USB-A chargers in all the seats, which will stick around far longer than those coming as standard making them an expensive custom option.
What you end up with is requirements that make the buses custom purchases, which massively inflates their costs, when any reasonable person would say that such custom attributes aren't (always) needed. By having a strong opinion about something, the city will pay far more than if they bought an off-the-shelf solution.
Much of "the west" is particularly affected by this sort of attitude. Everywhere and everyone is convinced that they are special in some way and need something specific, but end up paying for it. This is part of why India can send a probe to Mars for $72m, or why Singapore can buy busses at $300k instead of $1m. And to be clear, I say this having grown up in the UK and moved to Australia, both places with a certain amount of this attitude.
Do you have a specific citeable example of unnecessary “custom requirements” driving up the cost of city buses in the US
Well there's one in the article, the colour of the floors.
My point about the buses is about "missing the forest for the trees", so the fact that you've focused on getting a specific citable example while missing the point is quite ironic.
Here's an industry article about the phenomenon: https://enotrans.org/article/a-bus-is-a-bus-the-costs-of-exc...
And here's a study documenting excess customisation as a driver of the costs: https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/paying-less-for... – which notes that "70 percent of contracts in the BGS data in 2024 were for unique buses".
PHEV drivetrain with a 50 mile all electric range: would handle virtually all of the situations.
Climbing a steep hill? EV drivetrains don't care and provide great torque. Start/stop? perfect. Regenerative braking? There you go. Need all-electric for a spell? Gas to extend range? Gas for AC/Heat? ok ok ok. Smooth operation? Low noise? Low/no emissions? yes yes yes Less wear? Less gas? Lower operating costs? Simpler drivetrains? Simpler repairs? yes to all of it.
Every bus should have been forced to be a PHEV drivetrain within a decade of the Prius/Insight being released in 1997. The USPS should have been all PHEV by then too.
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.
Something from this article doesn't add up. In 2023 the SORTA board approved purchase of buses with a base price of $530,000.
Back in 2012 SORTA estimated that hybrid buses would cost an additional $240,000.https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/oes/mobility1/public-transport...
Assuming that $530,000 is for diesel only buses you'd have to more than double the premium to get to Bloomberg's figure as not all of the order was for hybrid buses.
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.
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.
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.
We solved that several generations ago with cars.
Considering the amount of traffic jams, wasted space due to parking lots, and lost third places, I'd argue "solved" isn't exactly accurate.
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".
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.
No, you'll get car sharing and even if just because you swing by a spot your friend recommended to pick up passengers to near you office, on days you feel like driving yourself, and likely become one such passenger yourself after a couple weeks of that, provided you're not amongst those who couldn't do it without their own car.
That's false because everyone has alternatives (you can stay home, for example). Raising the price will always on margin reduce trips.
How do you get to work when you stay home?
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.
You wouldn't. If you need to get to work, that wouldn't be the option you would exercise.
You'd really quickly find a way to work differently as soon as driving in to work to work for a shift becomes a net-negative on your finances.
Be that a pay raise, be that partially remote work, or carpooling.
Just be a rich tech worker with a remote job /s
Exactly, we will need to shutdown all the factories when nobody can come to work due to not being able to effort congestion pricing.
And broke it with congestion pricing so that only the few have the freedom to go where transit won’t or doesn’t.
Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded?
Only the rich are allowed to be free in congestion zones. All others must bow to the transport and fare schedules.
A typical household would have 4-5 people in it and only two cars if you’re lucky. A person needs mobility from the age of roughly 7 to at least 70 for all kinds of reasons.
Please travel the Europe and see how they treat their people and how increased mobility creates a great environment and freedom for everyone. I assure you that it’s not a backwards place as some people claim.
As a side note: All this car craze coincided with baby boomers (roughly) and now that they’re losing their physical and cognitive abilities we’re seeing a lot more accessibility support from them (duh) and I wouldn’t be surprised if they started pushing for free public taxi service for themselves but nothing that would serve the public. And we’re not talking about heavily subsidized industries like cars, but something that can be profitable and worthwhile because it allows people to go to work, school, shopping, hospital, theater, and more.
> Why don't the buses anywhere have some sort of uber style pickup.
They do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-responsive_transport
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.
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
Don't calculate the amortized (over a reasonable 30 years if you also ignore inflation and major maintenance/refurbishment costs) capex of the proposed Dallas red line northern extension, seen in a per-passenger-mile figure..... (I got 54ct per passenger mile just in capex (well, a capex-based view on the cost of having the track there and operable; costs from direct wear and tear of running trains and electricity and the trains themselves are additional)...)
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.
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.
>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?
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).
What you're talking about does exist, but it is specialized. For example, UTA (Utah Transit Authority) has both UTA On Demand - a "microtransit" service that's basically an Uber run by the bus company - as well as Flex buses that will deviate on request for a slightly higher fare (although you do have to set it up in advance). UTA uses these services for two specific niches of transit riders:
1. People who live in transit-poor suburbs
2. People with physical disabilities
To be fair, these have significant overlap. The common factor being "demand that can't be aggregated to a fixed bus route".
Once you have enough demand to have a fixed bus route, however, the most important thing is frequency. Schedule anxiety is the worst part of taking any public transit system. I find that if a bus or train comes every 15 minutes, I stop checking the schedule. Additionally, once you start scheduling frequent buses, then transfer times go down, which makes the bus network dramatically more usable.
Think about it this way: if you need to take a trip that involves a transfer between two buses, and the buses come hourly, you have an average transfer time of... 30 minutes, where you won't be doing anything to progress towards your destination. Your transit operator can futz with scheduling to try and make that transfer tighter, but buses infamously have to share infrastructure with private cars, which means they'll never actually come on time. The worst case scenario being you schedule tight transfers on an infrequent bus, then the first bus gets delayed enough to turn that tight transfer into an hour long wait[0].
Alternatively, you can just run more buses, and so long as they all make progress in the road grid you get tight transfers naturally. Miss your transfer? Oh no... anyway, here's the next bus.
On the other hand, if you're seeing three empty buses pull up to the same stop all at once, that sounds like you have bunching, which is the most catastrophic failure mode of any transit system. What happened is that your transit agency scheduled frequent buses at reasonable times, but some blockage along the route - traffic, construction, etc - delayed a bus long enough to arrive alongside the next bus in the sequence. The front bus will be nearly full and the next buses on will be almost empty. And as the day continues this can continue delaying buses until you have destroyed almost all the capacity and frequency in the system unless they take emergency action to pull buses out of the system and reinsert them at different parts of the route.
The way you prevent this is to give the bus dedicated lanes. The whole BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) concept involves moving bus stops to the center of streets, having offboard fare payment[1], level boarding, digital signage, signal priority at stoplights, and so on. Some of this is just to make BRT feel more "train-like", but a lot of it also lets buses maintain a tight schedule and not bunch up.
[0] I am aware of some bus systems where the bus drivers will actively radio one another to request a delay specifically so that riders don't miss their transfers. AFAIK, Suffolk Transit will do that, but only if the two buses are on the same part of the network, since ST is actually four bus companies wearing a trenchcoat.
[1] When bus drivers are responsible for fare collection, riders have to all enter from the front and all other doors on the bus are exit only. Which increases dwell time (the amount of time you spend at each stop). In fact, this is why Zohran Mamdani wants to make NYC buses free - specifically to speed them up.
Also, while I'm talking about bus boarding, I have rode buses in Japan that had people paying with IC cards enter from the rear, or worse, enter from the front and then tap your IC card at the back exit while the bus driver is trying to explain this to you in incomprehensibly mumbly Japanese.
> 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.
It definitely depends. The traditional yellow school buses here (Canada) use diesel, so they need things like glow plugs [0] and block heaters [1] to be able to run in the winter. But even that only helps so much, so when the nighttime lows are below –40°C, they cancel the busses since they know that they won't run.
Most of the city busses here use natural gas, and they're considerably more reliable in the cold weather but if they're parked for too long on a really cold day (even while running), the brakes will freeze up and they won't be able to move [2].
Similarly, the busses need a fairly powerful heating system, since it's tricky to heat a large space when it's really cold and the front door is open half the time. But conversely, most of the busses have no A/C.
Adding glow plugs, and block heaters, and brake dryers shouldn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a more reliable natural gas bus might be double the price of an unreliable diesel one.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glow_plug
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_brake_(road_vehicle)#Disad...
> 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.
That’s because your job was passenger.
From the drivers perspective: configuration should absolutely match the terrain and the expected route. For example: an Allison AT545 transmission without a lockup torque converter will be hell in the mountain and hill climbs of Colorado, possibly even dangerous. Whereas it may serve perfectly fine in Nebraska.
SG vs the US? Economies of scale, simpler drivetrains (hybrid vs non), and less expensive smog equipment.
> 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.
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.
< 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.
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.
> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.
Hmm, not sure about that. I live in Dublin, which is, generally, very flat, and where the temperature rarely goes far outside the 0 to 20 degrees C range. The buses can be fairly unpleasant on rare very hot days (no air conditioning), the electric ones can be unpleasantly cold on rare extremely cold days (heating not specced for it; this isn't an issue for the diesel ones as those produce so much waste heat anyway), and when I was a kid I lived in one of the few hilly parts of Dublin, and bus breakdowns going uphill were somewhat common (in fairness I think this is less of a thing now). Geography absolutely matters; Dublin's buses would be basically unusable anywhere very hot or cold.
There's other stuff, too. Buses here are almost always double-decker, but one specific new bus route requires single-decker buses, because the double-deckers won't fit under some of the older railway bridges. This will also require modifications to some road infra, which won't currently take long buses (to have a decent capacity single-deckers need to be longer; the single-deckers will be about 13m long vs 11m for the normal buses). Some cities use articulated buses; those wouldn't work here at all.
> 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.
Yes, but that's exactly the point the article is making: stop doing expensive one-off purchases! Rather than having 20 cities each buy their own set of 10 custom buses, have them place a shared order of 200 identical buses.
> 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.
There's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma here in that even if a city decides to go this route, their citizens are still paying Federal taxes and contributing to the programs used to buy busses.
So you're not going to save your citizens any money unless everyone stops using the programs. From an incremental standpoint, where everyone has already defected, you want your local governments to be grabbing every grant they can.
A very common problem in Metro Phoenix involves government or corporate procurement. They just purchase whatever is used everywhere else and end up with something that lasts well under is rated life time or doesn't even make it though a single summer.
Federal funds for transit vehicles come with an expected lifetime.
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.
The 2 bus contracts were with the same manufacturer, which is headquartered in California.
Thank you. That's informative. What about the third contract?
The difference between the North American buses is larger than the difference between the cheaper NA bus and the Singapore buses.
Is your theory that they treat half the plant poorly?
RTD's web site shows far more than 10 buses delivered in 2023 and nothing beyond that. They talk a bit about diesel hybrids but from what I can tell RTD does not operate any 40 ft hybrids.
Unsure what to say about the Bloomberg article but it smells like bullshit to me. Regardless, hybrid drivetrains will increase the unit cost significantly.
[dead]
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Portuguese salaries are miserable
"Miserable" like in "covers the cost of a $300k machine in 15 years"?
Bus drivers don't get software developer salaries.
As in $1000/month before taxes, with rent for pretty much any apartment costing quite a bit more than that.
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.
snip
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.
Yes, and?
The outcome of that approach is that an important service has uniform low costs to direct consumers, many of whom rely on the service for their quality of life, and many of whom would be unable to afford the service if its costs were passed along to them instead of subsidized via government debt and taxes.
In other words, a public service. That’s a good thing.
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.
I'm hearing you say we should have self-driving buses... which is feasible since their route is fixed.
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.
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.
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.
I mean it's already illegal to stop in the bus stop, and in some cities the buses have cameras to catch offenders, but people still do it. What would help is bus rapid transit (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit), which involves a lot of dedicated and separated bus lanes to make it a bit more like a train, but that only solves some of the problems I mentioned.
Bus driver also does things like trigger ramp for handicapped people, strap in wheelchairs securely, answer questions about the route, and security surveillance.
You can have a fleet of specialized self-driving taxis for people with disabilities. They can have articulated ramps or other special accommodations.
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.
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.
Slower? In top speed maybe, but not in time-to-destination (or, given congested streets, average speed).
Trains “require” you to make a transfer? Depends on your city, I guess; many train systems are hub-and-spoke-like enough (and dense enough) that common commutes don’t require any transfers. Also, I’m curious whether bus-centric mass transit requires more or fewer transfers than train-centric or hybrid.
> Slower? In top speed maybe, but not in time-to-destination (or, given congested streets, average speed).
Yep. Transit is ALWAYS slower on average compared to cars. It is faster only in a very narrow set of circumstances.
Try an experiment: drop 10 random points inside a city, and plot routes between them for cars and transit (you can use Google Maps API). Transit will be on average 2-3 times slower, even in the rush hour.
Ah yes 100x more expensive and 10x less practical. How did we get to posting blatant nonsense here.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
It's paying either way. I'd rather pay with money.
I'm the same. When brought up for policy, the results tend to be very disappointing, though.
Taking a look at NYC or SF bus, are you sure that more riders solve security issues?
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.
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....
And then we need to make a change to the route.... oops.
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.
No we don’t. Put another one in if need arises.
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!
Driving a city bus is much, much, _much_ harder than driving a car. Shuttle bus in an airport or something, sure, maybe. But (with the exception of BRT systems with mostly/all segregated routes), I'd expect city buses to be about the most difficult form of transport to automate.
e: after looking at the numbers again, i was wrong.
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).
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.
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
Or buy 10 Teslas for the same price and offer superior service.
The main cost of running a bus system is drivers, not buses. So that would be horribly expensive.
Also... how small are you imagining buses are? Standard buses here have a capacity of around a hundred people. If you broke them out into cars there simply wouldn't be space on the roads.
That is worse service. A tesla has low capacity and so cannot handle multiple groups randomly showing up at the same time. The point of great transit is you don't think, the system is ready for you.
That's 10x the cost of drivers though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
> What's this supposed to mean?
A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning. You can verify by looking at the maximum lane throughput in vehicles per hour.
> At higher speeds it's even less as the footprint of each vehicle equals "vehicle length + following distance".
The commercial speed of buses in cities is around 10-15 mph. There are no "higher speeds" when talking about the city traffic.
> 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.
I've seen buses blocking multiple cars for a traffic light cycle because buses take so much space. These days, it is apparently considered a feature in the pro-misery community...
> Citation?
For example: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
This is a very loaded topic. The average raw bus pollution is about 75g CO2e per kilometer, and a passenger EV is around 50g. However, these calculations neglect that a bus needs about 3.5 drivers per bus to be viable. And these drivers become by far the most polluting factor.
> A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning.
I've never heard anything of the sort and I don't believe it at face value - that's roughly the length of a football field. Perhaps this is true in a specific area with terrible bus infrastructure but where I live, and the majority of places where I've been, bus stops are off the main road so they never block traffic.
> I've seen buses blocking multiple cars for a traffic light cycle because buses take so much space.
As I said, a consequence of bad infrastructure, not an inherent flaw of this mode of transportation. And even if some cars get held up that doesn't necessarily mean that the throughput has been affected - in heavy traffic this gap will be filled by other cars.
> For example: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
This table lists "Coach (bus)" at 27g CO2e/passenger-km. I don't know why buses are listed three times and they don't clarify, but it sure seems like the figure for passenger EVs represents the average for all types of trips whilst bus service is broken down into long-distance (coach) and local city service, making direct comparison impossible.
Additionally, carbon footprint is one small part of pollution and arguably it's not even the most important one. Ultrafine particles, PM2.5, and noise pollution matter just as much to the local population.
> I've never heard anything of the sort and I don't believe it at face value
Perhaps you should stop listening to propaganda from the ubranists and start digging past the images of happy smiling cyclists riding the bike lanes in perfect weather with the sun shining on them?
> that's roughly the length of a football field.
Yep. That's how bad buses are. Want another fun fact? One bus does the same amount of road damage as 1000-5000 cars. If you have a bus lane, look at it and you'll see that it is much more damaged compared to the nearby lanes, even though it carries far fewer vehicles.
> As I said, a consequence of bad infrastructure, not an inherent flaw of this mode of transportation.
Yes. A well-designed city like Houston will have enough road space so that buses are do not affect the traffic disproportionately. But then it means that such a city does not _need_ buses.
> This table lists "Coach (bus)" at 27g CO2e/passenger-km
It's a UK term for long-distance buses. Yes, they are indeed more efficient than cars. If you can get a bus to drive at freeway speeds without frequent stops, then it becomes extremely efficient.
> Additionally, carbon footprint is one small part of pollution and arguably it's not even the most important one. Ultrafine particles, PM2.5, and noise pollution matter just as much to the local population.
Ok. Let's talk about PM25. If we're talking about the _brake_ _dust_ then buses are absolutely the worst. They emit way more dust per passenger. But I don't believe that this is a problem long-term, EVs barely use frictional brakes and future EV buses should also be able to mitigate the brake wear.
For _tire_ wear, it's more complex. There are no good studies of tire wear that control for the average speed. In most studies, tire wear is simply calculated by weighing the tires and dividing the lost mass by the number of miles traveled. A few studies that tried to measure the direct particulate emissions near highway exits produced results with error bars that make them useless.
Here's a nice overview: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-11/documents/42...
Noise pollution is a solved problem, btw. EVs are now required to make _artificial_ noise because they are so quiet. Ditto for brake dust, regenerative braking takes care of that.
> Perhaps you should stop listening to propaganda from the ubranists
I know this site is US-centric but excuse me if I don't take anti-public-transport propaganda at face value. I've lived in Europe all of my life and I've been to major US cities on the west coast so I've seen great public transport as well as the car-centric culture with my own eyes.
> Yep. That's how bad buses are.
No, that claim is ridiculous and obviously incorrect - It's laughable, really. Care to [try to] substantiate it?
> One bus does the same amount of road damage as 1000-5000 cars.
Sure, buses do cause more road damage than personal vehicles, but that's hardly a significant factor. Care to list all of the externalities for personal cars? Does parking build and maintain itself? How about all of the opportunity cost for space occupied by parked cars? Injuries caused by impaired drivers?
> A well-designed city like Houston will have enough road space so that buses are do not affect the traffic disproportionately. But then it means that such a city does not _need_ buses.
I have no idea what you meant by this. That doesn't logically follow.
> I've lived in Europe all of my life and I've been to major US cities on the west coast so I've seen great public transport as well as the car-centric culture with my own eyes.
So you're telling me that you've never seen a well-run people-oriented city like Houston?
And I grew up in Europe. I got my driving license around the age of 25, and my first car at 29.
> No, that claim is ridiculous and obviously incorrect - It's laughable, really. Care to [try to] substantiate it?
See?
> Care to list all of the externalities for personal cars? Does parking build and maintain itself? How about all of the opportunity cost for space occupied by parked cars? Injuries caused by impaired drivers?
Care to list all the externalities of buses? Do bus drivers spring out of sea foam and dissolve after the shift? How about all of the opportunity cost for people who can't make commutes that are forbidden by the bus network? The entire human lifetimes wasted every day while waiting for buses?
> Injuries caused by impaired drivers?
Self-driving solved it?
> I have no idea what you meant by this. That doesn't logically follow.
If buses don't affect your traffic flow, then you have enough road space so that residents can just use cars.
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.
carrying 3 passengers is doing all the work for you there
Crazy diesel busses are still legal to begin with. Thats basically some form of money laundering at this point.
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.
Something that strikes me as a bit odd is that most US electric buses seem to come from companies who just make electric buses. The electric buses here are made by conventional bus companies who've been making buses for, in one case, 80 years an in another over a century. Do none of the traditional US bus companies make electric ones?
That was just Proterra; all of Seattle's buses are from the usual suspects.
This is something I would honestly expect if you try and get cheaper from market pressure.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, it was. It was also a genuinely big problem, but given the scope for hype, even massive problems can be overblown as well.
(And the media is pretty good at it. I'm pretty sure if a comet was about to hit the planet tomorrow and wipe out humanity there would still be an article that somehow manages to make it sound worse)
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.
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.)
> Buses get shaken really hard.
In America they do, since we don't take care of our roads.
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.
Make the argument why the bus company that provides bus-based transportation near one's home/work should spend marginal income on fancy emerging technologies instead of on higher-quality service (or lowering ticket prices if somehow service quality has reached an upper limit)? Sure if the state or feds want to pay the extra costs to get such technology out there into production, make them an offer as the local bus company how much they'd have to chip in for you to deploy that.
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...
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.
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.
Imagine if they could just order from vendors like "Solaris Bus & Coach sp z o.o."... They're even running some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Urbino_12_hydrogen over here that I at least hope have their hydrogen premium costs paid for by the EU grant the decals claim. Riding them I can't note a difference between what I would expect from a battery only version. But I can't imagine it's cheaper to take the hit of hydrogen roundtripping and the cost of hydrogen infrastructure just to avoid some 400 kW DC fast chargers at some strategic extended-stay bus stops where they take their lunch break (kick the last passenger out, walk outside, plug it in, lock the door and take a walk or go back inside and read the newspaper, and at the end unplug and hang it back on the electricity-vending-machine).
Unless it's different for bus drivers than for truck drivers, there is plenty mandatory break time under German rules to allow fast charging of such style to give enough range. And it's easy to set up by just fitting route-after-route with the charging spots and keeping a few diesel busses in reserve to handle broken chargers until there are enough chargers to maintain bus schedules even if some of them go offline.
Aren’t most busses CNG these days?
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.
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.
LA metro has 2200 CNG busses.
>Almost no fleets in the US are running majority CNG.
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.
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.)
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}.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not just pedestrians, but residents who gotta breathe in the particulate and other exhaust emissions. That, in turn, significantly affects poorer parts of the population who have no other choice than to live and rent near heavily trafficed roads.
Modern diesels emit almost no particulates. The older ones yes, but few are still on the road in public transit service.
> The older ones yes, but few are still on the road in public transit service
If only that were true in my major US city. The public buses are probably the most filthy vehicles on the road. Every fourth one lets out a cloud of acrid black smoke every time it accelerates. I have to assume they are officially or informally exempt from emissions testing.
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.
Busses are loud, but not nearly as load and polluting as cars in aggregate
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.
> 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.
My experience is tainted by the fact that the battery electric busses are new and the diesel busses are (comparatively) old, but our battery electric busses are far more comfortable to ride. Diesels are uh, jerky. Maybe the drivers fault, but that’s how it is.
It's probably more the brakes than the engine. Diesel engines don't provide much of an engine braking effect (unless fitted with additional mechanisms a/k/a "Jake Brake" to provide this) so the vehicles use friction brakes any time they need to slow down, which can be jerky especially with air brakes. Electric buses would have regenerative braking which is probably smoother.
The vibration of the running engine is a big part of it. Very noticeable on diesel-electric battery hybrids; the whole feel of the thing changes when it's running on battery power.
They use hydraulic retarders in the transmission rather than engine brakes.
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).
Even more damning, diesel is objectively, inarguably more expensive to run, costing more than four times as much as [Vancouver's] battery-electric busses in fuel/electricity.
Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.
Diesel’s last remaining benefits are of no value for a bus (locomotive-class horsepower possibilities and rapid refueling) as a bus never weighs much and goes in a circle.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Trains run on rails, which doesn't exactly allow them to go off-highway. If you're already spending a fortune on building the rail infrastructure, why wouldn't you spend a few bucks extra to install the extension cord?
Because in most places in the world, the rail is already built.
So it's either extend the existing rail network, or try to build a new one entirely.
(Apparently it's something on the line of $10m/mile to add electrification, so presumably building it while building out is less, but not much less.)
The first one feels like a red herring, anyway; some places have battery powered _locomotives_, now.
citation needed.
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.
1: https://trafficnews-jp.translate.goog/post/587367/3
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).
Note how the whole thread has been about cost of diesel fuel vs electricity from the start, and how I'm explicitly talking about operating costs for them.
From the linked analysis you will also find that the higher price example for diesel bus in the article ($980k) is already more expensive than a typical BEV alternative and likely a net drain on the operator (by comparison) within the first year.
Your link doesn't work. However, I know electric busses have won tenders over diesel in many places that don't have any eco-subsidies.
Japan may have special conditions, like diesel/electricity price may be unfavorable or "build local" rules and no local competition in EV building.
ok, it looks like `?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en` parameters were mandatory, sorry. fixed link: https://trafficnews-jp.translate.goog/post/587367/3?_x_tr_sl...
Yes, the exhaust that people have to breathe.
I realize they have improved but aren’t natural gas buses better?
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.
So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production. As if that doesn’t carry any negative side effects.
This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing. Everyone is now fully aware that offshoring for a cheap sticker price comes with higher, harder to price costs elsewhere.
The side effects of “Buy American” rules do not include a dynamic, competitive domestic bus manufacturing industry. Just the opposite.
If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them? Are busses really critical national security concerns?
If we needed the existing NA producers to build military busses it sounds like we’d be screwed!
> If we needed the existing NA producers to build military busses it sounds like we’d be screwed!
I only really skimmed the article, and didn't even load the underlying paper. But it seems like a big issue was custom orders. If we need wartime vehicle production, like in WWII, there would most likely be a single or small number of designs that a facility would produce. I would expect a lot more coordination between ordering, production, and supply chain as well --- if we need mass production, tradeoffs change.
> If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them? Are busses really critical national security concerns?
Busses are likely not really the national security concern, the concern would be having large vehicle manufacturing. It may be easier to retool a bus factory line to build large military vehicles than a compact car factory.
I'd imagine this is something like the Jones Act, where if it works, we keep the doors open for rapid changeover to military production. That's not really working for ships... the market has chosen alternate transportation rather than building large vessels for domestic transport, and so we don't really have large shipyards that could be pressed into building military vessels if needed --- the shipyards that can are the ones that build them in peace time and they don't have much excess capacity.
It's primarily a jobs program. We do not really care about a competitive domestic bus manufacturing industry, but we care more than this uncompetitive industry is hiring workers.
A literal bus factory may not be critical for national security, but the ability to manufacture a vehicle is. So the know-how, the supply lines, and the manufacturing facility are important. The ability to manufacture a fuel injector, a transmission, a windshield is going going to apply to a bus, a plane, a tank..
So subsidise the bus manufacturers to make competitive products directly, rather than an indirect subsidy via forcing transport authorities to buy uncompetitive junk.
Forcing transport authorities etc to buy local seems like clearly the worst way to subsidise industry; there is little incentive for the manufacturers to make a good or cost-competitive product.
If only there was an entire American city filled with people and companies who had this expertise. We could call it the "Motor City".
You ignored "supply lines"
I encourage you to find a vehicle made in said city with zero parts sourced from China.
That is the point.
Or “Fremont”
Sure that's why the Hummer was a great vehicle with all the institutional knowledge from GM. /s Also modern engines in tanks and planes are turbine engines with nothing in common to lighter vehicles (APCs trucks etc). Tanks don't have windshields either.
> If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them?
The contention is always around the debt that is created when you let them. If China never calls the debt, that's a huge win — you just got something for free! You'd be crazy not to take that deal. But others are concerned about what happens if they do call the debt. You might not like what you have to give up in return (e.g. houses, farmland, etc.). Just ask Canada.
Of course, there is always the option to stonewall their attempts to collect on the debt, but that creates all kinds of other negative effects when the USA can no longer be trusted to make good on its promises.
Tradeoffs, as always.
>So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production. As if that doesn’t carry any negative side effects.
How's American shipbuilding faring, after companies were forced to "buy american" for domestic shipping?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
> So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production.
No, their recommendation are transit subsidies with strings attached aimed at driving domestic economies of scale. Of course, depending on how a model is defined, 100 offshore unit cap can absolutely be gamed by making a "custom" model for each city or year.
> Finally, they recommend that foreign bus manufacturers be allowed to sell up to 100 vehicles of a given model, at which point they would need to establish a US manufacturing facility to expand sales further.
> To reduce costs, the researchers suggest that the federal reimbursements for bus purchases be capped at the 25th percentile cost of similar vehicles
There's more than one way to accomplish the goals of protectionists, and the different options are usually not created equal. Some economic policies have worse side effects than others to accomplish similar tasks.
In this case, I think that placing a tax on imports (tariff) is always preferable to an inflexible ban on imports. This is not an unusual approach in economics; it is in fact very common that economists recommend replacing bans with taxes. In fact, even the current administration, which is radical by modern standards, basically always prefers tariffs to bans.
The left? The US doesn't have a leftist party. Any time a leftist starts looking like they are gaining both parties do everything possible to shut them down.
In American parlance, Joe Biden is "the left" and Nancy Pelosi is "the far left". I'm guessing both are probably considered center-right from an international perspective?
right wing to center-right for most reformist-minded Democrats. Maybe Bernie alone as center-left.
> This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against
Hardly. Less than two thirds of Americans actually bothered to vote. And a slight minority of those voted for the current government.
In any case, why does this need to be about identity politics? And if so, why are you suggesting that only the left is committed to an open, free market? Isn't that more traditionally a right-wing position?
All fun and games to point out seeming contradictions! Especially here.
Unfortunately GP is right - optics matters more than factual correctness, and the optics here is mixed - yes gov is overspending, but the solution is to offshore more jobs.
"Government is spending the amount required for developed world jobs to build buses." would be a better title than "US cities pay too much for buses." The macro of deflationary globalization due to enormous surplus labor in the developing world are mostly over.
Someone's comment said "why not let China subsidize US bus deployment?" I think that's a fine argument, as long as we're still spending to keep the US manufacturing muscle strong. The cost is the cost to have domestic skilled manufacturing labor at the ready, and someone is going to have to pay it, because you're not going to be able to buy warships from China for war with China. No different than the US auto and aerospace industries retooling from civilian to military production rapidly during previous world wars.
Corporate America cares about quarterly profits, not capability readiness. This is an incentive alignment and capital efficiency issue requiring policy improvement.
Citations:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
https://time.com/7313207/ford-ceo-farley-essential-economy-w...
China is neither an open or free market. Opening the door to China and their industrial policy is exactly what distorts traditionally free and open markets.
Blaming this on the amorphous "left" is extraordinary, when offshoring has been a 40 year project of corporate America and "shareholder returns at any cost". A neoliberal global order has been the traditional Republican platform.
It's also just not advisable. It's better to attack policies rather than groups.
The left serves corporations at least as much as it claims to represent the people. That is why they are blamed.
This is confusing. If I accept your statement, then it seems:
1) The democrats hypocritically supports offshoring while claiming to support workers
2) The republicans explicitly (prior to Trump, but MAGA is not very similar to traditional Republicans) support corporations and offshoring as a mechanism for increased profits
And so we blame "the left"?
No they aren't exclusively to blame. But they were a big part of elimination of manufacturing jobs in the 90s, and were huge critics of attempts to bring them back. I don't want people thinking that the left are some kind of "underdog" that is championing the people. Also their fiscal policy doesn't depend on manufacturing jobs. They can just print more cash and hand it out in various "programs". They, as a party, profit off suffering of Americans because they are always there to sell their voters a solution. The worst thing that could happen for them is people doing well. Because they won't be needed anymore.
Sorry to be glib but I’m not sure you’re familiar enough with the political left to make a statement like this so confidently.
That's not refuting my claim. It's turning the claim into an ad-hominem by attacking my character. You can research who donates to Democratic candidates if you want to see evidence of my claim.
by and large, US Democrats are center-right by policy. relatively leftward from your rank and file GOP goosesteppers, sure. maybe we feel the same way, but i wouldn't make the mistake of categorizing someone like Chuck Schumer as a left politician.
> This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing.
They voted against trans rights and they voted to cause harm to people they dislike. It had absolutely nothing with buss prices or generic this. The vote for conservatives and Trump is ideological, about wish to wage culture war. It is about cruelty being the goal.
And I mean this 100% seriously. It is absurd to pretend it was about something like this.
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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
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?
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.
What is your alternative explanation for why people rent public storage space? Urban growth and growth in suburbs are not mutually exclusive.
> What is your alternative explanation for why people rent public storage space?
People buying a lot more stuff. The mutually exclusive part is saying that home sizes decreased when they actually decreased.
> whether that would still be true had we approached public transit and health care subsidies the same way European countries did?
Why wouldn’t it? I’ve heard many different explanations for the US’s wealth, but never that it’s wealthy because it saves on expenditures. There is also a solid case to be made that healthcare specifically would, if socialized, drive up productivity, earning power, and reduce fiscal risk (and risk aversion) for many demographics, all of which are good for GDP and other measures of a country’s wealth.
As for mass transit? It has costs and benefits too, but they’re a drop in the bucket compared to healthcare costs.
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.
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.
Because US manufacturers/investors demand high profit margins and expect it to increase every year, if not every quarter. If a company makes the same profits year after year, US investors consider it a dead end if not a complete failure, despite the fact that everybody involved in the business is making money
The purchasers for buses, trainsets, etc., are bad- lots of unnecessary customization, last minute changes, low volume, etc. This drives down efficiency across the system.
Isn’t that true in other countries though?
RE volume, a couple of years back, Ireland, a country of a little over 5 million people, recently made an order for 800 electric buses over five years via the national transport authority. Meanwhile, the transport authorities in the article, in a country with 340 million people, made orders for 10 and 17 buses respectively.
Now, I think Ireland's extreme centralisation on this is unusual, but the US's approach of having loads of absolutely tiny transport authorities is, too.
unbelievably in depth channel, love all of the local business interviews (from other videos with restaurants and such)
Our buses are also less comfortable and "rattle" more that busses I've ridden in many other first world countries. I'm not sure if this is an economics thing but the standard New Flyer buses feel a bit dated.
What's causing the rattle?
In the UK, there were always a few buses in any given fleet that rattled more than others, especially when idling or at low revs - something to do with resonance with the body panels, I think. But that was back when diesel engines were universal, so hasn't really been a thing since hybrids and (more recently) BEVs took over.
Looks like New Flyer hybrids use BAE Systems' Hybridrive, which was fairly common in London during the 2010s but didn't produce noticeably excessive vibration as far as I remember. Is there something different about how the engines are mounted in US buses, I wonder?
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.
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.
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
I'm not sure? Perhaps the shocks are different, or the seats are just harder, or perhaps I'm imagining it.
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"...
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.
> instead of constantly starting and stopping to access road-side mailboxes
Q: What's the (average) distance between deliveries to road-side mailboxes?
I'm thinking of the average driving time between them, compared with the time to get out of a vehicle, put mail in a mailbox, and get back in the a vehicle...
I know "mounted delivery routes" sound and feel more efficient, but just how much more efficient are they actually?
We should note that USPS letter volumes are falling (just like everywhere else in the world) and somehow parcel/packet delivery services do not need to have "mounted routes", the delivery crew appear to be able to just get out of their vehicles(?)
USPS normal letter volumes are falling, but due to various stupid crap they are forced to deliver a lot of junk mail at low price. Political issue rather than technical.
The difference for parcel services is that, statistically, they do not deliver a parcel to everyone every time, making it way easier to do "p2p" because you're not canvassing a whole street.
I don't know how it is done in the rest of the US, but in my state rural mail services are 95% of the time delivered using the mail carrier's personal vehicle, not the custom mail trucks. I usually only see them inside towns or moving between post offices.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
IMO a LLV or NGDV is a custom-designed vehicle for USPS, the EDV is a delivery-optimized electric step van that happens to have been designed with the input of one specific delivery vendor.
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.
This problem is not unique to buses it's in almost all markets or industries in the US. Almost every industry has monopolies or virtual monopolies. Incubants pay/finance politicians to make rules that make it harder for new entrants to get into the market or use false free market narrative to hamper community inniatives. The attack on wind and solar by the current administration is part of the same play.
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.
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
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.
I assume buying from the European supply is federally banned due to truck import rules? Or would the insurance companies not recognize their capabilities?
There's at least some difference in design and requirements due to different assumptions about how high one needs to go on external rig, equipment in use, and fire codes.
None of it insurmountable but essentially means european vendors would need to make US-custom trucks which wouldn't make for cheap option at least for starters
I think there are some differences in approach and philosophy. Some are probably real and essential and some are more culture in fire service.
There are most certainly online discussions at great length on the topic.
Article leaves out how Private Equity has moved hard into the supply chains for buses and fire trucks and started taking advantage of their positions.
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.
The biggest killer are all the specific changes each city decides they need. If a standard feature set could be achieved mass production would be easier to arrange.
Perhaps with a module system to remove or add some subset of feature that are easily to adapt to it.
The 80% of federal funding¹ should be based on a "universal common standard", and cities pay 20% plus the city pays 100% for various customisations they need.
¹ I have not made any effort to verify this data but it's in hte article. It seems more generous than the federal government tend to be.
Similar to another comment here: the principle agent issue here is the person designing the spec for busses is not the person paying for the buses. If it was the case then the market would settle on a common standard as everyone seeks the lowest price.
This is true for every public utility vehicle. For example, firetrucks: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
It's a feature of the economic setup.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'm guessing that unlike here, some of those places need buses, and they simply can't afford any waste.
Historically denser cities.
> Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each.
Huh. TFI, the Irish transport authority, currently has a deal to pay 400 million euro for 800 electric buses, mostly double deckers (so a lot bigger than these ones). Diesel double deckers cost them significantly less (about 250-350k IIRC), but obviously cost more to operate. That's for custom jobs (in particular TFI has weird beliefs about what shape windscreens should be).
I wonder if part of it is just that these US transit agencies are buying them on such a small scale; a state-level agency responsible for sourcing the buses might be more effective.
But each State and County wants their say on what vehicles they want, and for sure a lot of them do not want those woke electric buses...
So give them a choice of two or three.
In many municipalities, it would be cheaper to run on demand van service for people than run busses. Not only would it get people to and from their actual homes and work, vans are cheap and readily available. Paying more drivers is cheaper than buying and maintaining multi million dollar busses that are empty a lot of the time.
In most of CA, most homes are far from bus lines. Making their use prohibitive for all but those who must use them. I know they do something like this in LA. People love it.
Metro micro doesn’t scale at all. It is still limited to pilot study areas. Cost per trip is absurd compared to traditional bussing. One of the stated goals of the next gen bus plan in LA was to get a bus stop in a 10 min walk of 85% of the workers in LA county and this was achieved.
The real trouble with transit is people choose where they live based on car convenience rather than transit convenience. So they open an app and go “gee I can drive to work in 30 mins but I have to take two or three busses and three times the time on transit.” And write it off forever, rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work. The way LA county is developed is that there are apartments basically in every neighborhood anyhow without very strong neighborhood specific effects on pricing. Housing a little more neighborhood specific but that changes as townhomes and other sort of not-detached-sfh buying opportunities come to bear generally in neighborhoods with demand for a song compared to detached housing.
> rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work
In many places I've lived, this optimization would need to be re-done every job change and you would probably need to move, because it's as much about where the job is as where your house is.
The thing about optimizing for a good commute in a car is that you're way more likely to be at least average or better even if your job location changes.
With the way traffic works in LA county that isn’t so much the case. Rush hour speeds are like 15mph or less no matter surface streets or freeways. Really large geographic area too. Other metros where you can move at more or less 60mph even in rush hour I agree.
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...
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.
The "nail house" phenomenon in China is counter-evidence to your point 3.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...
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...
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.
> China had a long term strategy to building its own trains (and, I assume, buses). They first imported high speed trains from Japan and Germany but ultimately wanted to build their own
Interestingly, this process has now somewhat gone into reverse. Alexander Dennis, say, built their first-gen electric buses on BYD tech (China was the leader in this space), but their second-gen on their own design.
> They standardize rolling stock.
re: buses, we have the same rickety ass new flyers essentially everywhere in the US, that doesn't make them any cheaper
I think the gist of the article is that we don't have the same busses across the US. Yes there are only two major manufacturers, but they're all being procured in different ways, in different custom configurations, all across the country.
We do. What is different is the options. The bus itself is the same, but you can put options on the bus that drive up the price.
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
"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.
Standard means you buy stuff that is similar to everyone else in ways that matter. paint is easy to do custom - and since everyone wants it they put in paint booths for any scheme. you want them to invest in jigs which costs money but pays off in volume - so work with the engineers to figure out what matters.
Not all New Flyer buses are the same in the same way not all Toyotas are the same.
The “tiny towns” like merced where the HSR will stop are some of the fastest growing cities in California.
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...
The central valley is where growth is expected. See growth projections into the middle of the century. It is expected to double in population. Look at the rate of growth already. These "little towns" of 100k people basically double in size every 20 years. Greenfield is where the growth happens because CA urban politicians are against meaningful amounts of infill development. If they built it along the 5 in 50 years when the central valley has over 15 million people, you'd say it was foolish not serving these communities when they had a chance.
Brightline is building a victorville to vegas train. They have no plan to reach LA. Maybe as close as Rancho Cucamonga. In either case no work has been done yet on that project while construction on the HSR is ongoing.
Similar data on police vehicles could be interesting.
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...
They're protecting and serving so well they're worried about getting jumped.
Firefighting vehicles too, more expensive than European counterparts by a factor of 10.
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.
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.
Public transit is intersectional. It helps poor and elderly people while also being climate friendly (assuming enough ridership). It’s often not used enough to satisfy either goal. California’s high speed rail boondoggle comes to mind as a great example.
Isn't this kind of thing always tacitly by design? Federal and local funding streams diffuse throughout the economy.
The article focuses on purchase price -- and buying from BYD in China will be a lot cheaper.
But I'm curious of the downstream effects of forcing cities to buy local, even at a higher price. After all, that money will get taxed many times over and could potentially change the equation?
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.
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.
So you're saying the designed can cost 3X the COTS one. Similar idea to the story, no?
Not sure why transit agencies are still paying for custom paint schemes or colors when they just turn around and wrap the whole bus with advertising. Just buy a plain white bus.
The article didn't mention corruption but I would not rule it out. Follow the money. Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus.
> still paying for custom paint schemes or colors
Because you need to be able to recognize from a distance, hey that's a city bus. Not a charter bus. Not a school bus. Not a long distance bus.
And buses aren't usually wrapped with advertising. It's usually just a banner on the sides below the windows.
Some ad campaigns pay much more money to extend it over the windows with that mesh material. But that's generally a small minority. But even then the colors on front and top and often borders still clearly identify it. E.g. these are still very clearly public transit if you live there, which is what's important:
https://contravisionoutlook.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads...
https://contravisionoutlook.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads...
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.
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.
It really isn't when many cities have apps that give you real-time information as to when to expect the next bus.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
If you read the article, one of the reasons the cost has gone up is supporting all the different bus colors because they have to keep 20 of same panel in different colors for different governments. If they had single color, then they could unlock better economies of scale.
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
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.
I really don’t understand why long distance visibility/visual identification is such an important feature. Care to elaborate?
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.
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
Huh?
Why not have identifying paint? I can't even imagine what would give you this idea. Like, they've got to be some color or set of colors.
Do you think police officers should just wear street clothes rather than us paying for their uniforms?
Should taxis that you hail from the street be indistinguishable from regular cars because you think the little illuminated sign on top is enough?
We color things and make them distinctive because it helps us tell them apart. If you don't understand this, I don't know how to help you.
I didn’t ask for your help other than accepting other opinions exist. In some cases the distinction is of high value. In some cases it’s at low cost. I’m of opinion this is low value and high cost, thus the cost benefit analysis fails. You’re free to disagree.
Cop uniforms are low cost and serve a significantly higher purpose. Taxis being a distinct color is unnecessary too. If I can identify a Dominos delivery vehicle from a distance, than they just need to try harder with their lit signs. A simple redesign could render vehicle paint job obsolete. Just because it’s been that way doesn’t mean it is the best or only solution and it certainly doesn’t mean it has to remain that way.
> I didn’t ask for your help other than accepting other opinions exist.
Perhaps you don't understand how HN works. When you give an opinion, other people can disagree.
If you don't like what they say, don't complain that you "didn't ask for their help". If that's your attitude, perhaps internet forums are not the place for you.
Telling someone "If you don't understand this, I don't know how to help you." is unnecessary snide that I was addressing. It is an passive aggressive attempt to assert your opinion as the only valid opinion.
> Perhaps you don't understand how HN works.
You continue with unnecessary attempts at belittling, while thinking you're in the 'right'. Perhaps take your own advice regarding internet forum usage.
> When you give an opinion, other people can disagree.
Yes, I'm disagreeing politely. You're the one having trouble accepting it.
Since they are often adorned with ads, I'm not sure why they pay for anything at all.
> 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?
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
Good example. That budget behavior is common. Fortunately, if that has true negative effects, the market corrects by putting one company out of business.
Let me know when the market gets around to that. At this time it's ignored all the ones I've worked for.
Is it "ignoring" it, or is it priced in to the company's valuation?
I mean could be, maybe their stock would be a touch higher, but it doesn't stop them from being some of the biggest players in their markets. A far cry from being "put out of business" as the commenter I replied to promised.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps we should implement public therapy buses, suggested by Steven Johnson in his 1991 book of the same name.
Honor systems only work with honorable people.
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.
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.
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.
get your own bus and you can do what you want with it! /s
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.
More things should be like the Interstate System when federal money is involved: locally budget, appropriate, source, build/implement, and when it meets federal guidelines, you get reimbursed.
I’m all for mass transportation m, but city buses blocking a busy two-lane road for several minutes waiting at a stop has got to end. Even when not stopped, they do a pretty good job at impeding traffic.
The bus system has one set of costs. But it has another set of external costs on the rest of society.
In contrast, I’ve seen British short trains arrive + unload + load + depart in far less than 5 minutes total, and that involves a far greater number of passengers than a crawling bus.
Yeah, trains require more infrastructure, but I think the public could grow to like them.
Transit violence is not limited to outlier cases like the nyc immolation or Iryna's horrific slaughter. Women in particular may never feel safe on public transit and avoid it entirely at night and alone. Daily harassment, stalking, threats and verbal abuse are "facts of life" for the majority of female passengers in metro areas. They will all move up or out to safer environments and take their car or private transportation everywhere. Pretending like Americans are instinctually averse to public transit is an absurd contention when they've been behaviorally conditioned by the insanely dangerous environment and a justice system that works to inflict it upon them until they give up or die.
Whatever solution to increase competition and bring down prices - great. The solution should also either increase bus capacity and/or bus routes to more desirable locations so people would _want_ and _need_ to take the bus.
Are 40 foot buses the right option when ridership is so low in the states? Europe has small van-like busses but more of them. Sure less people fit on one sitting, but routes are tighter, more frequent, and transferring between bus lines doesn't require going waaay out of the way to a hub to transfer. 40 ft busses are great once riders are dependant on it... Seems like a classic case of over optimization.
I think a bigger problem is that, with urban sprawl, it makes it hard to service enough people with public transportation.
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.
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.
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...
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).
I don't believe labor is that much of the cost of a bus, unless you are talking about the "labor" of investors and high level administrators. Ive worked in many many different manufacturing jobs, and labor of building things has always been the lowest cost of concern despite managers trying to harp on about it. Labor costs are the easiest to control, which is why they get the most attention, but material procurement, administrative bloat and bureaucracy, and marketing or bribes always top the scale above the workers actually producing what is being sold.
First: I'm not blaming US workers for being unreasonably expensive.
But those higher wage levels are not just affecting a products core-labor working at the assembly line-- you'll have project managers, sales, purchasing, contractors, even the construction workers building your factories: All of them are affected by this (and those people exist in China, too!). I would assume that the total sales price of a bus contains a larger fraction proportional with hourly wages than you might expect at first glance.
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.
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).
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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...
bulk price
200 buses equal cheaper buses, nothing surprise here
> "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!"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
> 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 war we're seeing in Ukraine right now. Europe has by far not enough tanks, especially heavy self-propelling artillery, to counter Russia. And for whatever reason, despite us actually having manufacturers for vehicles, we still haven't spun up large scale production, it's absurd.
IMHO, when WW3 hits, the situation will be like WW2, Europe relying on the US yet again - but I'm not certain that this time, even if the US wanted to support us, if they actually could. Not because of current political issues, but because the factories, the supply chains are all broken these days, tracing back to China far too often for my liking.
> 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.
I'm not advocating for full isolation amongst Western countries but for as much isolation from China and India as reasonably possible. We don't need to produce everything ourselves all the time, but if Covid has showed us one thing, it is that each country should at least have important industries running on low scale and people with knowledge around that can be expanded quickly in time of need. The US in particular should know the danger of knowledge literally dying out - what was it, about a decade was needed to replicate Fogbank [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
What is your threat scenario? Russia marching on EU capitals? After the showing in Ukraine I'm fairly confident that Poland alone with moderate support could put a complete stop to that. They are still growing and modernizing their land forces, but Russia has plenty of losses to recover from, too.
But I feel that argument almost supports my point: If you think Poland/Germany urgently needs more armored vehicles, then spending taxes specifically on that is way more efficient than subsidising the local bus industry.
Isolating yourself is also straight up painful economically, and you also lose a soft way of de-escalation/prevention. I'm not convinced that's a net gain.
Aggregate numbers also don't look that bad to me from a Europe vs Russia point of view; if you sum up vehicle numbers for European countries the gap is no longer that big, and European inventories are on average more modern/capable, too.
How much growth in those numbers would you like to see to be able to sleep at ease?
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.
> 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.
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.
The biggest problem with the private sector is that the tradeoff is always resiliency. Be it a product that isn't resilient to damage from everyday use, a supply chain that isn't resilient against erratic governments or pandemics, or the capacity and capability to rapidly upscale production.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
What geography allows for worker oppression and environmental degradation as a competitive advantage?
Where did I say anything about worker oppression?
> 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.
imagine how much money the government could save by just continuing to collect taxes and not providing any services! we could privatize everything!
That's running the government like a business!
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.
>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.
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
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.