> "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!"
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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"...
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.
"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.
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.
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%.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 79.9 ms ] threadIf 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!"
- 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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
SG vs the US? Economies of scale, simpler drivetrains (hybrid vs non), and less expensive smog equipment.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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"...
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
Just my €0.03.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.