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.
>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.