US cities pay too much for buses

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...

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.

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 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.

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).

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}.

Yes, the exhaust that people have to breathe.

I realize they have improved but aren’t natural gas buses better?

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.)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Aren’t most busses CNG these days?

citation needed.

Busses are loud, but not nearly as load and polluting as cars in aggregate

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  > On the other hand, he told us that without subsidies, the life cycle costs would be "diesel buses, followed by hybrids, and then with a huge difference, EV buses and then fuel cell buses." He asserts that, as things stand, "neither EV buses nor fuel cell buses would be profitable in terms of life cycle costs without subsidies."

  > Tai said, "Relying on subsidies to introduce EV buses and fuel cell buses cannot be considered a healthy business situation," and added, "I strongly hope that technological innovation and price competition will progress throughout the zero-emission bus market."

"EV too cheap to meter ICE dead" is just hype. The realoty is it's not much more than another subsidy milking, yet. Cleaner air in the city is nice, though.

1: https://trafficnews-jp.translate.goog/post/587367/3

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.

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.

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).

They use hydraulic retarders in the transmission rather than engine brakes.

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.

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...

  > 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.

LA metro has 2200 CNG busses.

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.

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.

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

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.)

>Almost no fleets in the US are running majority CNG.