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US cities pay too much for buses

(www.bloomberg.com)
355 points pavel_lishin | 2 comments | 26 Sep 25 13:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mschuster91 ◴[26 Sep 25 14:23 UTC] No.45386830[source]▶
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.

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1. SoftTalker ◴[26 Sep 25 14:36 UTC] No.45386989[source]▶
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.

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2. bluGill ◴[26 Sep 25 15:05 UTC] No.45387360[source]▶
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.