US cities pay too much for buses

I honestly don't think there is any future for them longer term (>10y). Long distance, diesel vehicles might hold out for a bit longer than a decade, but the situation looks kinda inevitable even there to me.

CO2 wise, electrifying a bus like this should pay off much quicker than replacing individual vehicles, because utilization is higher (not a lot of people drive 12h a day).

Even more damning, diesel is objectively, inarguably more expensive to run, costing more than four times as much as [Vancouver's] battery-electric busses in fuel/electricity.

Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.

Diesel’s last remaining benefits are of no value for a bus (locomotive-class horsepower possibilities and rapid refueling) as a bus never weighs much and goes in a circle.

citation needed.

Yep - and, in urban areas, buses are pretty much the best possible use case for BEVs, aren't they? Short distance, high utilisation, predictable routes with far more stop/start than normal traffic.

Consider also that bus depots are the perfect site for big battery banks hooked up to their charging stations, and tend to have plenty of room for solar panels on the roof. So electrification is good for the grid too.

It's one of those rare situations where everyone benefits.

> in urban areas, buses are pretty much the best possible use case for BEVs, aren't they?

I'd argue that mail delivery is an even better use case - it starts and stops even more frequently than a bus, practically never needs to travel at high speeds, and only needs to make one run a day.

But it's not a competition - they're both good use cases.

I think existing electric locomotives are more powerful than existing diesel locomotives.

The "most powerful diesel–electric locomotive model ever built on a single frame", the EMD DDA40X, provides 5MW.

The EURO9000, "currently the most powerful locomotive on the European market" provides 9MW under electric power.

USA-made locomotives are so far down the list on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_powerful_locomoti... that I suspect there's some other reason they're not needed, e.g. spreading the braking force across multiple locomotives throughout the train.

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.

  > 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.

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).

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.

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 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.)