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US cities pay too much for buses

(www.bloomberg.com)
355 points pavel_lishin | 1 comments | 26 Sep 25 13:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bluGill ◴[26 Sep 25 15:13 UTC] No.45387448[source]▶
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.

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1. brailsafe ◴[26 Sep 25 17:39 UTC] No.45389045[source]▶
Probably true, but those are accounted for differently, and (I'd speculate) that public transit labor costs convert tax dollars into economic activity as efficiently as the route can possibly operate given the constraints on the rest of the system. The lower the overhead to buying busses and the more reliably you can run them, along with making them more usable by your regional population, the more efficiently you're moving people to their jobs and the more of the tax dollars allocated to transit can into the pool that's going into the economy.

All the busses and tools required for maintenance are capital assets amortized and expensed over years, while the roads and the other infrastructure are hugely expensive and are rarely used as efficiently as they can be.