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US cities pay too much for buses

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355 points pavel_lishin | 3 comments | 26 Sep 25 13:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.018s | source
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jmyeet ◴[26 Sep 25 14:40 UTC] No.45387037[source]▶
As people should know by now, in the last few decades China has built a massive amount of public transit infrastructure, both within cities and regional [1]. Some of the subway systems are pretty amazing (eg Chongqing [2]). I'm interested in how they did this and I think it comes down to a few major factors:

1. They standardize rolling stock. The same stuff is used across the country. I think this is really important. If you think about how the US does things, every city will have its own procurement process. This is wasteful but is just more opportunity for corruption;

2. China had a long term strategy to building its own trains (and, I assume, buses). They first imported high speed trains from Japan and Germany but ultimately wanted to build their own; and

3. Streamlined permitting. China has private property but the way private property works in the US is as a huge barrier to any change or planning whatsoever. China just doesn't allow this to happen.

I keep coming back to the extortionate cost of the Second Avenue Subway in NYC. It's like ~$2.5 billion per mile (Phase 2 is estimated at $4 billion per mile). You may be tempted to say that China isn't a good comparison here because of cheap labor or whatever. Fine. But let's compare it to the UK's Crossrail, which was still expensive but way cheaper than the SEcond Avenue Subway.

California's HSR is hitting huge roadblocks from permitting, planning and political interests across the Central Valley, forcing a line designed to cut the travel time from LA to SF to divert to tiny towns along the way.

There is a concerted effort in the US to kill public transit projects across the country (eg [3]). You don't just do this by blocking projects. You also make things take much longer and make the processes so much more expensive. In California, for example, we've seen the weaponization of the otherwise well-intentioned CEQA [4].

I feel like China's command economy is going to eat us alive over the next century.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_hig...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7gvr_U4R4w

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...

[4]: https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/s...

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1. kjkjadksj ◴[26 Sep 25 17:40 UTC] No.45389057[source]▶
The “tiny towns” like merced where the HSR will stop are some of the fastest growing cities in California.
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2. jmyeet ◴[26 Sep 25 18:32 UTC] No.45389585[source]▶
There's a whole host of concessions and project redesigns that occurred for essentially political reasons.

Just look at the currently proposed route map [1]. It deviates to the east side of the valley because that's where these towns are vs the west side, which is more direct.

Deviating a supposedly high speed route for small towns doesn't make a ton of sense. Not only does it increase the cost and travel time directly, but extra stops slow the overall travel time. This could've just as easily beeen on the west side of the Central Valley and had feeder lines and stations into a smaller number of stations.

Look at any high speed rail route in Europe or China and you'll see fairly limited stops for this reason.

The biggest and easiest win for a high speed rail should've been LA to Las Vegas. It's a shorter distance and through mostly desert and other uninhabited land. Ideally LAX would've been one of these stops but I'm not sure how viable that is. Then you add a spur that goes north to SF so you avoid building through LA county twice, which is going to be one of your most expensive parts.

Instead we have a private company (Brightline) building a LA to Vegas route.

As an aside, Vegas desperately needed to build a subway plus light rail from the airport up the strip. The stupid Teslas in tunnels under the strip was another of those efforts of billionaires proposing and doing projects to derail public transit. Like the Hyperloop.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_of_California_High-Speed...

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3. kjkjadksj ◴[27 Sep 25 06:28 UTC] No.45393596[source]▶
The central valley is where growth is expected. See growth projections into the middle of the century. It is expected to double in population. Look at the rate of growth already. These "little towns" of 100k people basically double in size every 20 years. Greenfield is where the growth happens because CA urban politicians are against meaningful amounts of infill development. If they built it along the 5 in 50 years when the central valley has over 15 million people, you'd say it was foolish not serving these communities when they had a chance.

Brightline is building a victorville to vegas train. They have no plan to reach LA. Maybe as close as Rancho Cucamonga. In either case no work has been done yet on that project while construction on the HSR is ongoing.