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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: 0.212s | source
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SoftTalker ◴[26 Sep 25 14:23 UTC] No.45386831[source]▶
Not sure why transit agencies are still paying for custom paint schemes or colors when they just turn around and wrap the whole bus with advertising. Just buy a plain white bus.

The article didn't mention corruption but I would not rule it out. Follow the money. Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus.

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michaelt ◴[26 Sep 25 14:43 UTC] No.45387082[source]▶
> Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus.

I mean, that could just be normal, routine failure to negotiate effectively. If every bus vendor says "call for pricing" and your organisation has "always" paid $940k per bus, when you're told to buy some more buses, you might not even know you can get them for half or a third of that price by getting competing quotes from other vendors.

And if you're an ambitious, hard-nosed type that can really turn the screws on vendors, leaving no stone unturned in your search for savings - would you be working in the purchasing department of a municipal bus company?

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SoftTalker ◴[26 Sep 25 14:48 UTC] No.45387148[source]▶
OK I agree... add "incompetence" along with "corruption" as a potential reason. Though corruption is easier to get away with if it appears as incompetence.
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1. conductr ◴[26 Sep 25 17:51 UTC] No.45389184[source]▶
It’s a matter of procurement process and personnel. They simply aren’t always concerned with cost as the primary decision point and thus tend to not negotiate as hard as you might like. I’m in a finance role, company’s money is my responsibility so I very frequently have to tell procurement people that think a product “ticks all the boxes of the RFP” or similar, that the runner up product only missed on items we can live without so paying 2x isn’t worth it. I does come off as lacking critical thinking, but I’ve come to learn they just go off the requirement and don’t really know which things are critical versus nice to have. Those kinds of things, so I’d blame this entirely on whoever is supposed to have financial oversight over the bureaucracy. Do they have CFOs or similar, idk honestly, but that’s a reason most for profit companies do. They are monitoring large financial decisions for reasonableness.