US cities pay too much for buses

>In a large country like the US, some variation in bus design is inevitable due to differences in conditions like weather and topography. But Silverberg said that many customizations are cosmetic, reflecting agency preferences or color schemes but not affecting vehicle performance.

This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.

>Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each.

The issue here appears to be: Why is SORTA's purchasing so incompetent that they are buying 17 busses for the price of 35? They are over double the price of RTD.

> That same year, Singapore’s Land Transport Authority also bought buses. Their order called for 240 fully electric vehicles — which are typically twice as expensive as diesel ones in the US. List price: Just $333,000 each.

Singapore has a very efficient, highly trained, highly educated, highly paid administrative staff, and their competency is what is being shown here. They thought to get a reduction in price because of the large number of busses they are ordering.

One solution the author doesn't point out is that Federal funds often come coupled with a large amount of bureaucratic red tape. It could be cheaper in the long run to have more tax collection and expenditure at the local level, and not rely as much on federal grants.

For example. do they contain sustainment services, maintenance equipment, storage facilities, or other sourcing requirements?

When using federal funds, you're generally required to purchase all American products, I remember trying to furnish an office with just two desks and four chairs (nothing fancy), and the initial cost estimates were over six thousand dollars. When we acquired private funding, we were able to get everything under two thousand, you can see the same pricing with Zoom hardware as a service leasing prices as well, they're leasing some equipment almost at twice the cost due (as far as I know) to all American sourcing.

I'm not questioning the sourcing restrictions, but trying to point out that it's a little more than the education level of the staff only.

I'd start with one HUGE obvious waste. Why don't the buses anywhere have some sort of uber style pickup. My point. I see countless buses running empty all the time through the day where I live outside of busy hours. It is so depressing to watch 3 empty busses pull up to an empty stop to not pick anyone up then do it again and again and again.. I was once told it cost something like $250+ every time an empty bus drives one direction on its empty route. And there are hundreds of busses that do this for hours each day. Just so in case someone is there they can be picked up.

It seems like a dynamic system for determining where where people that need the bus are would be a massive saving. Or really just changing to a taxi style system only using buses during rush hours. I think some cities are actually experimenting with this.

Someone is gonna come at me about the reliability scheduling of transport for underprividged. But they have never actually rode a bus route so they don't know that the buses are as reliably late as they are on time in 90% of cities. This change would likely improve scheduling for people that need it.

Seattle has buses with electric trolley lines above, and buses that were designed to go through the tunnel under downtown on battery power to avoid causing air quality issues in a confined space. https://bsky.app/profile/noahsbwilliams.com/post/3lx4hqvf5q2...

Maybe SORTA wanted more customization on the interior of their buses? I'm not sure but in the last year I've been riding buses to work much more than before and I've been interested in the different seating configurations on buses from the same service and route. That shouldn't explain $8 million in differnce but I'm sure that semi custom work isn't cheap. A friend worked on airline interiors which might be reasonably analogous, I wonder what the cost for say Lufthansa seats/upholstery is vs Southwest?

Off the top of my head, road salt, used in the northern areas of America to melt snow can cause corrosion of metal pieces on the underside of the bus. So Chicago or Boston might need to take that into account but Miami probably doesn't.

My preferred way to solve bus lane reliability would be to shut down streets or lanes to only allow buses.

That said, I think that some program like this is essential to bootstrapping a really good transit system. The last mile problem really does stop a lot of would be commuters and is a huge, largely hidden cost, in regional transit planning. You could have fewer, more reliable trunks, that can run less reliably after core commuting hours, all because you have ways of alleviating the pain associated with difficulty getting to out of the way places. This allows people to make life decisions that they might not otherwise be able to make. And once you have a solid core, you can continue to grow it, by continuing to encourage long term ridership. Couple this with increasingly aggressive zoning changes to allow for density, and I think you could really grow out a transit system in 10-20 years.

But this is a fantasy of mine. It would likely be wildly unpopular to run an unprofitable program long enough to make all of this possible, and would probably only work in regions that have the potential for good transit anyways. You'd also need a large cohort of YIMBYs, that while currently growing in many regions, aren't guaranteed to still vote that way in a decade when they have more to lose.

It's not magic though, there are a lot of places where buses simply will not work and we need to find better ways to improve mobility. I don't have the slightest idea how, it's a generational effort.

So your justification for not having reliably scheduling comes down to "well we never had reliable scheduling", and your solution is to make the schedule more chaotic?

Why do we just accept and the broken windows in order to try and make new buildings, instead of fixing the windows?

And we also have some mountains here, so there's some buses for that (still stock from the factory)

And then the city government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to shut the tunnel down and make it light rail-only, forcing the buses up onto the surface and clogging up the street grid.

Everyone would be better off in an Uber type system but there's no appetite or budget to subsidize rides at the level people would use it

I don’t know much about bus procurement, but I’m not sure I believe you just based on the fact that you’ve ridden on lots of busses.

I’d expect that things like tire choice, engine, and transmission choices could be dependent on weather and geography. I’d expect any expensive differences to show up there, and I don’t really see how a passenger would gain much insight.

Would you rather have to call for a bus that might take an hour (or might take 2 minutes) to get to your stop when you call it, or would you like to know that it comes at 4:45, 5:45 and 6:45 so you can plan ahead to know when to get to your stop.

(failing to run on schedule is a separate issue, but on-demand rides won't solve that). In cities, one solution to that problem is to run at such frequent headways that a late bus doesn't matter -- when I lived in SF, I had 2 busy bus routes that could take me to work, during peak hours a bus ran every 6 minutes, so even if they weren't on schedule I didn't care since I knew another would be along soon.

If you want me to ride the bus to work every morning and home every evening, you still have to have buses in mid-day so I can go home early if I need to. Even if those buses are mostly empty.

Or it's just literal economy of scale. 10 buses, 17 buses, vs 240, that difference changes economics completely.

You will be buying 500 of headlights, little under 1k tyres and wheels, couple thousands of seats, etc. Those are all whole lot numbers. That will save tons of overheads.

They do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-responsive_transport

I'm sure there is a lot of slop in different purchasing departments. They can probably all tighten things up. But there are legitimate reasons for one product to cost more than its twin. The U.S. should not allow twin products to be sold on the same shelf if one was not manufactured under the same rules as the domestic product. If all three of these products played under the same rules, then we can point fingers. Without that you are just ridiculing the company who knowingly takes a hit for purchasing from responsible vendors. If that is what you are doing, shame on you.

Clogging up the rail grid was somewhat acceptable when it was a few end-of-line terminal stops, but now those tunnels are in the middle of the rail network. A bus breaking down and blocking the tunnel was bad enough when it affected end-of-line service, but would be an absolute nightmare when it affects middle-of-line service.

Sorry, downtown single-occupant vehicle drivers, you're just going to have to deal with the consequences of spending tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars on your choice of the least space-efficient, gridlock-inducing form of transportation.

https://www.cdta.org/flex https://drivecdta.org/

The few flex areas are small and I've never tried the electric rentals.

Every once in awhile I do use the bus system to check out how things are going and I get how depressive an empty bus is... I was just on an empty bus to the airport (which I have to take two routes to get there, another tough negative to solve).

Buses you pay directly to ride may be a bit different, but I'd also expect AC isn't ubiquitous in those, or wasn't until very recently.

2. If getting through downtown by bus is slow, getting through it by car isn't any faster.

Anyways, Seattle's transit problem isn't bad downtown bus service, it's godawful spoke-and-last-mile coverage, which eviscerates ridership, makes the overall network less efficient, and forms a negative-feedback-loop that blocks transit improvements.

Nobody likes sitting around for half an hour waiting for a bus that will take them to another bus.

Does have heat in the winter though.

Not many people per bus are needed for a bus to be better than the equivalent number of cars. And no, carpooling is not a useful option to rely on to reduce the impact. At least not until some of the occupancy rules are enforced.

Be that a pay raise, be that partially remote work, or carpooling.

Is your theory that they treat half the plant poorly?

  The 2 bus contracts were with the same manufacturer, which is
  headquartered in California.

RTD's web site shows far more than 10 buses delivered in 2023 and nothing beyond that. They talk a bit about diesel hybrids but from what I can tell RTD does not operate any 40 ft hybrids.

Unsure what to say about the Bloomberg article but it smells like bullshit to me. Regardless, hybrid drivetrains will increase the unit cost significantly.

  The issue here appears to be: Why is SORTA's purchasing so incompetent that
  they are buying 17 busses for the price of 35? They are over double the
  price of RTD.

SG vs the US? Economies of scale, simpler drivetrains (hybrid vs non), and less expensive smog equipment.

That's sometimes true but often not. Utah might need buses to go up the canyons, but might have passed some requirement at some point that said that all the buses need to be able to do this because someone got burnt once by not having enough of those buses. Or some well-meaning (or vote seeking?) city councillor might have put through a bill to put USB-A chargers in all the seats, which will stick around far longer than those coming as standard making them an expensive custom option.

What you end up with is requirements that make the buses custom purchases, which massively inflates their costs, when any reasonable person would say that such custom attributes aren't (always) needed. By having a strong opinion about something, the city will pay far more than if they bought an off-the-shelf solution.

Much of "the west" is particularly affected by this sort of attitude. Everywhere and everyone is convinced that they are special in some way and need something specific, but end up paying for it. This is part of why India can send a probe to Mars for $72m, or why Singapore can buy busses at $300k instead of $1m. And to be clear, I say this having grown up in the UK and moved to Australia, both places with a certain amount of this attitude.

It definitely depends. The traditional yellow school buses here (Canada) use diesel, so they need things like glow plugs [0] and block heaters [1] to be able to run in the winter. But even that only helps so much, so when the nighttime lows are below –40°C, they cancel the busses since they know that they won't run.

Most of the city busses here use natural gas, and they're considerably more reliable in the cold weather but if they're parked for too long on a really cold day (even while running), the brakes will freeze up and they won't be able to move [2].

Similarly, the busses need a fairly powerful heating system, since it's tricky to heat a large space when it's really cold and the front door is open half the time. But conversely, most of the busses have no A/C.

Adding glow plugs, and block heaters, and brake dryers shouldn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a more reliable natural gas bus might be double the price of an unreliable diesel one.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glow_plug

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_brake_(road_vehicle)#Disad...

If the buses and cars are on the same roads, going the same speed, the car will get you to your destination faster, and everyone will go by car. Buses only get ridership if they have dedicated lanes where they can go faster than regular car traffic:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22143...

This isn’t true at all.

Busses stop continuously along the route, which adds a ton of time. Cars go straight to the destination.

You also have to add the time spent waiting for the bus, and the time to walk to the bus stop.

Busses usually aren’t going to take as direct a route as a car can. You will likely have to walk once you get to your destination, too, or switch buses.

I am all for public transportation, and take it all the time, but let’s not pretend it is always faster than cars.

That’s because your job was passenger.

From the drivers perspective: configuration should absolutely match the terrain and the expected route. For example: an Allison AT545 transmission without a lockup torque converter will be hell in the mountain and hill climbs of Colorado, possibly even dangerous. Whereas it may serve perfectly fine in Nebraska.

  We also don't know much about these so called purchasing contracts either.

Something from this article doesn't add up. In 2023 the SORTA board approved purchase of buses with a base price of $530,000.

  Gillig LLC was the sole responding vendor and is recommended for award.

  The contract will be a firm fixed price contract with a 5-year term
  beginning immediately upon contract execution and ending on June 30, 2028.

https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/oes/mobility1/public-transport...

Assuming that $530,000 is for diesel only buses you'd have to more than double the premium to get to Bloomberg's figure as not all of the order was for hybrid buses.

Climbing a steep hill? EV drivetrains don't care and provide great torque. Start/stop? perfect. Regenerative braking? There you go. Need all-electric for a spell? Gas to extend range? Gas for AC/Heat? ok ok ok. Smooth operation? Low noise? Low/no emissions? yes yes yes Less wear? Less gas? Lower operating costs? Simpler drivetrains? Simpler repairs? yes to all of it.

Every bus should have been forced to be a PHEV drivetrain within a decade of the Prius/Insight being released in 1997. The USPS should have been all PHEV by then too.

1. People who live in transit-poor suburbs

2. People with physical disabilities

To be fair, these have significant overlap. The common factor being "demand that can't be aggregated to a fixed bus route".

Once you have enough demand to have a fixed bus route, however, the most important thing is frequency. Schedule anxiety is the worst part of taking any public transit system. I find that if a bus or train comes every 15 minutes, I stop checking the schedule. Additionally, once you start scheduling frequent buses, then transfer times go down, which makes the bus network dramatically more usable.

Think about it this way: if you need to take a trip that involves a transfer between two buses, and the buses come hourly, you have an average transfer time of... 30 minutes, where you won't be doing anything to progress towards your destination. Your transit operator can futz with scheduling to try and make that transfer tighter, but buses infamously have to share infrastructure with private cars, which means they'll never actually come on time. The worst case scenario being you schedule tight transfers on an infrequent bus, then the first bus gets delayed enough to turn that tight transfer into an hour long wait[0].

Alternatively, you can just run more buses, and so long as they all make progress in the road grid you get tight transfers naturally. Miss your transfer? Oh no... anyway, here's the next bus.

On the other hand, if you're seeing three empty buses pull up to the same stop all at once, that sounds like you have bunching, which is the most catastrophic failure mode of any transit system. What happened is that your transit agency scheduled frequent buses at reasonable times, but some blockage along the route - traffic, construction, etc - delayed a bus long enough to arrive alongside the next bus in the sequence. The front bus will be nearly full and the next buses on will be almost empty. And as the day continues this can continue delaying buses until you have destroyed almost all the capacity and frequency in the system unless they take emergency action to pull buses out of the system and reinsert them at different parts of the route.

The way you prevent this is to give the bus dedicated lanes. The whole BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) concept involves moving bus stops to the center of streets, having offboard fare payment[1], level boarding, digital signage, signal priority at stoplights, and so on. Some of this is just to make BRT feel more "train-like", but a lot of it also lets buses maintain a tight schedule and not bunch up.

[0] I am aware of some bus systems where the bus drivers will actively radio one another to request a delay specifically so that riders don't miss their transfers. AFAIK, Suffolk Transit will do that, but only if the two buses are on the same part of the network, since ST is actually four bus companies wearing a trenchcoat.

[1] When bus drivers are responsible for fare collection, riders have to all enter from the front and all other doors on the bus are exit only. Which increases dwell time (the amount of time you spend at each stop). In fact, this is why Zohran Mamdani wants to make NYC buses free - specifically to speed them up.

Also, while I'm talking about bus boarding, I have rode buses in Japan that had people paying with IC cards enter from the rear, or worse, enter from the front and then tap your IC card at the back exit while the bus driver is trying to explain this to you in incomprehensibly mumbly Japanese.

Here's an industry article about the phenomenon: https://enotrans.org/article/a-bus-is-a-bus-the-costs-of-exc...

And here's a study documenting excess customisation as a driver of the costs: https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/paying-less-for... – which notes that "70 percent of contracts in the BGS data in 2024 were for unique buses".

Places a little warmer (England, Denmark, Netherlands, northern Germany) might be warm enough for a few days per year, but the cost of purchase and maintenance of A/C might not be worthwhile.

Hmm, not sure about that. I live in Dublin, which is, generally, very flat, and where the temperature rarely goes far outside the 0 to 20 degrees C range. The buses can be fairly unpleasant on rare very hot days (no air conditioning), the electric ones can be unpleasantly cold on rare extremely cold days (heating not specced for it; this isn't an issue for the diesel ones as those produce so much waste heat anyway), and when I was a kid I lived in one of the few hilly parts of Dublin, and bus breakdowns going uphill were somewhat common (in fairness I think this is less of a thing now). Geography absolutely matters; Dublin's buses would be basically unusable anywhere very hot or cold.

There's other stuff, too. Buses here are almost always double-decker, but one specific new bus route requires single-decker buses, because the double-deckers won't fit under some of the older railway bridges. This will also require modifications to some road infra, which won't currently take long buses (to have a decent capacity single-deckers need to be longer; the single-deckers will be about 13m long vs 11m for the normal buses). Some cities use articulated buses; those wouldn't work here at all.

In 2020, 5% of bus in Paris had AC.

In 2026, they aim for 75%. And a 100% rollout by 2035.

Even subway lines don't all have AC.

Please travel the Europe and see how they treat their people and how increased mobility creates a great environment and freedom for everyone. I assure you that it’s not a backwards place as some people claim.

As a side note: All this car craze coincided with baby boomers (roughly) and now that they’re losing their physical and cognitive abilities we’re seeing a lot more accessibility support from them (duh) and I wouldn’t be surprised if they started pushing for free public taxi service for themselves but nothing that would serve the public. And we’re not talking about heavily subsidized industries like cars, but something that can be profitable and worthwhile because it allows people to go to work, school, shopping, hospital, theater, and more.

yes, it's expensive, yes, people's revealed presences indicate they don't care for these things, they rather give up QALYs than sitting hours every day in "rush hour traffic"

They have three types of trains (A, B, C) that are used in almost all subway systems across the country. You need a high-capacity train? A. You have a smaller line with fewer passengers? C. Something in-between? B.

There are a few variants for cities with special circumstances. Chongqing uses variants that can handle steeper slopes, because the city is incredibly hilly (like San Francisco).

By standardizing, prices can be kept down. Cities don't have to come up with custom solutions. Just define your needs and pick the standard variant that matches them.

Something similar could be done with buses.

The additional purchase cost is a rounding error, and you're far worse off if cooking people alive during the summer means losing customers year-round as they switch to less-hostile transit options. Maintenance isn't a dealbreaker either: sure, it's extra work, but the equipment is rarely needed. This means the occasional breakage isn't a huge deal, and big maintenance can be deferred to the spring and fall.

There's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma here in that even if a city decides to go this route, their citizens are still paying Federal taxes and contributing to the programs used to buy busses.

So you're not going to save your citizens any money unless everyone stops using the programs. From an incremental standpoint, where everyone has already defected, you want your local governments to be grabbing every grant they can.

The windows often contain labels like "Fahrzeug klimatisiert" (Vehicle is air conditioned) so it is not that people are unaware.