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US cities pay too much for buses

(www.bloomberg.com)
355 points pavel_lishin | 2 comments | 26 Sep 25 13:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | 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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esafak ◴[26 Sep 25 17:33 UTC] No.45388984[source]▶
I'm hearing you say we should have self-driving buses... which is feasible since their route is fixed.
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kjkjadksj ◴[26 Sep 25 17:36 UTC] No.45389011[source]▶
Bus driver also does things like trigger ramp for handicapped people, strap in wheelchairs securely, answer questions about the route, and security surveillance.
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bluGill ◴[26 Sep 25 17:47 UTC] No.45389130[source]▶
None of those should be needed. Get more people riding and they take care of security.

wheelchairs are hard - but the driver strapping them in is robbing everyone else of their valuable time so we need a better soultion anyway

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1. xjlin0 ◴[26 Sep 25 18:25 UTC] No.45389517{4}[source]▶
Taking a look at NYC or SF bus, are you sure that more riders solve security issues?
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2. cogman10 ◴[26 Sep 25 21:32 UTC] No.45391237[source]▶
Yes, this is simply a well known fact.

You can look up the NYPD report on crime for the month of june the total amount of reported crime was 427 for all forms of transport (metro, bus, etc). 3.6 million people use public transport in NYC daily.

No matter where you are, you'll never drive that number to 0. But if you wanted to make it better then you'd stop positioning the police to catch turnstile jumpers and you start positioning police to ride public transport during low ridership times to prevent incident.