US cities pay too much for buses

Tompkins County bought Proterra buses, they had some serious problems. When they jacked one up to work on it the axle came off and they immediately took all our electric buses out of the fleet -- and Proterra was bankrupt and not able to make it right.

TCAT is still scrambling to find diesel buses to replace those and older diesel buses that are aging out. Lately they've added some ugly-looking buses which are the wrong color which I guess they didn't customize but it means they can run the routes.

This is something I would honestly expect if you try and get cheaper from market pressure.

Some of it is that "legacy" products often involve more difficult engineering than people think. Circa 1980 this bus design was a notorious failure in NYC:

https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php/Grumman_Flxible_870

Buses get shaken really hard.