US cities pay too much for buses

I think that the authors solution, outsourcing production is not quite right, they gloss over other issues.

>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.

But a bus isn't just a bus, there are differences in what is needed in different cities. Some need heat, some need AC, some need both. In Utah there are buses that go up the canyons and they have gearboxes focused on climbing steep hills, while a bus in the valley might never need that ratio and can be optimized for efficiency on the flats.

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?

> 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.

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.

Given the choice between clogging up the city grid for car commuters, and clogging up the rail grid because buses are pushed to share rail lines, I'm going to pull the trigger on the first option, every day of the week.

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.

It's not that pushing buses onto surface streets makes it worse for cars. It's that it makes it worse for buses, which then leads people to take cars instead, which makes things even worse.