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.

> 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.

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.