US cities pay too much for buses

I think this shows one of the downsides of trade barriers very well: You get stuck with undesirable industries (diesel bus manufacturing), binding capital and labor better used elsewhere (and you easily end up with underperforming, overpriced solutions, too).

But I'm curious how much this actually affects transport costs. If such a bus is used 12h/day, then even overpaying 100% for the vehicle should get outscaled by labor + maintenance pretty quickly, long before the vehicle is replaced...

What is wrong with diesel bus manufacturing? Just the exhaust pedestrians have to breath in? It seems near the bottom of the list for things we'd need to solve for carbon emissions.

I honestly don't think there is any future for them longer term (>10y). Long distance, diesel vehicles might hold out for a bit longer than a decade, but the situation looks kinda inevitable even there to me.

CO2 wise, electrifying a bus like this should pay off much quicker than replacing individual vehicles, because utilization is higher (not a lot of people drive 12h a day).

Even more damning, diesel is objectively, inarguably more expensive to run, costing more than four times as much as [Vancouver's] battery-electric busses in fuel/electricity.

Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.

Diesel’s last remaining benefits are of no value for a bus (locomotive-class horsepower possibilities and rapid refueling) as a bus never weighs much and goes in a circle.

I think existing electric locomotives are more powerful than existing diesel locomotives.

The "most powerful diesel–electric locomotive model ever built on a single frame", the EMD DDA40X, provides 5MW.

The EURO9000, "currently the most powerful locomotive on the European market" provides 9MW under electric power.

USA-made locomotives are so far down the list on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_powerful_locomoti... that I suspect there's some other reason they're not needed, e.g. spreading the braking force across multiple locomotives throughout the train.

That electric locomotive has a really long cord attached to it - it only has about 2MW under diesel.

Once you allow attaching an extension cord, electric wins ever time; there's zero competition.

Trains run on rails, which doesn't exactly allow them to go off-highway. If you're already spending a fortune on building the rail infrastructure, why wouldn't you spend a few bucks extra to install the extension cord?