Us Cities Pay Too Much for Buses
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The article discusses how US cities are paying too much for buses due to lack of competition, customization demands, and 'Buy America' rules, sparking a heated debate on the causes and potential solutions.
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If that's not the most NYC finance-centered headline ever, I don't know what is.
"If we just offload our bus-building industry to somewhere else, we could save $x on taxes each year. Yeah, it eliminates jobs and is another blow against strategically-important heavy industry, but please, think of my balance sheet!"
After all, it was divine right (Darwinian evolution, AI schizobabble, etc) that made them men of might.
That's basically what states and municipalities are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived? Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy?
When a US airline thinks it's better for them to switch over to Airbus, by all means do so, that's competition.
But taxpayer money should not be used to prop up other countries' economies unless explicitly designated that way (e.g. contributions to international agencies, economic aid), and certainly not if that replaces domestic union labor.
If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as the private sector people are going to turn against the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
Given the encroachment of enshittification on the private sector, I'm not sure it's any more efficient than the public sector on the whole.
And in the cases where it is more efficient, that's because there's either less at stake, or people care less. I don't care what Jim at Jim's Quik Lube does with my money after I pay him for an oil change. I do care what the Feds do with my tax dollars after I file my return, and so does everyone else, so we create regulations and policies to keep government agents from blowing taxpayer dollars. Or, at least, we used to.
Now, we've bought into this "the private sector is always more efficient" BS and put a private sector guy in charge, and it's a disaster. I don't want the mechanisms of the state being treated like a company where the guy in charge has his name on the building and always gets what he wants, because the mechanisms of the state are that of force. People get arrested, assaulted, imprisoned, and killed. It has to be more deliberate and take longer.
Public sector sometimes acts like they have infinite money. They'll just print more and drive up inflation while paying lip service to voters and pretending to care during election season.
There's also the massive corruption in the public sector. All the work is actually done by the private sector, but the contract isn't decided on who will delivery the best quality at the lowest cost, no no no. You'd have to be naive to believe that. The actual decision is based on who will kick back the most money (labeled as "campaign contributions") to the people who are in charge of making the decision.
So really, both suck. Private sector will give you a shitty product at a great price. Public section will give you a terrible price with the quality being a complete gamble.
You need to use eminent domain on straight lines as much as possible for HSR, both to keep costs low and to allow for actually high speeds, but that's risky for legal challenges and even then, horribly expensive at US scales.
Yes, China has larger scales and still gets it done, but they a) just throw money at the problem and b) just do what the CCP wants.
> Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant.
That's not made easier by the fact that many cities just hand one way bus tickets to local homeless and nutjobs that bus them off to somewhere else [1], often to Democrat-run cities. In addition to that, there are almost no asylums left to take care of the nutjobs because a lot of them had been forced to shut down for sometimes atrocious violations of human rights many decades ago. Some areas now (ab)use jails and prisons to punish homeless people for being homeless, a practice that has also come under fire for creating the same abusive conditions, on top of scandals like "Kids for cash" [2].
The obvious solution to a lot of the problems with nutjobs, homeless and drug addicts would be a sensible drug policy combined with a "housing first" policy. Both of that has been tried in the US and in other countries worldwide to a sometimes massively positive effect, the problem is it has to be done federally - otherwise you end up like Frankfurt here in Germany, where Frankfurt pays the bill for drug addiction treatments and somewhat safe consumption facilities, but ended up having to pay that for people from almost across the whole of Europe.
> If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
It could be at least pleasant and responsive, the problem is you need (a lot) of money to pay for it, and no one likes paying taxes. It's a chicken and egg problem across Western countries - ever since up to the 80s, when neoliberal politics, trickle-down and lean-state ideology took over, public service has been cut and cut and cut. People don't believe any more that paying higher taxes would yield a net benefit because they lost all trust in politicians, and I don't see any way of fixing that - not without a stint of a good-willing dictator at least, and I don't see that on the horizon at all.
[1] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/bussed-out-how-americ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
You are basically asking taxpayers to fund an uncompetitive (i.e. wasteful) local industry.
I think that's justifiable when you have high local unemployment (making the thing a job program, really), or when you really need the industry for strategic reasons (food and weapon manufacturing), but when that is not the case, doing this raises labor costs in general and hurts your actually useful and globally competitive industries, too.
That is why even something as manufacturing cars, trucks and airplanes is vital to be resilient. And in addition, it's bad enough how much of a grip China has on our balls with rare-earth metals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the threat of snacking a piece of Taiwan. India isn't much better, they keep buying up Russian oil despite sanctions. We don't need to hand them more economic power.
And yes, resilience costs money. We need to explain that to our populations - and most importantly, we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!
I can see your point, but I'm not buying this argument for multiple reasons.
First, if you do blanket-protectionism like this, the actual strategic gain per "wasted" tax-dollar is abysmal. You could have just bought those singaporean busses, and spent the money on skunkworks and lithium mine subsidies instead if you actually needed that resilience and military capability.
But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What kind of war are you even anticipating where you would need massively scaled up tank production of all things? The US, currently, could fight an offensive land war against the whole continent pretty much (regardless of foreign support), and for anything else tank production capabilities are more than sufficient.
Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks.
> we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!
100% agree with that, but I think this is a (tax) policy failure most of all: my take is that in a capitalist society capital inevitably accumulates at the top, and regulatory backpressure (progressive taxation and antitrust law) is needed to keep the wealth/income distribution somewhat stable; the US has been shitting the bed in that regard for more than half a century now with predictable outcomes for wealth/income distribution (similar for other industrialized nations). Redistribution/balancing dynamics ("poor people getting paid for labor") are also getting weaker because unskilled labor lost lots of relative value.
The war we're seeing in Ukraine right now. Europe has by far not enough tanks, especially heavy self-propelling artillery, to counter Russia. And for whatever reason, despite us actually having manufacturers for vehicles, we still haven't spun up large scale production, it's absurd.
IMHO, when WW3 hits, the situation will be like WW2, Europe relying on the US yet again - but I'm not certain that this time, even if the US wanted to support us, if they actually could. Not because of current political issues, but because the factories, the supply chains are all broken these days, tracing back to China far too often for my liking.
> Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks.
I'm not advocating for full isolation amongst Western countries but for as much isolation from China and India as reasonably possible. We don't need to produce everything ourselves all the time, but if Covid has showed us one thing, it is that each country should at least have important industries running on low scale and people with knowledge around that can be expanded quickly in time of need. The US in particular should know the danger of knowledge literally dying out - what was it, about a decade was needed to replicate Fogbank [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
But I feel that argument almost supports my point: If you think Poland/Germany urgently needs more armored vehicles, then spending taxes specifically on that is way more efficient than subsidising the local bus industry.
Isolating yourself is also straight up painful economically, and you also lose a soft way of de-escalation/prevention. I'm not convinced that's a net gain.
Aggregate numbers also don't look that bad to me from a Europe vs Russia point of view; if you sum up vehicle numbers for European countries the gap is no longer that big, and European inventories are on average more modern/capable, too.
How much growth in those numbers would you like to see to be able to sleep at ease?
Public sector organizations should focus on their operational requirements when deciding what to buy. When a transit agency wants to buy buses, it should not pay extra due to unrelated policy goals. If the best option is foreign, and there is an equivalent but more expensive domestic option, the price the agency pays should be the price of the foreign option. If politicians want to subsidize domestic labor, they can tell the transit agency to choose the domestic option and pay the rest from an appropriate budget.
this is the kind of domestic union labour you're up against. american union labour should absolutely at least be subject to competition from union labour elsewhere, including european bus manufacturers.
_What benefits_?
> Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived?
Been through Flint, MI lately?
How about Gary, IN? Camden, NJ? East St. Louis, IL?
> Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy?
They already do have to compete with Airbus for pretty much everything that doesn't involve the US Government as a customer. That's the majority of the global aircraft market. How's that working out? The incumbent still got "lazy", not so much from entitlement but from a "need" to constantly reduce costs while simultaneously increasing revenues for the benefit of shareholders. You can only make aircraft building (or anything else) so profitable before you hit a ceiling. Boeing hit that ceiling, but of course, that doesn't matter. Number must go up.
People in postindustrial economies cannot work as cheaply as people in developing economies because they must pay local prices for goods and services required for them to live. Going with the global competition because "it's cheaper" doesn't address the hundreds of thousands of people in the US who now don't have the ability to earn a living in the way that they did before while still being forced to consume using the value of their labor. Worse yet, it enriches people who don't have our national best interests in mind.
This kind of "globalization benefits Americans" mindset is why we're in the mess we're in now with a tyrant in office and people having no faith in the economy or the future. It's not 1990 anymore. The experiment's over, it failed. Horribly.
I would also argue that customizations are indeed a total waste of money for systems that already cash strapped.
I don't necessarily agree. Outsourcing has a cost in that you also lose the knowledge of the entire engineering chain.
That engineering chain has a LOT of value to us as a society. However, it has negative value to a single CEO looking at his quarterly bonus.
- low lot size combined with a lot of customization demands leads to high per-unit costs
- "Buy American" is expensive. D'uh. Unfortunately the article doesn't dig down deeper into why BYD and other Chinese manufacturers are cheaper - 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability not just against American companies but against other Chinese companies.
Silicon Valley CEOs saw this and thought it should be their playbook. So hell, maybe made in America will eventually get cheaper as this innovative economic and social system sees adoption by brave pioneers.
Won't work when the market colludes. And Silicon Valley Big Tech already got caught in such a cartel - see [1], debated back then in [2].
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168214
Getting parity with subsidies, worker/environmental protection and regulation overhead would not even come close to make the US price-competitive for labor intensive work like this right now, IMO.
BYD constructs cars with radically different methods than Western manufacturers, who can close much of the gap when they catch up in technique
https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1mnel0i/f...
Being price-competitive with Chinese production then means either driving down local wages or inflating product costs, and there is absolutely no way around this (until you have heavy industry that literally builds itself).
But those higher wage levels are not just affecting a products core-labor working at the assembly line-- you'll have project managers, sales, purchasing, contractors, even the construction workers building your factories: All of them are affected by this (and those people exist in China, too!). I would assume that the total sales price of a bus contains a larger fraction proportional with hourly wages than you might expect at first glance.
Same with municipal vehicles, most towns will buy all Ford or all Chevrolet and as few different models as possible.
Even ignoring the above, all but the smallest agencies can dedicate mechanics to each make. A mechanic can maintain so many buses per year - lets say 10 for discussion (I have no idea what the real number is), so if you have 100 buses you need 10 mechanics. if you have 4 trained on brand A, 4 on brand B, and 2 on both you are fine.
I’m not sure that this is accurate. My understanding is that BYD invested heavily into automation. Their factories have few human employees left. They do almost all their automation robotics design and manufacturing in house to boot. That’s a huge advantage
[1] There's an even worse number for Cincinatti.
To your point though, even at a much higher price, the "Buy American" is putting that money back into the U.S. economy (we hope).
The article didn't mention corruption but I would not rule it out. Follow the money. Whose pockets are being filled when one transit agency is paying 2x what another one does for the same bus.
I mean, that could just be normal, routine failure to negotiate effectively. If every bus vendor says "call for pricing" and your organisation has "always" paid $940k per bus, when you're told to buy some more buses, you might not even know you can get them for half or a third of that price by getting competing quotes from other vendors.
And if you're an ambitious, hard-nosed type that can really turn the screws on vendors, leaving no stone unturned in your search for savings - would you be working in the purchasing department of a municipal bus company?
Absolutely not. Cost savings is career suicide in the public sector. The goal is to spend all budget and then beg for more. Regardless of ridership, the ironclad rule is "budget must go up".
Government employees are NOT well-equipped to compete with private sector ones; they don't think like them and they don't act like them. Why? Because the public sector is driven by a completely different model: bottoms-up management, led by the citizenry, not led top-down to maximize shareholder value. In addition, because private sector jobs pay 2x+ what the same level in a public sector organization will pay and thus the candidate pool is simply not at the level that you would expect at a similarly sized private sector organization. Because of this flip-flopped model of operation (bottoms-up vs top-down) Public/Private partnerships are NOT equal arrangements and the private sector companies know exactly how to leverage these differences in their favor.
In this instance, a public sector employee may feel that paying more for a bus will better serve the public good because it /may/ be better engineered, have a longer lifetime, and offer value to the public that's above and beyond what a less expensive model will do. But! Even if the support staff look for multiple quotes from a variety of vendors, all of which may be at the cost level a private sector company may prefer, that public sector staff member may very well be directly overruled by the elected officials; who, for reasons that can only be hypothesized (take your pick: corruption, brand/personal preference, whatever) may prefer the more expensive vendors that were not included in the research and bidding process.
While I have laid out that the public sector is not well-equipped for public/private partnerships and business dealings, there are MANY reasons for this including: candidate pool, different underlying model of operation, and elected official decisioning.
https://www.startribune.com/the-drive-birth-control-bus-ad-s...
This did not improve public sympathies for bus service broadly speaking.
However, buses can and should feel safe for everyone, whether you're 5 years old or 95 years old, a US citizen or a visitor from Japan, whether it's 2 PM or 2 AM. In the United States, they absolutely don't. This can be fixed, but nobody has the political will to be perceived as a little mean.
I perceive buses in my town be very safe. I definitely see emotionally disturbed people downtown and near the homeless colony behind Wal-Mart, but I don't see them on the bus.
It got so bad, especially on the middle cars (the "party cars") after COVID, that the middle car was retired and they are now in Year 3 of a security improvement plan.
https://www.metrotransit.org/public-safety
They are also retro-fitting screens into the buses, showing the buses' own live camera feeds, to further reinforce the perception of being watched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SBd3wno61k
It's still not working in some areas.
https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-46th-st-light-rail-c...
https://www.instagram.com/karenthecamera/?hl=en
In 2023, Democratic lawmakers changed it from being a misdemeanor to being an administrative citation, with... get this... $35 for first offense, scaling up to $100 + 120 day ban by 4th offense. More merciful than going through a court system inconsistently, at least in theory. Huge surprise it's not working out.
There should be passes for disabled vets, children, and other poor people as well.
I have no problem with homeless people getting free transit if they need it. However, the subset of homeless that are consistently riding for free and making nuisances, they may need to be forcibly kept off the train. It doesn't even need to be police action - install physical barriers, requiring cash or pass, and hand out passes to the homeless like candy with revocation for repeated misbehavior.
About a year ago I went to NYC and it was a bit surreal. It didn't really seem unsafe but boy I saw a lot of people (mostly white) propping open the emergency exits so other people could sneak in just around the corner from New York Guard troops supporting the NYPD. Video ads on the subway were oddly calibrated: "Don't sleep on the subway because it makes you vulnerable to crime", "Don't jump the turnstile because we have roughly 30 programs that could get you free or reduced fares" together with ads for deodorant.
I find buses are safe too. I don't understand the worry myself. However buses in the US normally run terrible routes that make them useless for getting around and so people who want to seem "green" need to find some excuse and not understanding the real problem blame safety and not that the route is useless.
In Ithaca we have great bus service between the Ithaca Commons, Cornell and the Pyramid Mall. Before the pandemic we had a bus every 15 minutes at the mall which was great -- it's still pretty good. There are 5 buses a day during weekdays to the rural area where I live. These are well timed for the 9-5 worker at Cornell and I'm going to be taking the late one back today because I'm going to go photograph a Field Hockey game over in Barton Hall and the timing is right -- it's OK but we did have more buses during the pandemic.
Bus service is not so good to Ithaca College. When I've tried to make the connection with my bus I've concluded that I might as well walk up the hill the IC rather than wait for the bus.
Because you need to be able to recognize from a distance, hey that's a city bus. Not a charter bus. Not a school bus. Not a long distance bus.
And buses aren't usually wrapped with advertising. It's usually just a banner on the sides below the windows.
Some ad campaigns pay much more money to extend it over the windows with that mesh material. But that's generally a small minority. But even then the colors on front and top and often borders still clearly identify it. E.g. these are still very clearly public transit if you live there, which is what's important:
https://contravisionoutlook.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads...
https://contravisionoutlook.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads...
Spotting buses a few blocks away is a crucial skill in cities.
...grab my phone, unlock it, navigate to the app, wait for it to load, wait for it to figure out my location, wait for it to make an API call, try to figure out which of the two "34th and 7th" stops is the one going in the direction I want (since it's a two-way street with bus stops on both side of the intersection), click on one randomly, confirm from the first bus destination listed that I did click on the correct direction, otherwise go back and click on the other one, and then look at its ETA?
Sometimes it really is just better to use your eyes, to figure out that the bus is going to reach the bus stop in about 30 seconds, and that it'll take you 30 seconds of brisk walking to reach it in time, so you'd better start making a beeline now.
You want the bus to be identifiable as possible.
Sure, but fix here seems to be that DOT Regulations state that transit buses are painted "Lime Green" (example) and other companies should not use said color. People would quickly learn that Lime Green = transit bus in same way School Bus Yellow means school bus.
I don't see any reason why it would need to be standardized to the same color in every city nationwide.
School buses are the only ones that do that because it's a safety issue as opposed to a convenience isuse.
The paint job really is important because it's vastly more visible. It also often does things like distinguish between local buses and commuter buses, depending on your city.
Why not have identifying paint? I can't even imagine what would give you this idea. Like, they've got to be some color or set of colors.
Do you think police officers should just wear street clothes rather than us paying for their uniforms?
Should taxis that you hail from the street be indistinguishable from regular cars because you think the little illuminated sign on top is enough?
We color things and make them distinctive because it helps us tell them apart. If you don't understand this, I don't know how to help you.
Cop uniforms are low cost and serve a significantly higher purpose. Taxis being a distinct color is unnecessary too. If I can identify a Dominos delivery vehicle from a distance, than they just need to try harder with their lit signs. A simple redesign could render vehicle paint job obsolete. Just because it’s been that way doesn’t mean it is the best or only solution and it certainly doesn’t mean it has to remain that way.
Perhaps you don't understand how HN works. When you give an opinion, other people can disagree.
If you don't like what they say, don't complain that you "didn't ask for their help". If that's your attitude, perhaps internet forums are not the place for you.
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...
If only that were true in my major US city. The public buses are probably the most filthy vehicles on the road. Every fourth one lets out a cloud of acrid black smoke every time it accelerates. I have to assume they are officially or informally exempt from emissions testing.
Avid cyclist myself, personally I'd rather see the stiff necked 80 year olds in cars as old as them (so barely any safety features) with tiny tiny mirrors gone off the road.
Bus drivers are at least regularly examined for their health, the buses themselves have a lot better maintenance done on them than the average private person, they got more mirrors than a disco ball, and at least here in Germany, the bus fleets are routinely updated to have allllll the bells and whistles. Lane keeps, dead-spot alerts, object tracking/warning and collision avoidance...
As for the noise: yes a bus is louder, but (IMHO, having lived on a busy road that was suddenly not so busy at all during Covid) I can handle the occasional bus every 5 minutes way better than the constant car noises.
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 looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.
Consider also that bus depots are the perfect site for big battery banks hooked up to their charging stations, and tend to have plenty of room for solar panels on the roof. So electrification is good for the grid too.
It's one of those rare situations where everyone benefits.
I'd argue that mail delivery is an even better use case - it starts and stops even more frequently than a bus, practically never needs to travel at high speeds, and only needs to make one run a day.
But it's not a competition - they're both good use cases.
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.
Once you allow attaching an extension cord, electric wins ever time; there's zero competition.
So it's either extend the existing rail network, or try to build a new one entirely.
(Apparently it's something on the line of $10m/mile to add electrification, so presumably building it while building out is less, but not much less.)
My takeaway: No reasonable assumption exists that would make operating battery electric busses more expensive than diesel ones.
1: https://trafficnews-jp.translate.goog/post/587367/3
The electric variant is clearly significantly cheaper to operate (like my linked source shows) even taking charging infrastructure and maintenance into account.
Battery electric busses becoming CAPEX competitive with diesel ones is also just a matter of time in my view (case in point: singapore already gets those for less than the US currently pays for diesel ones).
From the linked analysis you will also find that the higher price example for diesel bus in the article ($980k) is already more expensive than a typical BEV alternative and likely a net drain on the operator (by comparison) within the first year.
Japan may have special conditions, like diesel/electricity price may be unfavorable or "build local" rules and no local competition in EV building.
Note that engineering can be done in one location for multiple factories.
Even in much more highly automated industries you have a shift towards lower wage regions (see eastern europe automotive industry as an example) because you still need labor to build and maintain the factories at the very least.
I realize they have improved but aren’t natural gas buses better?
(At least, globally. China and Europe are all in on electric buses; I doubt any of us have a good crystal ball for what's going to happen in the US.)
Until recently the US Federal Government funded capital expenses but never operating expenses. This lead to outcomes such as the feds distributing grant money with the requirement that buses must last at least 12 years and transit agencies refreshing their buses on the 12 year mark. Buying a natural gas bus or battery electric bus lowers OPEX and the increased CAPEX is picked up by the feds.
CNG and propane have much better emissions profiles, and vehicle lifetime and compressed tank lifetime are a good match for transit, as opposed to personal vehicles where when the compressed fuel tank ages out, the otherwise servicable vehicle turns into a pumpkin.
However, CNG ends up being expensive and may not save much versus diesel... The natural gas is usually not expensive, but compression requires a lot of energy input which is expensive.
Unless it's different for bus drivers than for truck drivers, there is plenty mandatory break time under German rules to allow fast charging of such style to give enough range. And it's easy to set up by just fitting route-after-route with the charging spots and keeping a few diesel busses in reserve to handle broken chargers until there are enough chargers to maintain bus schedules even if some of them go offline.
1. They standardize rolling stock. The same stuff is used across the country. I think this is really important. If you think about how the US does things, every city will have its own procurement process. This is wasteful but is just more opportunity for corruption;
2. China had a long term strategy to building its own trains (and, I assume, buses). They first imported high speed trains from Japan and Germany but ultimately wanted to build their own; and
3. Streamlined permitting. China has private property but the way private property works in the US is as a huge barrier to any change or planning whatsoever. China just doesn't allow this to happen.
I keep coming back to the extortionate cost of the Second Avenue Subway in NYC. It's like ~$2.5 billion per mile (Phase 2 is estimated at $4 billion per mile). You may be tempted to say that China isn't a good comparison here because of cheap labor or whatever. Fine. But let's compare it to the UK's Crossrail, which was still expensive but way cheaper than the SEcond Avenue Subway.
California's HSR is hitting huge roadblocks from permitting, planning and political interests across the Central Valley, forcing a line designed to cut the travel time from LA to SF to divert to tiny towns along the way.
There is a concerted effort in the US to kill public transit projects across the country (eg [3]). You don't just do this by blocking projects. You also make things take much longer and make the processes so much more expensive. In California, for example, we've seen the weaponization of the otherwise well-intentioned CEQA [4].
I feel like China's command economy is going to eat us alive over the next century.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_hig...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7gvr_U4R4w
[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
[4]: https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/s...
re: buses, we have the same rickety ass new flyers essentially everywhere in the US, that doesn't make them any cheaper
if you end up buying a whole bunch of units of the same stuff without planning to, you're wasting all that potential efficiency.
> They standardize rolling stock. The same stuff is used across the country. I think this is really important. If you think about how the US does things, every city will have its own procurement process.
Having everything ordered piecemeal in smaller custom orders is more expensive and gives cities a disadvantage in negotiation power
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...
China just doesn't let private property owners effectively delay and block everything.
[1]: https://www.the-independent.com/asia/china/china-grandfather...
Just look at the currently proposed route map [1]. It deviates to the east side of the valley because that's where these towns are vs the west side, which is more direct.
Deviating a supposedly high speed route for small towns doesn't make a ton of sense. Not only does it increase the cost and travel time directly, but extra stops slow the overall travel time. This could've just as easily beeen on the west side of the Central Valley and had feeder lines and stations into a smaller number of stations.
Look at any high speed rail route in Europe or China and you'll see fairly limited stops for this reason.
The biggest and easiest win for a high speed rail should've been LA to Las Vegas. It's a shorter distance and through mostly desert and other uninhabited land. Ideally LAX would've been one of these stops but I'm not sure how viable that is. Then you add a spur that goes north to SF so you avoid building through LA county twice, which is going to be one of your most expensive parts.
Instead we have a private company (Brightline) building a LA to Vegas route.
As an aside, Vegas desperately needed to build a subway plus light rail from the airport up the strip. The stupid Teslas in tunnels under the strip was another of those efforts of billionaires proposing and doing projects to derail public transit. Like the Hyperloop.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_of_California_High-Speed...
Brightline is building a victorville to vegas train. They have no plan to reach LA. Maybe as close as Rancho Cucamonga. In either case no work has been done yet on that project while construction on the HSR is ongoing.
Interestingly, this process has now somewhat gone into reverse. Alexander Dennis, say, built their first-gen electric buses on BYD tech (China was the leader in this space), but their second-gen on their own design.
We could move a lot faster here if we removed or severely limited the ability for individuals and small organizations to completely stall progress on major societal efforts. I think this is not at all unique to the US, either, it is a problem to varying degrees in most modern democracies.
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.
https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php/Grumman_Flxible_870
Buses get shaken really hard.
Sigh.
(And the media is pretty good at it. I'm pretty sure if a comet was about to hit the planet tomorrow and wipe out humanity there would still be an article that somehow manages to make it sound worse)
Nowadays with spending power way down, it may in fact be more "efficient" to get something out quick, and have frequent repairs. If you hit the expensive failure... welp, just throw it out and make a new one.
At the federal level, this was somewhat easy to do, because the vast majority of government spending would go to domestic recipients. Yes, we were spending a lot, but local places would see and could celebrate in the results.
At some point, though, we switched to the idea that taxation is punitive. And we stopped taking pride in big things the government can do. Quite the contrary, people are still convinced the F22 is bad. Meanwhile, many of us still revere the SR-71 as a beautiful thing. (Which, I mean, it is.)
In America they do, since we don't take care of our roads.
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