- 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...
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).
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).
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.
[1] There's an even worse number for Cincinatti.
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
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?
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.
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".
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...
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. Shocking.
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.
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...
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.
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).
Note that engineering can be done in one location for multiple factories.
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.)
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
> 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
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.
In the UK, there were always a few buses in any given fleet that rattled more than others, especially when idling or at low revs - something to do with resonance with the body panels, I think. But that was back when diesel engines were universal, so hasn't really been a thing since hybrids and (more recently) BEVs took over.
Looks like New Flyer hybrids use BAE Systems' Hybridrive, which was fairly common in London during the 2010s but didn't produce noticeably excessive vibration as far as I remember. Is there something different about how the engines are mounted in US buses, I wonder?
At face value, though, public infrastructure is largely the sort of thing that enables many things with no obvious stakeholder that could have done it themselves. Certainly not in a way that would have an easy path to profits for the infrastructure.
Half the costs of running a bus route are the driver's labor. The other half needs to pay for maintenance, the cost of the bus, and all the other overhead.
lenerdenator•1h ago
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!"
sidewndr46•1h ago
red_rech•1h ago
After all, it was divine right (Darwinian evolution, AI schizobabble, etc) that made them men of might.
potato3732842•1h ago
That's basically what states and municipalities are.
mschuster91•1h ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
sidewndr46•28m ago
namdnay•1h ago
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?
mschuster91•1h ago
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.
rangestransform•1h ago
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.
PaulHoule•53m ago
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.
myrmidon•39m ago
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.
infecto•1h ago
I would also argue that customizations are indeed a total waste of money for systems that already cash strapped.