Comment by SpicyUme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SpicyUme | Hacker News Reader

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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?

But they all basically come with AC and heating? At least in basically any semi-modern bus I've ever been in in Europe. No matter if it's -20 or +35 celsius, as long as they turn the AC actually on it's tolerable.

And we also have some mountains here, so there's some buses for that (still stock from the factory)

No, they certainly don’t all come with AC and heat.

I haven't seen a non-AC bus in ages, even in developing countries.

You'll find buses with no AC in northern Spain today. And it's not ancient ones, but ones running on natural gas: They option then without, making them a hazard in July and August. I've seen one specifically operated to take special needs children to their facility, where we'd argue with the company that the fact that they are special needs doesn't mean they don't feel the heat in the summer.

Buses in places like Ireland, Scotland, much of Scandinavia, etc will never need air conditioning.

Places a little warmer (England, Denmark, Netherlands, northern Germany) might be warm enough for a few days per year, but the cost of purchase and maintenance of A/C might not be worthwhile.

How many of those places have you been to? They might not need year-round A/C like some other countries, but the increasingly-common heat waves definitely require them. The buses are almost intolerable with air conditioning, there's no way in hell they'd ever purchase them without it.

The additional purchase cost is a rounding error, and you're far worse off if cooking people alive during the summer means losing customers year-round as they switch to less-hostile transit options. Maintenance isn't a dealbreaker either: sure, it's extra work, but the equipment is rarely needed. This means the occasional breakage isn't a huge deal, and big maintenance can be deferred to the spring and fall.

Here in Germany many passengers are even against air conditioning in buses and open the windows in summer so the AC doesn't work.

The windows often contain labels like "Fahrzeug klimatisiert" (Vehicle is air conditioned) so it is not that people are unaware.

I've been to all of them, and lived/live in two of them.

I live in the UK and most of our buses in my city don’t have air conditioning as far as I can tell since they usually have open windows, except some the very newest ones

https://www.ratp.fr/decouvrir/coulisses/au-quotidien/des-sol...

In 2020, 5% of bus in Paris had AC.

In 2026, they aim for 75%. And a 100% rollout by 2035.

Even subway lines don't all have AC.

The vast majority of buses in Montreal, Canada do not have AC. Crack a window in the summer.

Does have heat in the winter though.

My public school buses in a decent Midwestern suburb had no AC cooling as recently as a decade ago (only heat, since heat comes free with an engine). I wouldn't expect them to have AC cooling today.

Buses you pay directly to ride may be a bit different, but I'd also expect AC isn't ubiquitous in those, or wasn't until very recently.

They are exactly the same busses. I've never heard of a school bus with AC in the US. (Please, someone from Arizona correct me.)

In Vancouver the climate generally does not need them. Some days it gets hot and those suck.

It's been a while since I've been on Muni but most of their bus fleet did not have AC as of 2019.

Busses without AC drive kids to school everyday out here in the American Midwest.

The number of places in the US that will never need both at some point is vanishingly small.

Irish buses don't have AC (rarely hot enough here to need it) and the electric ones only have heating adequate for about 0 degrees and up (rarely colder than that, though they're unpleasant when it is).

they should, also with air filters, noise and air quality are big issues, keeping windows closed would help a lot

yes, it's expensive, yes, people's revealed presences indicate they don't care for these things, they rather give up QALYs than sitting hours every day in "rush hour traffic"

One way that China keeps the cost of subways down is by standardizing the train sets.

They have three types of trains (A, B, C) that are used in almost all subway systems across the country. You need a high-capacity train? A. You have a smaller line with fewer passengers? C. Something in-between? B.

There are a few variants for cities with special circumstances. Chongqing uses variants that can handle steeper slopes, because the city is incredibly hilly (like San Francisco).

By standardizing, prices can be kept down. Cities don't have to come up with custom solutions. Just define your needs and pick the standard variant that matches them.

Something similar could be done with buses.

> 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.

I'm not familiar with the details of the situation but the tunnel is being used for transit either way right? If someone used to rely on busses in that tunnel aren't they vastly more likely to switch to whatever replacement is in the tunnel (rail?) than a car?

1. Priority bus lanes are solving that problem.

2. If getting through downtown by bus is slow, getting through it by car isn't any faster.

Anyways, Seattle's transit problem isn't bad downtown bus service, it's godawful spoke-and-last-mile coverage, which eviscerates ridership, makes the overall network less efficient, and forms a negative-feedback-loop that blocks transit improvements.

Nobody likes sitting around for half an hour waiting for a bus that will take them to another bus.

> If getting through downtown by bus is slow, getting through it by car isn't any faster

This isn’t true at all.

Busses stop continuously along the route, which adds a ton of time. Cars go straight to the destination.

You also have to add the time spent waiting for the bus, and the time to walk to the bus stop.

Busses usually aren’t going to take as direct a route as a car can. You will likely have to walk once you get to your destination, too, or switch buses.

I am all for public transportation, and take it all the time, but let’s not pretend it is always faster than cars.

> 2. If getting through downtown by bus is slow, getting through it by car isn't any faster.

If the buses and cars are on the same roads, going the same speed, the car will get you to your destination faster, and everyone will go by car. Buses only get ridership if they have dedicated lanes where they can go faster than regular car traffic:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22143...

It is too bad the Rapidride R line is so far away from being finished. I think it would be good to have it and allow for more E/W routes possibly between there and the train. Having regular, quick bus service on the rapidride lines makes connections easier to decide on the bus.

Not many people per bus are needed for a bus to be better than the equivalent number of cars. And no, carpooling is not a useful option to rely on to reduce the impact. At least not until some of the occupancy rules are enforced.

Only because the current mayor hates non-drivers and is sandbagging bus lanes. Seattle's buses will become a lot faster in January once the Wilson administration starts putting bus lanes everywhere.

I go back and forth on that, the bus tunnel was useful. But a tunnel with 3(4?) stops seems like a good place for a train of some sort. I guess the buses are why there are no center stops in there? It seems like a missed opportunity. Not sure about the history of the tunnel but there were tracks there years ago so they must have planned to put trains in eventually.

The Link light rail uses it.

The tunnel belonged to King County, not the city government, and transferring it to Sound Transit was in fact a wise decision. It would not be possible to run a train every six minutes during peak hours if they still had to share the tunnel with buses, and the 3rd Ave transit corridor sees more bus throughput than the tunnel ever did.

> But a bus isn't just a bus, there are differences in what is needed in different cities

That's sometimes true but often not. Utah might need buses to go up the canyons, but might have passed some requirement at some point that said that all the buses need to be able to do this because someone got burnt once by not having enough of those buses. Or some well-meaning (or vote seeking?) city councillor might have put through a bill to put USB-A chargers in all the seats, which will stick around far longer than those coming as standard making them an expensive custom option.

What you end up with is requirements that make the buses custom purchases, which massively inflates their costs, when any reasonable person would say that such custom attributes aren't (always) needed. By having a strong opinion about something, the city will pay far more than if they bought an off-the-shelf solution.

Much of "the west" is particularly affected by this sort of attitude. Everywhere and everyone is convinced that they are special in some way and need something specific, but end up paying for it. This is part of why India can send a probe to Mars for $72m, or why Singapore can buy busses at $300k instead of $1m. And to be clear, I say this having grown up in the UK and moved to Australia, both places with a certain amount of this attitude.

Do you have a specific citeable example of unnecessary “custom requirements” driving up the cost of city buses in the US

Well there's one in the article, the colour of the floors.

My point about the buses is about "missing the forest for the trees", so the fact that you've focused on getting a specific citable example while missing the point is quite ironic.

Here's an industry article about the phenomenon: https://enotrans.org/article/a-bus-is-a-bus-the-costs-of-exc...

And here's a study documenting excess customisation as a driver of the costs: https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/paying-less-for... – which notes that "70 percent of contracts in the BGS data in 2024 were for unique buses".

PHEV drivetrain with a 50 mile all electric range: would handle virtually all of the situations.

Climbing a steep hill? EV drivetrains don't care and provide great torque. Start/stop? perfect. Regenerative braking? There you go. Need all-electric for a spell? Gas to extend range? Gas for AC/Heat? ok ok ok. Smooth operation? Low noise? Low/no emissions? yes yes yes Less wear? Less gas? Lower operating costs? Simpler drivetrains? Simpler repairs? yes to all of it.

Every bus should have been forced to be a PHEV drivetrain within a decade of the Prius/Insight being released in 1997. The USPS should have been all PHEV by then too.

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