(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 588: What Does It Cost to Build a Bus?

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Lisa Jerram of APTA and Philip Plotch of the Eno Center for Transportation to discuss Eno’s report: Customization, Competition, and Costs: Findings and Recommendations for the U.S. Transit Bus Industry. We discuss what agencies want in a bus and why, the differences in European and US bus markets, and why customization standardization is hard to achieve.

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Below is a full transcript of this episode:

Well, before we get started, can you tell us all a little bit about yourself? And we’ll start with Lisa, and we’ll go with Philip.

We’re a membership organization, so we have public transit agencies across the country who are members, and also all the businesses that support them. And we do a lot of things at APTA, which people will think of maybe the government advocacy part. We do a lot of meetings. People might have been to those.

I personally, my particular focus is on bus transit stuff, uh, for lack of a better way of putting it, which is committees, things like that. So bus transit, uh, my nickname here is the bus lady at APTA. So.

But for that, I was in academia, and I wrote three books. I wrote a book about the Second Avenue Subway, a book about replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge, and a book about the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. And, uh, I learned how to get into the weeds, and I learned how to get people to explain why, which is so helpful.

And those little skills and experiences help when you write a report about bus customization or just about any other report to, like, understand, like, what people’s incentives are, why people do the things they do, and then try to change it, which is much harder than trying to figure out why people are doing what they’re doing.

I worked at the MTA in New York, and after 9/11, I worked on, uh, redeveloping the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. So I’ve had a, a great career so far, and really enjoying working at the Eno Center, ’cause I get to do the things that I enjoy doing oftentimes, which is talking to people, and when I’m curious about something.

So I was curious about how is retail space doing in transit stations? I put a webinar together. Or I wanna find out what transportation reporters, um, how they do their jobs or, and what they look for, and I just brought some transportation reporters in and had a webinar. So I do enjoy, I think, asking questions more than I like to answer them.

How do you do that? Like, is it a long conversation? Is it a short conversation? Do you just have to show them that you know what you’re talking about, and then they’ll start talking to you in a different way?

Um, and IBM, they, they teach you how to be marketing all the time, right? It’s what you wear, and it’s developing relationships with people. It was nice to have tickets to Madison Square Garden events and, and take people. I don’t, I don’t have that anymore, Dino. So it actually can be difficult to develop relationships with people since we’re all, like, remote, right?

But you can do it. You can explain to people that you know what you’re talking about, and you can explain to people that they’re in a safe space, and tell people that you’re just trying to inform other people. Um, and sometimes if you flatter people, it also helps a lot, right?

I mean, that was, like, a million years ago. And so I kind of got into it that way. I really liked the idea of something new. I learned something new, and it was good for the environment, so that was great. And it sort of evolved over time. I worked for a couple of different nonprofits, and there was one of them where we started working on hybrid buses.

And I thought, “Gosh, that’s not gonna be very interesting. I’m not excited by buses. That’s not gonna be great.” And I started doing it, and I was doing research, kind of like you do, Phil, so I was asking questions, and found out transit agencies will tell you all kinds of stuff. It is great. If you wanna learn something and do great research, transit is one of the best places to do it, because we’re very open, very honest, they love to share, and it’s just a really kind of interesting environment to be in.

And I got really excited by it. And so, years went by, I was interested in APTA for quite a while, and, uh, some point, someone I knew at APTA, they were looking for somebody new to come in. And at that time in particular, the whole zero emission thing was really kind of taking off, and I had that ex- particular expertise.

So that was valuable for that reason. So here we are, and I’ve been at APTA for eight years. And, and I do, I think transit is a really… When people get into it, they really get into it, and they love it.

And one thing that came up from a lot of people was this issue of customization. If you think about you’re walking and you’re buying a Toyota or a Ford or any other car, you wouldn’t just walk into a dealer and say, “Oh, this is a great model, but can you just swap out the air conditioning unit, and maybe change the window frames, and move the cup holders, and, oh, I don’t really like those color screws, and a different color seatbelt, and let’s turn these seats around.”

Like, you j- you just couldn’t imagine doing that. And if a company had to do that, if the car dealer was able to actually, like, create a car, it’s almost like a Rolls-Royce customizing a car. You’d just have to have a, a lot more engineers to do that, and you have to stock a whole lot more parts. You’d have to test all of these different components, right?

Here’s this new air conditioning system that, is it gonna work w- with the filters you have? Is it gonna work with all the duct work you have? Do you have to test everything separately? Who, who knows? Like, there might be some sort of a wireless frequency conflict between the different components, or maybe you’re gonna have overheating ’cause you’re not used to having this, this certain part.

And at the end of the day, you’re gonna pay a lot more for that car. It’s gonna take a lot longer for it to come, and you’re probably gonna have a lot more quality issues. Because if you have an automated manufacturing facility, one car after another car after another car, it’s going either by people or by robots getting different parts that are put on.

But if everything has to swap out, if you have to change the parts, change the work processes, all of a sudden everything becomes more expensive, and that quality actually gets impaired. So to us, it seemed like a win, win, win. If we can reduce customization, we can lower the cost that transit agencies have to pay, we could speed up the delivery of the buses, and we can get better buses.

It just seemed like sort of an easy thing to take on. It seemed like an easy thing to take on.

So what they’ll do is they’ll issue a re- request for proposal, an RFP, and they’ll put all of these different specs in it, and then the manufacturer has to respond to this. And putting those specs together can take six, nine, 12 months because there’s so many different parts and components in a bus, and you have all of these different people looking at these things.

And it’s not just the bus maintenance people and the operators, but it’s also the lawyers and the financial people and the insurance people. Everybody’s, like, looking at what should go into that RFP. So the RFP gets issued. The manufacturer then has to figure out, oh, how are they gonna respond to that?

They don’t usually use those different components. So they’ll look at this RFP, and they’ll have, like, 3, 400 different recommendations for how you should change that bus that was specced out and customized to meet the agency’s needs. The reasons why they’re doing it, I think it… I think are really interesting.

One is they think there’s something unique about their place, and sometimes there is. So San Francisco has really steep hills, and you need a more powerful engine to handle that. Phoenix obviously is a little bit hotter. Boston has to worry because not only is there salt on the road during the winter, but also there’s salt that’s sprayed in from the harbor.

So they need a different, more robust bus. Um, New York thinks they need the most robust bus in the world. They think it’s the heaviest use. The roads are really bad. So those are, you could say, pretty valid reasons, or at least they think they’re really valid reasons. But then there’s a lot of other reasons they do this.

One is they’re a little bit leery of changing the way their buses have always been built. If you’re a customer, all of a sudden you get onto a new bus and the seating arrangement’s a little bit different, or it used to be you press the button and now it’s a strip or you pull a cord, or maybe the wheelchair gets tied on a little bit differently, you’re kind of resistant to that.

And agencies, what’s more important than the i- idea of customization is keeping their customers happy. But the same thing with the operators or the bus drivers. You wanna keep them happy, too. They’re sitting in this seat for eight hours a day, and they want their instruments a certain way. They want this sort of mobile office of theirs to be comfortable for them.

And you want, if you’re a transit agency head, you want your operators to be happy, and you want your customers to be happy. So a lot of reasons that they come up with, but I, I think one of the biggest reasons they come up with for all of this customization is they want consistency with all of their previous buses.

They want to minimize the number of spare parts they have. They want to minimize the training requirements they have. And they’re just sort of used to certain kinds of products, a certain air conditioning unit or certain windshield wipers or whatever it is. There are certain things that they, they kinda get used to, and then they wanna just keep that.

So they want this consistency within their fleet. But ironically, the best thing w- for everybody was if there was more consistency across the country. But that’s hard to do, making this shift.

But I would say too, honestly, for APTA’s perspective, I would broaden this a little bit because our interest came through a desire to sort of shore up or secure the health of the bus manufacturing industry overall in the US. From what APTA’s perspective was, we started out in 2023 with a bus manufacturing task force And that was driven by losing a couple of bus manufacturers from the US market, and we already had a fairly small number as it was.

People either decided to stop manufacturing in the US, uh, a very significant manufacturer declared bankruptcy. And we were looking all of a sudden at having a really small number of manufacturers to supply the market and sort of trying to figure out what’s going on here. We need to take some action as an industry to ensure that this industry, the bus industry, is a healthy one.

So from our perspective, I would say, honestly, it’s a little broader than just the customization piece. Customization was identified as one of the challenges for the manufacturers. That is definitely a key challenge. We also focused a lot on sort of the contracts, the terms and conditions that agencies were putting through their procurements, and the impacts that had on the financial health of the manufacturers.

And that can sort of be considered as part of customization in a way. I mean, so what we at APTA have done is we have what I’ll call the white book. It’s what it’s normally called. The longer name is the Standard Bus Procurement Guidelines. And it is kind of what it sounds like, which is a very long template, long as in like 300-plus pages, that, uh, APTA has maintained over about like 25 or 30 years, and updated over those years, that agencies can use to create their RFPs.

And we are focused on streamlining that document and encouraging and kind of reducing some of the over, you know, kind of the many options that are available in that, either the technical options or the contract options, and streamlining that and making that document, uh, a better document that will help address some of this customization.

So, so from our perspective, I would say, again, it’s sort of more broadly how can we kind of streamline overall this procurement process, make it less burdensome, you know, potentially, of course, for the manufacturers, but also for the agencies, honestly, ’cause it can be kind of a difficult process for them.

That can help bring down costs of bus. It can help encourage new companies to come into the US market and, you know, just kind of improve the bus industry overall.

Is that kind of like the u- a unifying principle, or is it just, like, a whole bunch of things that kind of bring it together like that?

We all learned a little bit more about what that term means. When, in the United States, the federal government pays for 80% of a transit agency’s bus, which means they have a lot of say in what kind of buses we can buy at the transit agencies. One of the biggest requirements is this Buy America requirement, which means that transit agencies can only buy buses that are made in the United States.

So they’re assembled in the United States, and then most of the components have to be purchased from United States companies that are actually made in the United States. And we were thinking a lot, and APTA’s been thinking a lot about this also, is how do you bring in more manufacturers, and how do you make sure that the existing manufacturers are strong?

And it’s not just the manufacturers we worry about, we also worry about the suppliers.

There’s only about 4,000 or 5,000 buses that are made every year. So it’s a relatively small market, and we want to make sure there’s good competition, but at the same time, we want to make sure that the manufacturers are strong because if a manufacturer goes out of business, they’re not gonna be there to support you, they’re not gonna be there to provide the parts, they’re not gonna be there to provide the training.

So we were thinking a lot about the manufacturing industry as a whole for buses. And I just want to say that Lisa was such a great resource on the advisory panel, as well as the other advisory panel members. Really helped us at Eno understand this. We went in not really understanding, like, what was going on, why things were going on, a- and what could potentially work.

So you’ll consolidate that purchase, and then you’ll have that ability to get not just more standard buses, but also more efficiency in the, in the marketplace and be able to keep the price a little bit lower Lisa, are you aware of outside of Europe, the bus market at all?

Obviously China, the numbers are, are gonna be enormous. But I think that comparison with Europe really shows you the difference, though. You know, my impression is people are sometimes surprised ’cause, ’cause usually the US is a big market for anything, right? But in this particular product, if you will, it isn’t really a very big market.

I mean, and, and the other thing too is, you know, if we’re talking about the cost, I think Phil really answered it really well actually, which is we wanna make sure that the bus manufacturers that we have are, like, healthy businesses and that they can continue to supply our, you know, need for transit buses, and, you know, that we could encourage new companies to come into, uh, the market.

I think that’s always good to have that happen. You know, there are gonna be other things that affect cost differences between the US market and Europe besides the customization. Customization is one of the factors, but you have to think about, uh, again, the Buy America. We already talked about that. That obviously is just, it’s regulation that is going to be increasing the supply chain, increasing the prices.

We have a 12-year life requirement for buses, right, that are purchased with FTA funds, and I believe in Europe, I think the typical life of bus is maybe more like around eight years. That’s my understanding certainly, I think, for, like, the, the London buses, the TFL buses. It’s just a more expensive bus, I mean, just inherently.

Obviously something that lasts 12 years is gonna cost more than something that lasts eight years. Uh, there’s some ADA requirements that are a little bit different, so there’s a lot of different factors. I think it’s, you know, y- you wanna make sure you’re kind of comparing apples to apples when you’re talking about, like, what the differences are in the, the prices.

So traditionally it’s been a diesel bus, but there’s a lot of CNG buses out there. There’s, uh, hybrid electric buses, and there’s hydrogen fuel cell buses, and there’s also battery electric buses. That’s a lot of different kinds of buses that are coming out there. And in Europe, I think almost all the buses that are being produced now are battery electric, and European manufacturers, when they think about entering the United States, they don’t see that market as necessarily being stable and strong for battery electric buses.

Editor’s note, Shenzhen operates around 16,000 buses. So there’s just, like so many places that are doing that, and here it just doesn’t seem to take on. And then part of that’s probably because there are only 5,000 buses manufactured a year, and also those specifications that we have for the hardening of these buses.

In the New York case study was very fascinating, and you mentioned this, but the New York case study’s really fascinating at the amount of strengthening these buses have to go through in order to be able to operate in New York City for 12 years straight, right? Can you kind of give us an idea of what they’re looking for when they’re trying to build a bus specifically for New York?

And what has happened i- in the United States is because New York has this robust test, the manufacturers, when they build their buses, not only do they have to meet the standards of the United States, which has its own robust testing, but also New York standards. So New York standards almost become the national standards.

So the, the bus in New York, m- maybe they do need a really strong bus, but they don’t need that same kind of bus in Phoenix or in Albuquerque or something as they do in New York, because they’re not running as many hours, they’re not having as many people, the roads are a little bit different. In New York also, they have more experts than the bus manufacturer does.

So they have engineers who can actually design braking systems, and they’ve designed their own braking system that they want on their buses. They, um, have certain requirements because they have things that other places don’t have. So there’s something called bus surfing in New York. Um, you’ve probably all heard of subway surfing, which is…

I highly recommend not doing. Well, there are people who are doing bus surfing also. So you have to harden the top of the bus in New York in a way that you don’t have to do in other places. That you can consider customization, or you could just say it’s a feature, or you could just say, “We have to do this.”

Depends on how you look at it. Another thing is in New York, there are 12,000 bus drivers, and that means there’s gonna be a lot of crime that happens against these bus drivers. And if you’re the head of the agency, you wanna make sure they’re all safe. So you, you’re really careful about creating this enclosure for the bus driver so they are super safe, whether it’s from somebody on the outside or somebody on the inside trying to hurt them.

So New York, um, is definitely leading because of their size, because they are buying about 10% of the buses every year. But at the same time, it’s costing a little bit more money, and they are customizing more. They actually have their own funds. They don’t even have to use federal funds. So if the federal government told them to do something, they could just say, “It’s okay.

We’ll use federal funds for something else, and we’ll buy buses, um, with our own money.”

Um, so then you kind of explained this next question, which is, like, how did agencies get so much power over customization? It’s because they all have their little fiefdoms, it feels like, and over time it’s probably stacked on top of itself, kind of a Russian nesting doll of customization, uh, where, you know, they’re asking for more, and then as you mention in the report, it kind of becomes standard after the first time it’s in there, and then so they ask for more after that.

And what they’re doing is they’re trying to get the transit agencies to put those components into their specs And what that does is it just increases the amount of customization. And the more that transit agencies customize, the more there is an incentive for these suppliers to market directly to the transit agency.

To me, it reminded me of when you watch a football game and you see, like, some pharmaceutical product that’s sold, that they’re trying directly to sell to the consumer, and I’m always thinking, you know, I have no idea what this means, and the doctor should be, like, filtering this sort of stuff out. So it’d be nice if the bus manufacturers could filter it out, but that’s just not how it works.

The bus manufacturers get a lot of pressure from the transit agencies to add these components that the transit agencies have seen at conferences or in brochures or in videos or whatever.

And that has been, like, a goal of the White Book for, for quite a while, is to ensure at least that if an agency’s putting out an RFP and what they’re asking for is gonna be, if you can meet that performance requirement, then you can, you know, respond to the RFP. It is designed to try to, you know, minimize that kind of, like, very specific, I think direct specification, if you will, from the, from the agency.

Uh, can’t say that i- always necessarily works. Of course, agencies are free to modify as they wish. And, and, and indeed, some of them are going to, like Phil said. And sometimes they have reasons to do it. You know, they… Again, it gets pretty complicated in terms of what happens internally at the agency. The mechanics are accustomed to dealing with particular components, or even, you know, maybe they’ve had better experiences with one company’s products or components than others, and they sort of think, “Okay.

Well, this is, we know this. This is what we wanna use.” So that’s where you end up, it gets kinda sticky, I think I would say, trying to avoid some of the kind of things that Phil’s talking about.

But one thing to understand about the White Book, it’s voluntary. So it’s great, it’s detailed, has lots of information, and, um, it would be great if everybody could use it, but some of the, the larger transit agencies use maybe 70% of it. The smaller agencies use a lot more of it. But it’d be great if Lisa had a little more time to go around the country expounding on the, the virtues of using the White Book.

And then the last one was really on customization, and we’ve made some updates. Uh, Phil mentioned earlier about, like, seating companies. We did some, like, standardized floor plans that are in the white book now, so you sort of would select from a couple of standardized floor plans. But the next phase is, yeah, how do we just put this out there and encourage agencies to use it?

And also, not just encourage, but I think genuinely some agencies don’t necessarily know, you know, everything that’s in the white paper or understand all the components that are in there, or why is this new, you know, element considered a best practice as opposed to what we’ve been doing before? What are the impacts of this new one versus what we did before?

So that is gonna be part of my job for the coming year.

Or somebody had, uh, had it written into law, uh, through a court order that they had to have, like, lights or something on a certain spot in the bus or whatever. Like, how much is it just, like, the litigiousness of American society that might not exist in other countries as heavily?

And it made transit agencies really nervous. And one of the things in Lisa’s white book is how do you deal with indemnity? Like, if we are sued, who’s responsible? And you get sued once, you get sued twice, um, and your insurance company is all over you also. You have to think really carefully about what the specs in the bus are, and if you’re not totally comfortable with some standard that APTA came up with, you’re just gonna stick with what you had before.

And it feels k- kind of something similar, where we need to have us be able to build more buses at a cheaper rate, or else we’re just gonna end up getting to the point where we’re spending s- a ridiculous amount on a bus, and it takes away from operating funds or other capital funds or something along those lines.

And so I g- kinda just got a feeling of NIMBYism from all this, and I don’t know if that’s right or wrong. Maybe you guys can tell me. But it just feels silly that, like, I wrote down this note about a bike sensor that n- you, where you needed to re-engineer the wiring harness. And I’m, I’m sitting here with my phone, and this phone has an accelerometer and everything else, and it does a million different things.

Obviously, Apple makes m- millions of these things. But that would cause, like, a, a whole shakeup of the system. And so how much of this is kind of, like, the agencies being NIMBYish, the manufacturers being NIMBYish, and then just wanting to go about their way the same way they’ve always done it, and passengers like me, who ride a bus every day, really honestly don’t care if the windows square or round?

I think that’s fantastic, right? Like, like- It makes sense … yeah, you know the bus is coming in six minutes, but if the next three buses are all filled with bikes, you, you can’t put it on. The trouble is when King County Metro insists on having these bike sensors on, it just, there’s a lot of customization that has to go into the bus.

It’s not just the rack, but it’s integrating with all the other hardware and software in there. Um, and then getting that information onto an app. It’s expensive. It’s a little kludgy. But the transit agency’s just trying to be responsive because at the end of the day, they want their customers to be happy.

And if your operators are happier, their customers are gonna be happier

And actually, uh, again, it’s not even just the customization, it would also be true for putting in certain types of terms and conditions that are, uh, not sort of what we would consider to be best practice or standard and, and what the cost would be. Uh, could be anything, I don’t know, with longer warranties or, you know, whatever it might be.

I really like that recommendation a lot because I think part of this is just having a, a real sort of awareness, like a concrete quantitative way to understand what you’re doing if you ask for something that’s different, and it’s maybe it’s gonna increase cost. And then the other thing about it is then you can say, “Okay, now I understand what this is gonna cost me,” and you can make an informed decision.

And your decision might be kind of like with the bike racks, whatever, we’re still gonna do that because that’s what our customers really want or, you know, for whatever it is, whatever the reason is gonna be. But you can make, I think, a much better, more informed decision that way. And I’m sure some agencies will be driven to not make some of those decisions for something that really isn’t providing customer value.

Again, the bike rack provides clear customer value, arguably different, uh, you know, colors of the white or whatever it is are not necessarily, right? And I think they just might say, “Okay, this doesn’t provide real operational or performance value. We’re not gonna go that route.” So I really, I really think that’s a big part of it, is just having a real clear sort of a concrete understanding of what the differences are from the choices you make.

And so your comment about the, the recommendations that they didn’t like, maybe that was along the same lines. I don’t know. Uh, I also wonder, Lisa, what’s the complaint that you hear most from, like, agencies about this process or, you know, the whole thing? Because it- I’m sure that you get people being like, “Ah, I hate this,” or, “This is so annoying,” or like, “Why are they doing this?”

And, “Why can’t we do it this way?”

Smaller agencies They just don’t have, they just don’t have that kind of, like, staff resource. And it’s a complicated thing to be doing. I mean, you know, listeners would not be able to see if I held up the white book that we have. It’s a really thick, like I said, 300-page thing. And that w- that’s not something that a small agency is gonna have the time necessarily to go through and really kind of rework and, and do differently and understand what’s sort of the latest best practice.

So I would say that’s part of it is just honestly just, like, sheer, you know, time, resources from your staff. But then also, you know, I think in fairness, they wanna understand what’s the benefit to me, not just am I just doing this because I think it’s gonna help a bus manufacturer? I mean, yes, they’re partners in a way.

They want bus manufacturers to be healthy and to be ar- around. That’s, that’s good for them. But I think it’s also important to, to sort of stress that there are benefits to the agencies as well, which could be a shorter procurement process. I mean, I think that’s one of our goals with this whole effort is to say this could, you know, if you streamline the procurements, if you streamline the specs, could speed up the procurement process.

That’s good for everybody. I certainly think the agencies are conscious. They do wanna be, like, good stewards of federal funding. Uh, they’re aware there’s not, like, an unlimited supply of it, so if they can reduce the cost of their buses, that’s obviously a benefit, uh, to them. So I, I think that’s part of it is just sort of some of it is just, like, sort of capacity for the agencies.

Some of it is making sure that they understand what’s sort of the real, like, direct benefit to them to making these changes

Yes. Um, one thing to understand about all of them, though, is they all have these little fiefdoms, and everybody has different perceptions and different interests. So you could be the head of an agency, and I know this happened, and you can go to these conferences and say, “Oh, yeah, we need more standardization and less customization.”

But then you go back and you’ll talk to the head of your bus maintenance facility, who’ll say, “Sure, we could do that, but, uh, I don’t know if the brakes are gonna be any good.” Or, “Oh, the supplier for that product, did you know that they make it, like, in our town, and it’s an important manufacturing job creation for our community?”

Or that they have, uh, there are parts that they store on the expressway not too far from here. So then you’re the transit agency and you hear, “Oh, the mayor’s not gonna be happy if I do this,” or, “If there’s an accident, I’m gonna be in trouble,” right? Or, “It’s gonna be harder to get parts.” And you’re gonna go back and say, “Okay, I, I think I’m not gonna overstep the maintenance guy because he knows what he’s doing.

He’s been doing this for 20 or 30 years, and he knows sort of things inside and out.”

And so, you know. Yeah.

Like, uh, you know, there’s a reason why we have stations, obviously. But it would generate more, uh, speed between the stations if there were less of them. So yeah, there’s, it’s funny, like, how that goes back to my comment about NIMBYism. It’s like all these little tiny things, and it all makes sense, obviously.

Like, you wanna make your operators happy. You don’t want grumpy operators. You don’t want your maintenance people to be super grumpy either, and things like that.

So there’s all kinds of different little pressure points, I think, that can make it kind of challenging to make big changes.

The main computer also connects to the computer-aided dispatch automated vehicle location system, which generates and integrates GPS tracking with dispatching software to monitor vehicle locations and track schedule adherence.” Directly from your report. Continue.

A lot of them are proprietary, and they’re not interoperable. And if you’re a bus manufacturer, I mean, you, you can’t imagine, again, but going back to a, a car dealer and telling them what kind of computer systems to put into their car, if it’s the camera systems, right, or the systems that automatically stop, or these audio alerts when you change lanes, right?

There’s all these, like, great safety systems in there. But the transit agencies use different systems. There’s not one system, and they don’t necessarily talk to each other. So they’re expensive, they’re complicated, and once a transit agency has gotten these systems, it’s not easy to change. So they want their entire fleet, let’s say, to have the same maintenance system, so when a bus comes into a bus depot, you can plug it in or wirelessly get the information about all of the different problems and concerns that you have to worry about with the bus, or when it needs new tires, or when it has to get an oil change.

So all of the systems are talking to each other, and if they’re interoperable and proprietary, it’s causing a problem, and it’s just gonna get worse.

And then these standard committees will then look at those recommendations, and then consider whether there should be a standard, and then they’ll bring the right people together, and then they’ll develop the standard.” Um, it takes a little while, huh?

That’s part of what we do. So that is a big challenge, honestly. It really is. And it is something that we are looking at in our standards program. It’s actually not in the area that I focus on myself, so I don’t… Um, but I know it’s something that we’re thinking that we might start tackling under our APTA standards program, is some kind of, you know, unified interface or some kind of standardized whatever it is, uh, that will help all these different pieces of technology integrate better.

It’s easier said than done, to say the least, but I agree that that is something that is a real, it’s a real challenge for, uh, for the agencies to work all that out, to get all these different pieces, and a challenge for the manufacturers to figure out, too, to put all these pieces together and have them all talk to each other.

The manufacturers can respond to it, and then the, the, each of the transit agencies could then buy buses off the contracts that are executed from that RFP. So these are state contracts or state schedules, and federal government now allows an agency to purchase a bus from any state. So if the State of Washington is…

Actually, that’s a really popular place for bus transit agencies to purchase their buses. So a bus agency in Huntsville, Alabama, doesn’t have to issue its own RFP. They could just look at all the information that’s available on one of these state contracts in the State of Washington, and they can purchase the bus off of that.

That’ll help create better standards. It’ll streamline the process. It makes it easier for manufacturers. There’s just, there’s benefits for everybody to encourage people to use the White Book and the state schedule, and to do them together would be really helpful. Another thing is, how do you provide a financial incentive for the agencies to be using the White Book and these state schedules?

And it’s, it’s money. It’s like you’ll get more money if you do it, and you’ll get less money if you don’t do it. And at the end of the day, that’s really what’s gonna make the difference, having different financial incentives. And there’s just, there’s different ways to structure it, and I’m not wedded and, and Eno’s not wedded to a certain thing, but really the idea is, how do you change people’s priorities?

And you do that with federal money.

And so I know that that’s tricky in a way because, you know, you could get certain things happening. There’s always, uh, something that you don’t know about when you’re trying to, you know, put it together, legislation and when you’re trying to do these things. But that was an interesting one to me, which is, you know, putting a cap and saying, “If you wanna spend $600,000, we’ll pay for all the bus,” or, “If you wanna spend 700, you get to spend, you know, you get to pay 100,000 per bus from your own funding, and if you want all these customization things,” et cetera.

So there’s some interesting solutions out there that people are talking about that agencies may or may not like.

That recommendation to me, the issue with it is it’s a little arbitrary, right? You’re, you’re putting on this, this cap without really having an awareness of, you know, l- like the manufacturing industry for transit is gonna be subject to all of the same, like, macro forces that everything is right now, right?

Uh, you know, you’ve got inflation, you’ve got different, uh, types of supply chain challenges. You’ve got tariffs, that of course drives up prices. Any kind of, you know, regulatory things on the transit bus market can drive up the price of the bus. So I will say, yeah, APTA is definitely not in favor of that particular approach.

Uh, again, I think it sort of puts transit buses for some reason at a disadvantage that other types of infrastructure really aren’t at, and again, doesn’t really, it doesn’t reflect whatever might be happening with the overall, like, market and, and prices. What I think does make sense is, and this happened with the FTA’s, you know, the low/no program that they had for zero and low emission buses, which is it, you would get a higher, like you would get some kind of additional credit, s- something to that effect, if you were using the White Book for your spec.

And so it means it, more advantageous for you to use the White Book and, and to, you know, secure certain types of federal funding. Th- that kind of thing. Incentivizing, which is what Phil said, incentivizing use of the White Book, you know, working at that, or the state contracts are also a great pathway forward.

Is my hobby horse, Austin, ’cause I went to the University of Texas and I did my master’s on the history of urban rail financing and projects, and all that stuff, that you can build a subway in Milan for 14 kilometers for the same amount of prices you’re gonna pay for a surface light rail line in Austin for the same cost.

So there’s just, like, a lot of that stuff that’s going around where, w- I mean, I’ve looked up electric buses in China. It’s, like, $200,000 per bus or less, and they’re all electric nowadays. And so, you know, I can’t help but look at other countries and think like, “Oh, I wish we could be closer to that,” ’cause then we could get more buses, we could get more service.

I mean, I just went around canvassing to get SFMTA and the Bay Area transit agencies more money. I’d get signatures so that we could have this on the ballot so we could vote for it. But one of the things is, like, if I’m gonna do that and if I’m gonna go around and ask people to give their signature to me to put something on the ballot that they would vote for to give Muni more money, I want us to also be good stewards of our money as well.

That’s a whole other thing, Muni having a different thing with our own trolley buses and 60-foot buses and 40-foot buses and, and everything else that we have in the report. So, and also my daughter and I take a PCC to school every morning, so, you know, there’s, there’s interesting historical precedence too that kind of pop out at me daily.

I do have one last question for you all. What’s something that you wish people would know about this process that maybe gets overlooked?

And they built thousands of them. They were used all over the world. It was more efficient, and they were faster and more comfortable. Really popular, and you can still see them.

So Congress set aside some money, uh, the equivalent of about $200 million today, to create what they called the Transbus in the early 1970s. This was a nine-year program, and the idea was they’re gonna develop a standard bus, and I think this is just really fascinating to think about. The federal government is creating the standard bus, and a- any transit agency in the country that wants to purchase a bus would purchase the standard bus, and it w- it had all these wonderful goals.

So it was… The… If you had a standard bus, it would promote more competition in the bus industry, not just one or two manufacturers, which was the case at the time. You could lower the cost to build them, and they would design the buses so they were less expensive to operate, easier to maintain, they’d be more reliable, more comfortable.

They would be able to handle wheelchairs, which was a bit, a new thing at the time, and, uh, reduce diesel emissions. So really great idea. And what the federal government did, it, it was the predecessor of the Federal Transit Administration. They awarded three contracts to companies to come up with these designs, and the companies made these prototypes.

And the UMTA, that was the Urban Mass Transit Administration, they announced, “Okay, now we have, uh, one prototype. We’re sort of combining all three.” And three transit agencies got together in 1979, and they issued this RFP for buses. They were gonna buy more than 500 buses, and all of these manufacturers were gonna come and bid on it, and they got zero bids.

So this is a, like a nine or 10-year process to develop a standard bus. They have the design, the transit agencies issue the request, and no manufacturer was interested. And they weren’t interested because they figured it was gonna cost too much to make, and the design, it would be expensive to maintain.

The buses were gonna be less fuel efficient than the ones they had. It would need more parts. It was a lot of experimental components they weren’t really comfortable with. Like, you can imagine if the federal government is designing the brakes and you’re not comfortable with it, you don’t really wanna manufacture it.

So there were all these different issues with it, and the federal government pulled the plug. So nearly a couple hundred million dollars, seven-year or nine-year process to come up with the buses, and then it just didn’t work. And I think there’s just a lot of lessons in there about who should design it, who needs to be at the table.

And one of the wonderful things about, I like about APTA is they have everybody at the table. They’re not, like, sitting on their own trying to come up with these white book standards. They really get everybody there and battling it out what these specs should look like, and bringing the manufacturers to say, “This is what we could build, and this is what we can’t build,” getting the operators to say, “Oh yeah, this is, these are our priorities when it comes to putting a bus together.”

So great story for the 1970s. That’s what I think people should know.

We, the industry, really are working toward creating a better procurement process, but I would want everyone to understand that, again, it’s not, it’s not, like, a magic thing. The panel that we were on before, Phil, where Holly Arnold from the Maryland MTA talked about they had a- adopted, uh, some of the new specifications and, and also I think some of the new contract terms maybe from our white book, and she was…

And it was great. I, I mean, they had a really good experience, but I think, what did she say? They saved, like, 17,000? I think it was something like that, which is great. That’s a great result. But, you know, it’s still a pretty small percentage overall, the bus. So I, I just want everyone to kind of, kind of keep a bigger picture here, uh, you know, of how to improve this process overall, absolutely be good stewards of federal funding, and also good, you know, thinking about what your customers want, thinking about how you’re gonna provide the best service you can provide.

But I don’t know, we wanna avoid sort of magical thinking about it as well, and just sort of… Sometimes it is kind of, like, a step-by-step incremental thing, and we’re making progress, and maybe not as dramatic as people might want it to be, but, uh, you know, it’s happening, and it’ll keep happening.

They’ll fi- any- you name it, it’s over there.