The price of Buses

The New Hybrid Flyer

Standard New Flyer heavy transit buses cost $250,000 (30-50 people). Articulated buses about double, but can carry 150. LRT cars are 8 times the bus price and carry 250. LRT cars last twice as long. (This estimate of relative costs is very approximate)

Some published snippets about bus prices.

PHILADELPHIA – September 27, 2007 – At its regular monthly meeting the SEPTA Board today approved the purchase of 400 new diesel-electric hybrid 40-foot low floor buses from New Flyer of America, Inc. for a contract price of $212,387,236.00.


General Manager Fernandez said Wednesday before the board vote that the $547,739 per [60-foot buses] bus proposed purchase price for the 19 Van Hools is “fair and reasonable,” and rejected assertions that comparable buses by other manufacturers could be purchased for a cheaper price. In addition, Fernandez said that if Van Hool eventually won the contract after competitive bidding, it is likely that inflation over the time of the extended bidding and contract award process would drive up Van Hool’s price.

The hybrids (non-articulated?) cost $645,000 each – approximately $200,000 more than a new diesel bus.

More later on this.

Traffic and transit protocols

In world of transit automation, knowledge of all objects along the transit corridor are broadcast and known by digital wireless devices, including the general public. In software we talk about protocols, what do the words of software mean that pass over the corridor wireless net?

I claim here that knowledge of objects is fundamental to participants in the digitally controlled region. Reported object locations should be sit directly upon the transport layer. In Internet world, the TCP and UDP layer holds object location messages. This sort of precludes the idea of XML or other web protocols carrying the vital information.

This idea also requires local object processing of local images. The camera, processor, and wireless link are embedded into a single unit. Its output are object descriptors and locations every where it looks.

Wireless security and authorization are important, and should be buried in the link layer.

With a low level, simple, location code, the cost of applying one to an existing car, like a radio beeper, offers great simplification at low cost. Humans driving through the robotic zone will beep the what they are, and hopefully where. This helps the automated traffic to stay on equilibrium.

The idea here is (KISS) Keep It Simple Stupid. We need to simplify the setting up of camera units and wireless beepers.

I am currently looking at DSRC, from the Intelligent Transportation Society. Reading the research reports and looking at the organizations, DSRC is certainly the main standard. It is in "beta" test at the Michigan Speedway, supported by DOT, etc. But if it not yet available, go ahead and use commercial wireless ethernet. They come from the same technology base and both will likely be in play. One wireless communications unit will be in the $100 range in quantity.

It is still embedded visible object identification which is the constraining technology.

Obama wants citizens to save more

According to this CNN story. (HT to Steve Horwitz).

If Obama wants us to save then Obama should talk to Ben about raising the short term rates, otherwise Obama is ripping off workers with this pitch. But then, as Steve points, raising short term rates puts the whole Paradox of Thrift argument down the drain.

Is this a case of Larry Summers or Chris Romer being unable to reach Obama about the contradiction he implies, or is this a case of the economic team finally capitulating and preparing for a Fed rate hike? Has Ben forewarned these folks about a impending rate hike before we know about it?

ISM Index

From Scott Grannis:

"The Institute for Supply Management's service-sector releases for June showed substantial improvement, as seen in these charts. Both the general indicator as well as the prices paid index have risen to levels that are consistent with the end of a recession."

So far so good. The ISM Index is still tracking oil prices, but somewhat less so. The key to ending the recession is to remove the inelasticity of oil. I also noted the sudden jump in yield across the curve in one day, yesterday. We are seeing nominal growth in GDP, but dominated by inflation.

The thing to watch is oil inventories, so let's check the DOE report:

"U.S. commercial crude oil inventories (excluding those in the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve) decreased by 0.4 million barrels from the previous week. At
343.4 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are above the upper boundary
of the average range for this time of year. "

We want oil inventories to be decorrelated from the ten year yield. More precisely, we want it decorrelated by design, not by default.

Computer Vision is coming

Computer vidio is still lagging for semi-automated traffic control. The technology is there, the traffic systems market focus is not. I think I can solve that problem with some well timed phone calls.

Check the investment list, the newest entries will mostly be concerned with vendors who solve the vision problem.

The Oakland Airport Connector, and RapidBART

I concern myself with the better BRT based proposal to connect Oakland Ca airport with the Bay Area Rapid Transit, BART.

First, I think there is every reason that the currently proposed elevated guideway for a people mover will crash and die. The main reason being that the technology community in Silicon Valley will unite in opposition to the proposal, and in favor of a proposal like RapidBART from Transform. Transform is a local transit monitoring NGO in the Oakland area and they have watched the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) for years. There website here.

This post will be updated as I evaluate the RapidBART, but for now, I am going to propose that RapidBART take the meridian strip of Hegenberger Road, and possibly one additional lane for dedicated BRT. I would include the best of breed technology such as computer vision based detection of buses and traffic, automatic lane guidance, and central traffic management along the dedicated route.

Automatic lane guidance should get a BRT system an additional lane by narrowing the corridor. Central traffic control allows bi-directional travel by all BRT on all dedicated lanes, with turnouts for passing. Consider this research from the Mineta Research Institute. Here the authors discuss a single dedicated lane BRT system in which left turn lanes are taken from traffic temporarily so that one BRT may idle and allow an opposing BRT to pass. This scheme allows two way BRT traffic on a single lane taken from the street meridian. The concept requires more sophisticated traffic software than a simple Bus Priority Signaling system. However, the more sophisticated traffic control allows BRT to effectively use two lanes, one lane or even three in various configurations with directional flow being altered by control.

Central traffic control in turn requires distributed collection of traffic conditions, including location of automobiles as well as buses. Hence the need for computer vision based traffic detection, as I always talk about. Computer analysis of the traffic scene will be the norm starting in the next year or so, and computer detection of obstructing vehicles and pedestrians will be the norm for all semi-automated BRT. All semi-automated BRT will have pedestrian detect and avoidance. Computer vision requires aggregation of both stationary and mobile cameras. Each camera scene analyzed to detect traffic units and create a uniform model of current vehicles, buses and pedestrians, available to all BRT systems.

And a note on BRT configurations. BRT with lane assist will generally be two, three and even high multi-car configurations. They will use electric control and be managed from either end, so they are bidirectional. Being bidirectional greatly simplifies the construction of ed terminals, and with no additional cost allow shorten local routes within the automated traffic corridor. I believe bidirectional BRT configurations will be the norm within a year or two.

The system I describe requires a bus manager, not a driver. The driver is not nearly able to take digital commands and execute them, and certainly the automatic lane guidance is far more accurate than the human driver can handle. But BRT speeds of up to 70 MPH and higher are indeed possible on a semi-automated BRT.

Bus Priority Signalling

Much of the gains in traffic relief we will see in the coming years comes from signal assist, automatic lane guidance. This post is bout signal assist for buses and BRT. It will take a few updates to fill in the references, but the basic price point for adding signal control is about $20,000 at the low end. Thee has been a lot of studies, and I have read the most important ones. Over the ext day or so, I will fill in the key quotes and hopefully reference the important research on the topic.

The following abstract from Chattanooga, TE is typical:

"The Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA) installed a new transit signal priority system to improve on-time performance for buses operating in a heavy retail area of Hamilton Place. Instead of increasing their fleet size and adding more buses to compensate for increased traffic delay, the city installed a traffic signal priority system for $250,000. Twenty-seven agency buses were equipped with transit signal priority transmitters, and 10 intersections on Gunbarrel and Shallowford roads and near the mall were equipped with receivers. The transmitter aboard the bus automatically transmits a signal to the receiver. If the traffic control light is about to change to red, the green time is extended 10 to 15 seconds to allow the bus to pass. Overall, the system was expected to improve operational efficiency and have minimal impacts on other traffic."

The parameter to watch is cost per intersection, at $25,000 this implementation is still on the low side.


NYC had a trial on Staten Island to cut transit time. They call it Transist Signal Priority:

"TSP technology was installed aboard 300 New York City Transit buses on Staten Island and at 14 intersections along the critical 2.3-mile Victory Boulevard/Bay Street corridor to and from the ferry terminal in St. George. The system operates in the ferry-terminal bound direction during the morning rush-hour period and outbound during the evening rush period, and is used by 19 bus lines and 49,000 daily passengers."

Their cost per intersection was a little high, but they installed more technology on the 300 buses used in the trial. In a moment I can get into the various choices transit authorities make regarding bus installed technology.

The best overall review of Transit Signal Priority comes from England in this online report. This report discusses the technologies of TSP, as well as other aspects. My position, right now, is that vision based traffic and bus detections will become the norm. I like this technology because vehicle detection by computer visions makes the entire traffic corridor available to all vehicles and to control, uniformly.

Stay tuned.

This robot on U Tube, just too weird

See it here.

tutor2U must include negative multipliers

In this post they talk about multipliers from government spending.

"If the $10bn increase [in government spending] caused total United States economic output to rise by $5bn, the multiplier would be 0.5; if it rose by $15bn, the multiplier would be 1.5."

It can also drop by $5 billion, making the multiplier -.5. There are many, many, many multipliers that have negative value. Norm Mineta's San Jose Light Rail fiasco, for example. Many economists consider this depression to be the result of a negative multipliers, from lil Bush.

Krugman resurrects the dead Economist, again

Let us review Quantum Mechanical economic theory and deflation/inflation.

In QM Theory we deal with the finite length of the productions chain. The finite dimensionality of production is reflected in the monetary yield curve as defined with a finite set of term, estimation periods, on the yield curve. We can only support a small number of term points of the curve.

Deflation is what happens when the economy reduces the length the distribution chains, and the yield curve reduces the number of investment terms. The reduction in rank is greater than required for the underlying technology because our choices are quantized between N and N-1.

Inflation is when the finite terms of investment is greater than can be supported by the underlying technology. We have a greater length of the production chains than is needed, because we are quantized to choose between N and N+1 for queue length.

We use the mathematical concept of a multi-stage queue to model the phenomena. Inversion in the yield curve occur because some inventories have to go to zero if we restructure the inventory queue. The zero bound in inventories causes the yield curve to have a momentary zero in its spectrum, which we see as an inverted yield curve.

The inventory queue is distorted when fat tail effects happen, like right now. The upper part of the yield is inflated the lower part deflated. What happened to demand? We will see new demand rise when the yield curve goes through a complete inversion, the upper part of the curve has to deflate.

All of this theory comes about because humans are at least endowed with a constant desired level of certainty, neither more or less. This endowment results in minimizing the interference of the terms across the yield curve. Investment terms have to be separated and numerated to minimize the interference between certainty bands across the yield.

Demand is there, but we cannot see the new demand because of measurement interference in the inflated part of the yield curve. From a path point of view, the problem is backing down one path so we may take the better path. Deflate to maximize observation, then re-inflate with better observation.

The technology in question is transportation during the larger deflations, transportation is undergoing restructuring and inevitably local and state governments are reluctant and try to continue to inflate. So we have contradictions, like Norma Mineta, the worst traffic planner in history, having a wonderful transportation research group named after him. Like Obama hailing from Chicago with the worst rail freight congestion in the nation, now pushing High Speed Passenger Rail. Finance, Fed and Treasury all trying to restore Humpty Dumpty. These large institutions occupy the fat part of the tail, and their monopoly power is draining as they are the last to capitulate.

What cures the recession is enough deflation such that economic agents can see what is happening, then the agents can choose a better path. Remember, for each "rank" change in the queue, all term points have to readjust, we get economic wide adjustment.

Take Keynes scalar view. Make it a vector. Add minimum variance estimation techniques. Accept a finite dimensionality and constant uncertainty. Add a biological bias toward collective action. Then you have the chain of economic thought from 1920 to 2010. An asymmetric, finite dimensioned, quantum mechanical system.