[danpalmer]

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".