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Re:The Town of Innisfil partners with Uber for transit inste... by kuschku on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @08:50AM (#14041676)
> $270,000 annually for one bus

For comparison, in an average German town, a bus costs annually $80'000, including maintenance and driver. From scratch or rented from a company offering bus services.

Re:The Town of Innisfil partners with Uber for transit inste... by HillaryBriss on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @11:06AM (#14042601)
how does the accounting work out for the driver's health care and retirement pension?

a typical California city must contribute quite a significant sum so that the bus driver can retire at, say, 70% of their highest salary level. (e.g. over the past year, about 20% of Los Angeles's budget went to paying for the retirement of past employees.)

how does Germany do it?

Re:The Town of Innisfil partners with Uber for transit inste... by kuschku on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @12:33PM (#14043332)
The employer pays 9% of the monthly wage directly into the federal pension insurance, 7% directly into the federal health insurance. Roughly 1.5% into unemployment insurance

The rest is handled by the employee.

Pensions are paid by the employees pension insurance, and the federal pension insurance, not by the employer.

Re:The Town of Innisfil partners with Uber for transit inste... by germanier on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @12:55PM (#14043512)
Note that this is different for certain kinds of civil servants (so-called Beamte). A rule-of-thumb for a typical public entity is that about 10% of the budget go to health and pensions of those public servants (but the exact number varies substantially between different entities), with rising numbers.

There was a distant time where some bus drivers were also appointed Beamte but that practice was done away decades ago, so there are only very few such drivers left.