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Saw some photos of several ex-WMATA Orion VI's at a private operator in Brooklyn NY - supposedly they will be converted to double-deck tour buses as various other second-hand Gillig, Orion and New Flyer transit buses have been. 

How many do you remember seeing?  Any others you can recall?


http://www.imcdb.org/vehicle_39657-Orion-V-501-1990.html

This one is not a real WMATA bus - you can tell this was filmed in the greater Toronto area (the streetlights are a giveaway) and a note on the website indicates it actually an Oakville Transit Orion V painted in a pseudo Metrobus scheme.   

That is the back of the train and it is going in the correct direction, not being short-turned.

Glad to see that WMATA will continue to field a diverse fleet from a bus fan's perspective.  Hopefully this will lead to some 40-foot O7's as the remaining Orion V's and the VI's come due for replacement. 

Fare enforcement goes hand in hand with a Proof-of-Payment system like the Tide.  The agency is getting more productivity out of its operators since they don't have to collect fares, so a portion of those savings need to be spent on enforcement efforts.  Some systems like Buffalo have a very active enforcement presence and have very few problems as a result.

Perhaps WMATA should come up with a simplified paint scheme that is mostly silver but does have red and blue stripes and/or accents, for use on a handful of buses at each depot on interlined runs and as spares. 

Coney Island and Lower Manhattan would also be susceptible to any significant storm surge.

AM Generals were still operating on WMATA when I visited in 1986.

Does anyone have a list of WMATA buses in the blue Express scheme they can post here? 

Great shots - keep 'em coming!

Yes.  I'm sure WMATA has an online database used by maintenance to track specific vehicles but there is no reason why the public relations department would have access to it.

I understand where you're coming from – as a bus fan, I generally don't photograph many cutaway buses and I'm a big fan of 30-foot 'shorty' versions of standard transit buses.  That said, I can understand why cutaways work for very small transit agencies.  The ride quality may be worse, but the economics are undeniable both from a capital cost and an operating cost point of view (cutaways can get double the mileage of a standard transit bus). 

Some small transit operators have converted part of their fleets to cutaway buses for their least-patronized routes while maintaining larger buses for the busier routes – hopefully that is what Macon is doing here.

30-foot versions of standard transit buses are not much less expensive than full-size buses - for example, Connecticut Transit's 2009 bid prices for 30-foot diesel Gilligs was $352,000 per bus compared to $376,000 for New Flyer 35-foot diesels and $383,000 for 40-footers.   Diesel cutaway buses typically cost between $50,000 and $75,000 each, so they make sense for smaller systems that often carry only a handful of passengers per trip and don't need all that space.

If they are on the BAE Systems website and listed as 'HybriDrive', then these buses would be hybrids, correct?

Someone needs to sit down and decide what the purpose of the Circulator is going to be.  When Circulator was launched, the idea was to have short, frequent routes that would complement the existing bus service.  It now looks like they might be creating a second bus network within DC providing limited stop routes.  My question is why isn't WMATA developing those sorts of routes, which was supposed to be their job as I understand it?  The value of the Circulator goes down in my opinion when you have routes going from Rosslyn to Howard University or from New York Avenue to Alabama Avenue. 

I've been an advocate of bringing the Metrobus system out of the 70s and into the modern day in terms of its route structure.  The latest Circulator proposals should only make that a higher priority IMO.

That was exactly my thought when I read the Post article.  Metrobus is enough of a mess already without having to compete for resources with the District itself. 

Is it time to rethink WMATA?  Should one agency run Metrorail and maybe express commuter buses across the metro area, and have the district and each county run their own bus systems?