Shiny, Happy Buses; Take Them Into Town

New buses are coming—with a lot more to offer than just better seats and and that new-bus smell.

Starting next week, CT Transit will start rolling out two kinds of new vehicles in the New Haven area. Some are environmentally-friendly hybrids; others are 60-foot-long “bendy buses” that can carry as many as 120 passengers and will be used to ease crowding on the busiest routes.

Forget the grimy belches of exhaust and the sticky seats of some of the existing buses. These shiny blue vehicles are sleek, with better lighting and lower ramps for the disabled. The hybrids are quieter, too.

The buses start hitting the road Monday. On Wednesday, CT Transit showed off the new vehicles at the agency’s garage on State Street in Hamden.

CT Transit General Manager David Lee and state DOT transit administrator Michael Sanders.
The New Haven area will get 14 of the 40-foot hybrid buses, and a dozen of the super-long vehicles known as “articulated” buses. They call them “bendy buses” in Britain, because an accordion-like midsection lets the bus wrap around a turn.

The bigger buses, which can carry 57 seated riders and as many as 63 standing passengers, will be used first on the busy B, D, J and O routes.

The hybrids, which seat 38 people, will be sprinkled throughout the system. Additional buses are being added in Waterbury and Hartford.

Ridership on the most crowded routes has been growing to the point where it’s imperative to add more service, said David Lee, CT Transit’s general manager (on the left in the picture above). Over the same period, the system has adopted newer buses that are lower to the ground and therefore make them more accessible to anyone with mobility problems—at the expense of seats.

There are two ways to solve the double-barreled problem, Lee said: more buses, or bigger vehicles. The articulated buses are the answer, he said, carrying more passengers but requiring only one driver.

The 60-foot buses cost $619,000 each; the hybrids run $560,000 apiece. A typical diesel bus costs $376,000.

“Even though it costs more to buy the buses, they’re more economical to operate,” Lee said.

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