Metro showed off a sleek silver-and-red design for its buses Monday, the first tangible step in what officials have promised will be a new era of comfort, speed and reliability for the agency’s notoriously unpredictable bus network.
“It’s really our hope that people who wouldn’t normally take the bus will see this beautiful bus and want to take it,” Metro bus chief Milo Victoria said.
Metro will have 22 of the 60-foot accordion-style buses in service by late August, Victoria said, although planners have not yet determined which routes will see them.
Metro also is starting an effort to improve the bus network’s on-time performance, which until this month officials were unable to measure because of incompatibilities between the GPS system on the buses and the agency’s database.
The transit agency is shuffling employees in its bus department, giving new authority to bus supervisors to manage bus traffic and proposing a dramatic increase in the number of express bus routes in the region.
Victoria said customers should notice a change in service reliability by next summer.
Over the next year, the agency expects to receive 225 new buses — 44 that run on clean natural gas and 181 in a range of sizes that use diesel-electric hybrid technology.
The fleet of new buses will serve as replacements for ones that are nearing the transit agency’s 15-year age limit.
They feature a more aerodynamic design, handhold straps for standing passengers, better heating and cooling systems, vandal-resistant seat cushions and reverse cameras to help operators see behind the buses.
Each of the clean natural gas buses will cost Metro $790,000, compared with $650,000 for new clean-diesel fueled buses, officials said.
Metro decided to invest in compressed natural gas technology early this decade, after extensive research convinced officials that it was the cleanest and most advanced choice available, said Phil Wallace, Metro’s head of bus maintenance.
Metro now has 461 CNG buses, 50 diesel-electric hybrid buses, 117 clean-diesel buses and 898 of the old diesel buses.
