Bendy buses to hit streets

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/11/2013 (4592 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The first of Winnipeg Transit’s articulated buses has arrived.

Winnipeg Transit acquired 20 used “bendy” buses from Ottawa’s fleet and swung a deal for New Flyer Industries to refurbish the lot.

The first bus was delivered Friday and will be on city streets Remembrance Day.

“We have the first one, and it’s going on the road Monday for training,” transit authority head Dave Wardrop said Friday. “It won’t be seen in regular service for a few weeks.”

Wardrop said the training period for bus drivers will last two to three weeks. The city will roll out more buses as they are fitted with fare boxes and communications equipment and more drivers are trained to manoeuvre them.

The buses, or stretch buses, are nearly twice the size of the regular transit fleet. They can carry 40 per cent more passengers than a regular bus — most Winnipeg Transit buses seat 38 people while articulated buses seat 54.

Transit Tom has picked the following four routes for the initial passenger runs: routes 36, 54, 58 and 59. They’re high-traffic routes through the Maples and St. Vital areas.

The union for Winnipeg’s 950 bus drivers welcomed the new buses.

“It’s not like driving a semi, but you do have to get some training and my members are guys who are used to operating buses,” Amalgamated Transit Union president Jim Girden said. “They’ve very versatile… it’s not going to be a major issue.”

For all their advantages, the flexible middles in bendy buses have made for a few mishaps and they can be tricky to drive. They struggle uphill when streets are snowbound or slippery.

They’ve been known to jackknife making turns in snowy weather — once in 2008 in Ottawa and once in Halifax after Christmas last year.

Drivers here will want to focus on techniques to manoeuvre them in snow-packed curb lanes.

Transportation expert Barry Prentice said bendy buses are ideal for peak traffic times with heavy passenger loads. Using them for runs to Bombers games at Investors Group Field will put an end to the kind of complaints the city heard this fall about bus lineups, he said.

“They’ll be in high demand for football games,” said Prentice, an associate with the University of Manitoba’s Transport Institute and a professor with the Asper School of Business.

Winnipeg’s wide roads are well-suited to the bendy buses, and passengers will like them better than double-deckers because they’re faster to get on and off, he said.

“I’ve ridden articulated buses in Ottawa, and by and large they’re very good where you have peak load problems, like our Pembina Highway to the university,” he said.

Winnipeg Transit purchased its 60-foot articulated buses from New Flyer Industries at less than 10 per cent of their new cost of $625,000.

The city said it brokered a great deal on the used buses.

“The negotiated purchase price of $53,000 (plus PST) per vehicle included delivery to Winnipeg and approximately $11,500 per bus of refurbishment to be undertaken by New Flyer Industries,” the city’s announcement said.

Winnipeg’s announcement follows one from Toronto, where articulated buses are making a comeback. The first of its 153 new bendy buses will take to heavy transit routes in December. That city tried bendy buses in the 1980s, but when those earlier models started corroding a decade later, Toronto retired most of them.

Montreal rolled out its bendy buses in 2008 and Halifax shortly after that.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca