Driver2165

Well, it looks like we're going to see some new buses rolling around the Twin Cities soon. According to the article, Metro has an order with New Flyer of Winnipeg (with two of the company's three plants in Minnesota) for 51 buses. 15 of them are high floor articulated buses (just like the double/accordian ones we've already got) and the other 36 are low floor forty-foot, which are not the high-floor forty-foot buses made by Gillig that we've been using for the last twenty years. It's not a completely new bus - we've got something like ten of this style that are the big blue hybrid buses (7100 series), and ten more that they tested in 1994 (I haven't seen one of these in a few years - they were cool but sloooooooooow) but we've never ordered anything like 36 of a tester bus. Maybe we're going a similar direction with agencies in Seattle and Portland, who seem to have low-floor on most of their new buses.. The benefit of low vs high floor (we've had twenty years of Gillig high-floor) is that low floor makes travel faster and is more accessible to the elderly and disabled. The tradeoff is that there are less seats, so on busy routes (which we have here like nothing in Seattle or Portland) more people have to stand. That's not a bad thing in my book, though. Could this be the end of Gillig in Minneapolis? I hope so.