During the 26 years that Bob Vos has worked with Capital Transit he has seen about two dozen new buses join the fleet. He’s been around long enough to see many of those retired.
“I’ve seen a lot of new buses come, and I’ve seen a lot of those get old and leave,” Vos told the Empire from behind his desk at the city’s bus barn near Industrial Boulevard in the Mendenhall Valley.
Until last week, Vos had never seen a new bus arrive with a paint job other than Capital Transit’s signature white with blue and gold streaks. But the city’s newest four buses, which only just arrived and haven’t yet entered service, are sporting a new look.
The new buses haven’t abandoned the white, blue and gold color scheme, but they have ditched the old striping pattern, which hadn’t been updated in at least 30 years, for a sleeker edgy new look.
“We’re trying to give Capital Transit a new face,” Transit Supervisor Ed Foster said, adding the new buses will be in service by December.
That new face also includes a new logo — a stylized blue and gold design depicting downtown Juneau set against tall mountains. The bus service’s face-lift didn’t come cheap, but federal Department of Transportation grants covered most of the costs.
“There’s about $1.5 million sitting there,” Foster said Wednesday afternoon, pointing at the city’s four new buses lined up in the bus barn parking lot.
Each of the new buses cost $385,000. That’s about $60,000 more than the median home price in Juneau, according to Zillow.com. The city only paid about one-tenth — or $150,000 — of the total cost.
Foster said the other 14 buses in the fleet will get new logo decals. The only buses that might be repainted to match the four new ones are the five buses the city purchased in 2010.
Per its contract with Gillig, the California-based company that manufactured the four new buses, the city will replace three more buses next year and an additional four buses the following year, Foster said.
Typically, the life cycle of a city bus ends at 12 years or 500,000 miles, whichever comes first. Juneau runs its buses quite a bit longer.
The four buses that are being replaced were added to the fleet almost 16 years ago, and each has about 630,000 miles on it.
“Juneau’s not easy on any vehicles — rust, corrosion — and we’re no exception,” said Vos, the city’s transit maintenance supervisor who used to work as a bus mechanic. “You can’t run ‘em until they have nothing left. They have to safely haul passengers.”
The city’s oldest four buses will continue running until late November or early December, Vos and Foster said. It will take a few months to train bus drivers and mechanics to handle the new ones.
Other than the new paint job, Foster said it’s unlikely that passengers will notice any changes in the buses. They’ll still feel roughly the same as before. For the mechanics who work on them, it’s a whole different story.
Capital Transit mechanics have had to rebuild the engines of each of the four outgoing buses at least once during their long lives, and at roughly $10,000 a rebuild, that’s not an inexpensive procedure, Vos said. Mechanics have also had to replace the floors in at least two of those buses, which is time and labor intensive.
The floors of the old buses are made of wood, which eventually rots in Juneau’s perpetually wet climate. Replacing the floors usually take mechanics up to a month or two to complete. They won’t have to worry about this with the four newest buses, Vos said.
They feature composite flooring, which isn’t supposed to rot in the presence of moisture like wood does. Replacing the floors of the old buses cost upward of $15,000, according to Vos.
“Theoretically, maintenance costs should drop now,” Foster said, but it has been almost seven years since the last time the city bought new buses. He didn’t remember whether that was the case last time, and data corroborating this claim weren’t readily available.
As for the four buses soon to be retired, Foster said they will likely be surplused and sold to the highest bidder. Moving to a nice retirement community in warm sunny Florida is likely out of the question for these buses.
“As far as we know, there could be another community that wants to use these still,” Foster said.
• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
One of four new buses, left, sits next to an older bus with over 600,000 miles on it.
Capital Transit has received four new buses with a new paint and branding design. The buses are to enter daily use by December.
