With the new parts and machinery constantly being updated, more time and money have to be spent maintaining buses on the CT Transit lines.The cost of bus maintenance for CT Transit’s New Haven division increased by $3.5 million, or 46 percent, from 1996 to 2012.The maintenance costs have remained between 18 and 23 percent of the total budget, as all CT Transit costs in New Haven have increased during that same time period.The figures come from budget data posted on the National Transit Database, which collects information about all transit districts in the United States.
“Once upon a time the bus was a plain vanilla vehicle that had a diesel engine and old fashioned technology with no other electronics on it,” said CT Transit’s General Manager David Lee. “Today buses have more sophisticated engines, engines that have to comply with environmental requirements.”
Lee said now all buses have electronic controls for diesel particulate filters that are designed to reduce the black smoke seen from most diesel vehicles, which shows the complexity of the vehicles compared to what they used to be.
“The cost to maintain a bus today – even a brand new bus – is partly a reflection of how complicated the technology is and that is also reflected in what you are seeing in the trend,” said Lee.
Michael Volpe, CT Transit’s New Haven maintenance supervisor, said meeting the Environmental Protection Agency’s guidelines and laws is challenging.
“We have more hybrid models now and they are very complex to work with,” Volpe said.
Adding technology is helping to improve the environment, but Volpe said it creates more complex maintenance work for him and his team.
Replacing Old Buses
Another challenge for the maintenance workers is that public agencies are required to go through a competitive bidding process, Lee said. Although it seems as though this would make it a cheaper and easier, complications arise from having buses manufactured by different companies.
CT Transit has to train mechanics to maintain different bus manufacturers and new technologies. CT Transit also needs to have different parts in stock for the several manufacturers they use, which makes it more expensive and harder to maintain than if everything was fairly uniform, according to Lee.
Click play on the video to see a summary of reasons why the bus costs have gone up.
The inspections for the CT Transit buses have become much more rigorous with the buses coming into to get checked every 3,000 miles, said Lee.
Volpe, however, said the buses are being inspected every 1,500 miles in New Haven.
“But put some strings on that such as the useful life of a bus being 12 years,” said Lee. “So, in theory, every bus that you see on the streets is less than 12-years-old. But often buses have had to be kept in service longer.”
Lee said that currently the oldest bus in the fleet, that is just about to be retired, is a 1996 vintage bus. This means it is six years older than the predicted useful life of a bus.
In New Haven CT Transit runs about six buses made in 1996, according to the National Transit Database.
Phil Fry, planning and marketing general manager of CTTransit, said buses that reach 12 years of service are put out to auction for scrap, or sold to other transit districts.
“When a bus reaches its usefulness for our company, it is no longer valuable to us,” said Fry.
The state decides when the bus will be replaced and what town gets the replacement buses, Fry said.
All buses in the United States are purchased with 80 percent federal grants. The state has to come up with the 20 percent match.
“This automatically requires more maintenance,” said Lee. “Spending the most money on old buses and maintaining them because the cost of new buses is not in our budget. Because that’s a capital cost, not an operating cost.”
Matt Stumpo and Carl Jordan Castro contributed reporting to this article.
The CT Bus Diaries project is a collaboration between the New Haven Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel and students from the multimedia journalism class at Southern Connecticut State University. The students are blogging about experiences on CT Transit’s bus lines in order to give a glimpse into the commutes of the people using the bus system.
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Wait, I saw the data is from 2012, not 2014, so the inflation rate is in fact also 46% going by the BLS calculator
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.00&year1=1996&year2=2012