Ed T.

Hand-me-down TTC 7973 heading south on Brown's Line on 123C.

7934 on 50,

TTC Handmedowns

7930 on 37A
7969 and 7922 NIS on Islington Ave
7927 on 110A

Islington station bus lot looking awfully empty and desolate.

TTC  7975 rumbling by on 50 Burnhamthorpe.

Needs black paint in the window area to really hit the CLRV vibe.

7977 cruising on 123B Shorncliffe Sherway in glorious hand-me-down CLRV paint scheme.

It's a long way to Kipling station
It's a long way to go
It's a long way to Kipling station
To the sweetest route I know!
Good bye to ratty Bloor St
Farewell Islington
It's a long long way to Kipling station
But Miway's right there

7926 seen going about its business on 123C.

7976 seen on 111.

Hey, it's 2021. Shouldn't these be in the special sightings thread, or the Orion VII retirements thread?

If someone creates an OMG MORE HAND ME DOWN BUSES Sightings thread, I'm all in for it.

17 hours ago, Orion V said:

I find it strange the OG HEVs are much more reliable than their NG counterparts. What did Orion screwed up in the newer ones? Software?

Iirc, the reason the 1200s are better than 1500/1700s are because they have older more reliable software? Can the same be said about the 1000s?

According to the wiki, almost all of the 1200-1423 buses were rebuilt. The later hybrids were not rebuilt. I would assume that a lot of the difference is right there, and that the later NG HEV buses would retire later than the earlier HEVs if all of them had been through the same maintenance procedures. In other words, an older but rebuilt HEV is better than a newer one that's about ready for a rebuild, but (as has been discovered) not really worth rebuilding.

That would not explain rebuilt OG HEVs outlasting NG HEVs, unless there was a difference in the rebuilt. Perhaps Bus Medic would have some info here.

TTC 3737 seen on 41 Keele. This is the first time I've seen a battery bus on Keele.

They were (and are) frequent on 58 Maple Leaf. I wonder what the chances are of catching a meetup of a couple of different kinds of battery buses, at Keele and Ingram/Gulliver.

Is the wooden bus stop pole holding up the stop sign for eastbound Lonsdale at Russel Hill a remnant of the Hill Coach?

It's almost impossible to get a good google streetview of it. Here's my best attempt.

5 minutes ago, bus_7246 said:

It’s been cleared for some time now. At least a few years

Apologies, I thought I put this in the Misc TTC questions.

I know it's been cleared for years. But I drove by today, and there's plenty of equipment out and driving around, looks like digging up stuff. I didn't get a good look unfortunately. That all is different from the years when.....nothing happened on the site.

Lots of work going on at the site of Lansdowne carhouse.

Has the site finally been cleared for redevelopment?

7045 in presumably earlier days before the numbers by the blue lights, is the feature photograph for a 2020 Spacing blog story.

http://spacing.ca/toronto/2020/10/21/lorinc-the-crowded-bus-problem-during-the-second-wave/

TTC 1000 on 41 KEELE showing that the OG hybrids aren't dead yet

On 9/12/2020 at 11:41 AM, Wayside Observer said:

You betcha.  It’s not just any grease though, it’s the most expensive designer boutique exclusive grease there is.

I rolled through the moneyed paradise on my way to some essential services work I had to do during the peak of the panic in the spring and I saw a construction crew working on a traffic island in the intersection of Speers and Trafalgar right by the Go Train Palace.  On closer inspection, they were planting flowers in the planters at the height of the lockdown.  I was so glad to see that the important things needed to keep society running were being attended to because life in an upscale enclave such as this would cease to exist if the flower beds don’t get attended to.  The light changed and I took off before anybody could see my vulgar, rude Chevrolet and call in a report of someone with inadequate net worth driving through because I’m sure vagrancy is taken as seriously as the decorative planters.

I know it's fun to be grumpy cat and all (like, how many followers does Reasonably Satisfied Cat get?). But I did drive past a pile of these planters along Lakeshore in Oakville, and they all display sponsor signs. So even though the crew may have been city workers, it's not some expense that's being taken away from your Hamilton GO service or anything.

The observation that wealthy and privileged neighbourhoods are nicer is, of course, no news. Even if the municipality is not necessarily paying for more services to them (ha!), residents there have the time and means to beautify areas that otherwise are left as garbage filled weed fields. I'm sitting in front of a privilege garden by Eatonville library right now, in fact.

TTC 8004 seen on....wait for it....900 Airport Express! So it's actually going where it should be going.

Artics in the Branch.

9146 seen westbound at Brown's Line on 501 (L?).

3729 westbound on Lawrence at Culford, signed up as a training bus.

Followed by 8131 so it's not an electic bus convoy.

7909 seen on a branch of 66 Prince Edward yesterday evening.

The bus looked pretty shiny and chipper for a bus retired in 2019 to be retired in 2020 real old and I know someone in the garage who says that it's a real old bus.

13 minutes ago, nfitz said:

Their thinking would be "How would that headline look in the Toronto Star". TTC can short-circuit that entire debate by stating how much extra it would cost to implement micro-transit on a handful of routes. 

That's how you do things politically.

Gary Webster tried that.

15 hours ago, nfitz said:

They want to do this to save money. But TTC already cancels routes when they have so little ridership that this might save money. There's literally nothing to be saved, and implementing microtransit for any of these routes would cost money - not save it.

You are thinking like an intelligent, reasonable transit user. I'm not sure how many politicians, if any, think like that.

Once you convince the public, i.e. voters, that microtransit will save money and is a positive step, whether it actually saves money or not is irrelevant, certainly in the short term. You have "done something" about all those lazy overpaid unionized workers and the buses that are running around empty in city streets. And your voters will vote for you.

That's why TTCriders has to be political. These are all political decisions, not decisions made on rational transit planning grounds.

5 minutes ago, nfitz said:

The only regular routes that comes close are the 99 Arrow and the Downsview Park. I honestly don't see the point for the latter, now they've built the subway station.

One possible response would be "oh well, two small routes, won't change anything, why bother?" Another possible response would be "well, we need to make the criteria wider, so we're sure to replace a bunch of routes. Otherwise we will have constituents phoning our offices saying 'Hey, I saw another empty bus passing by my house, I thought you were getting rid of this waste of money!'."

The government does not necessarily have to be fools to do this kind of thing. There can be other machinations involved that, from their point of view, are very much not foolish. Steve Munro also appears to be quite skeptical as to how this might go.

7 minutes ago, nfitz said:

Complete and utter BS. The criteria was saving money. None of those routes have low enough ridership to save money using microtransit. What would that have to be ... about 5 rides an hour? Those are all in the 15-20 range at a minimum, and some much higher.

TTCriders are far too political for their own good.

Unfortunately "We're saving money and providing the services that taxpayers want and need" is a fine phrase even if the implementation is BS.

Politicians have assured us that contracting out City services is "efficient and cost effective", even when the inside view is that it's a mess with unaccountable contractors doing whatever they want (and residents then complain about "city workers").

This kind of nonsense can happen with the smaller bus routes. Calling out this possibility is not BS on the part of TTCriders.

That's interesting, because when I saw 3729, it was definitely on its own, showing TRAINING BUS as in the pictures above.

3729 was out on Lawrence somewhere west of Keele this afternoon.