By Peter Sachs / The Bulletin
Published: August 28. 2007 4:00AM PSTThree of the city's six original large blue buses are parked in a line behind a Public Works building beside Pilot Butte Cemetery. Workers at the cemetery said they haven’t seen anyone touch the buses all summer. A city official said three buses will go back into service next month, when temperatures cool off.
City of Bend Transit Manager Heather Ornelas said three buses are offline for the season because they have weak A/C systems. “Their heating systems aren’t great, either,” she said. “If you have extremes of temperatures, they aren’t comfortable to ride in.”
All six of Bend Area Transit’s large blue buses are out of commission for the time being, parked behind buildings and alongside cinder piles at the city’s Pilot Butte Public Works campus.
Three of the buses are still functional but not running because their air conditioners are not strong enough, Transit Manager Heather Ornelas said. Three others have been junked, and the city has no plans to repair them.
The city bought the six buses last summer from a used bus dealer in Southern California, which had purchased the buses from the Utah Transit Authority. The Utah Transit Authority said the buses had been too unreliable for their routes and had sold them to Transit Sales International for scrap.
“They have weak A/C systems,” Ornelas said of the three that are off-line for the season. “Their heater systems aren’t great, either. So if you have extremes of temperatures, they aren’t comfortable to ride in.”
Ornelas declined to go into the details of the condition of each of the buses because of a pending lawsuit filed by the city against Transit Sales International, the Southern California company that sold Bend the buses.
She expects that three will be back in service by the middle of next month when the weather cools. Two others had their engines fail and a third had a tire blow out that damaged the side of the bus. Ornelas said the city does not have any plans to fix those three.
Even with all six of the blue buses out of service, BAT’s fixed-route service has been running better than ever, Ornelas said, thanks to modified routes and schedules put into place in early July.
A fleet of smaller buses that were previously used for the city’s Dial-A-Ride services have been working the fixed-route system. The city also purchased two new buses this summer with seating for about 20 people. They are about the same size as the old Dial-A-Ride buses.
“I would say our on-time performance is right now in the low 90s,” Ornelas said, compared with about 70 percent on-time performance under the old schedules. She added that since the new schedules went into effect, BAT has not missed a single run. That was happening several times a week under the old schedule, she said. The buses used to run every 30 minutes, but now run every 40 minutes.
“We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting a heck of a lot closer to an operational sweet spot,” Ornelas said.
The city purchased the six used ElDorado Transmark buses for a total of $220,000 last summer to jump-start its fixed-route bus system. But soon after taking delivery of the buses, the city found itself having to do more and heavier maintenance on the buses than it anticipated. In February, the city sued TSI, claiming that the company had defrauded the city and that someone had tampered with the odometers in two of the buses.
Martin Hansen, the Bend attorney representing TSI, has fervently denied any wrongdoing on the part of the company. He has charged that the city’s own maintenance practices are to blame for the breakdowns.
The lawsuit is currently in federal court in Eugene and both sides are in the process of exchanging and reviewing documents. A trial date has not been set.
Ornelas suggested that if the buses had been delivered by TSI as promised, the air conditioners would have been able to handle Bend’s summer heat.
Mayor Bruce Abernethy said it was “frustrating” to him that the air conditioners were keeping the buses parked.
“I don’t know how buses work, but I would have not had thought that would be a factor in keeping them off the road,” he said.
It has been at least a month since any of the big blue buses were used on the fixed route system, several riders and drivers agreed Monday afternoon. But even that was short-lived.
“There was one working, and it was like a month ago,” said Claudia Lopez, 30, who rides the buses daily. She said a few days later, the single large blue bus was out of service again.
Danielle Burger, a groundskeeper at the Pilot Butte Cemetery, said she had never seen anybody come near three of the buses, parked on a gravel strip behind a Public Works building and clearly visible from the cemetery, since she started working at the cemetery at the end of May.
“I haven’t seen them move, ever,” Burger said. “I’ve never seen anybody out there touch them, in them, working on them, ever.”
Peter Sachs can be reached at 617-7837 or psachs@bendbulletin.com.
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