On most mornings the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority can’t muster enough working buses at its Melrose Street garage to cover all of the routes, according to current and former RIPTA bus drivers. So drivers get paid for sitting around in the cafeteria. Mechanics sometimes are forced to cannibalize parts from one disabled bus to keep others running. And, all too often, the buses that do pull out of the garage under their own power end up returning behind a tow truck.
“These buses!” veteran driver Steve Murray railed. “The tail lights are out on buses. The license plate light, the safety equipment, the fire extinguishers, the wheel chalks–you name it, they’re not there or it’s not working. It’s a fiasco.”
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General Manager Beverly Scott said the bus authority does manage to keep up with all of its routes, but she doesn’t dispute the ragged state of her 220-bus fleet
“You look at this fleet and it’s like the luck of the draw,” Scott said, ticking off a list of the different bus models and makes on her manicured fingers. “Let’s just say that is quite not the norm.”
The hodge-podge of aging buses that compose RIPTA’s fleet include a collection of 1985 Volvos that are well past their useful life of about 12 years. However, scores of 1990 buses that should still be on the road by industry standards have been towed a couple of blocks to a fenced parking lot on Niagara Street.
RIPTA bus drivers, who are negotiating a new contract with management, said the unused buses are being stripped for parts.
“They are so short of parts that if a bus has something wrong with it, they park it and take parts off it to fix another bus,” charged one former bus driver who asked not to be identified. “Now the bus lays idle for God only knows how long. It’s ridiculous.”
Scott said the 1990 buses parked tightly on Niagara Street are undergoing various repairs. But she said RIPTA has been forced to cannibalize its 1985 Volvos for spare parts because the manufacturer pulled out of the U.S. bus market long ago. If her mechanics can’t get a part they need from another bus, sometimes they just fabricate it themselves.
But there are problems with the authority’s newest buses too.
Six 30-footers RIPTA bought last year have been parked in the garage for months.
“They aren’t fit for the road,” the former bus driver said. “If they go over 40 miles per hour, the back end vibrates so bad that they aren’t safe.”
The authority hasn’t officially accepted the buses from the manufacturer, Nova Bus Corp. of Toronto., because of mechanical problems, said RIPTA spokesman Lee Beliveau.
RIPTA is suing another of its vendors over defects in the engines of its 1992 buses, Scott said.
A group of 50 new buses began plying Rhode Island’s streets last year, and RIPTA expects to add nearly 40 additional buses to its fleet–at a sticker price of roughly $300,000 each–over the course of about a year and a half.
Don’t look for them in Kennedy Plaza anytime soon, though. Bus makers have been working off a two-year backlog of orders caused, in part, by a shortage of domestic steel, which is required under federal “Buy American” rules.
In the meantime, RIPTA will try to squeeze more miles out of the buses it has. One of the most telling indicators of the condition of that fleet is a benchmark transit statistic called mean distance between failures.
Scott said RIPTA’s mean distance between failure rate is hovering at about 2,400 miles, which is to say the average RIPTA bus logs about 2,400 miles of service before breaking down on its route. That’s much better than it was when she took over as general manager in 1996, but it’s still far short of the industry standard of at least 4,000 miles.
“That’s one of my throbs I get,” she said.
RIPTA’s board of directors feels the pang too.
“I’m most concerned about things like mean distance between failures,” said William Ankner, director of the state Department of Transportation and a RIPTA board member, “so that we don’t have people stranded on buses on Route 4 or I-95 as they wait for a backup to come.”
CT Transit General Manager Dave Lee said his system’s buses logged about 3,900 miles of service in the Connecticut cities of Hartford, New Haven and Stamford between mechanical failures as of last month. That’s up from 3,700 miles at the same time last year, he said.
Ankner said the board isn’t setting any deadlines, but it expects Scott to budge RIPTA’s mean distance between failures up to the industry average for similar systems.
Meanwhile, when a bus does break down on the road, the driver often uses a wireless telephone to call for help because RIPTA’s antiquated radio system is in even worse shape than its buses, driver Murray said.
In its 47-page audit report issued in October, the state auditor general’s office noted that 92 of the 213 buses available for service on Feb. 17, 1999, did not have working radios. RIPTA officials complain that they can’t find parts for the 17-year-old radio system because they are no longer manufactured.
Because the authority can’t afford to spring for a new radio system, RIPTA has been handing out mobile telephones to drivers assigned to buses that don’t have working radios.
