Updated, 4:10 p.m. | Double-decker buses — a fixture of the streetscape in London and other international cities — could be making a comeback in New York City. Officials at New York City Transit said today that the agency was considering bringing back double-decker buses, similar to ones that used to run in the city decades ago.
The officials said the buses could seat as many people as an articulated bus — the double-length buses, each pivoting around a joint in the middle, that are used on some of the city’s busiest routes — while needing less maintenance.
The new double-deckers could run in pilot program on Fifth Avenue. But officials said they had not yet chosen a bus manufacturer and could not say when the pilot would begin. Howard H. Roberts Jr., the transit agency’s president, said at a meeting of the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the transit agency’s parent entity, that double-decker buses were in regular use on Fifth Avenue as recently as the 1970s.
(Several readers have expressed surprise that double-decker buses were used as recently as the 1970s. According to New York City Transit, double-decker buses were the norm on Fifth Avenue for decades, until they stopped being used in the early 1950s. They returned in 1976 when the eight British-made double decker buses went into service again on Fifth Avenue as part of a test program. But the buses did not hold up well, said Charles F. Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit, and were taken off the road after about two years.)
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