1-Month Test of Double-Decker : San Diego Transit Bus Acquires British Accent

Beginning Sunday, there will be a wee bit of Britain on the streets of San Diego. San Diego Transit will begin a one-month experiment with a yellow English-made double-decker bus.

The first use will be on the run from Mira Mesa to the stadium for the Chargers game, said transit district spokeswoman Deborah Wetter.

She said Friday that the double-decker bus will be used in November for one day on 27 of the transit district’s 29 routes. Only an infrequent express route connecting San Carlos and downtown, and Route 2, which stops at Lindbergh Field, will not be visited by the double-decker.

Wetter said the British bus “would have been a natural” for the Lindbergh Field run, “but it’s so tall (14 feet, 2 inches), it would have taken out the West Terminal overhang.” Leyland Bus of the United Kingdom is providing the bus free to San Diego Transit for the one-month experiment in hope that the company will decide to purchase double-deckers.

Similar marketing experiments are ongoing or planned soon in the California cities of Palm Springs, Santa Clara, Oakland and Long Beach, and in Portland, Ore. There is no transit company in the United States using double-deckers, although they are common throughout much of the rest of the world.

During the test period, riders will be asked to fill out opinion surveys. And 12 transit district drivers specially trained to operate the buses--which have different transmissions and braking systems from U.S. buses--will be asked at the end of the month about their drawbacks and advantages.

Wetter said there are “several real advantages we can see with the double-decker buses. They get better gas mileage (four to five miles per gallon), they are 34 feet long as opposed to 60 feet (for the German-made accordion style buses in service here), and downtown, with every inch of curb space at a minimum, that’s a big plus. And, in a city where tourism is so important, the views from the windows up top would be a tremendous promotion for the transit company and might be a boost for our ridership.”

There are some disadvantages to the British buses as well, however, which would have to be ironed out before they could be used in this country. Wetter said double-deckers are not equipped with wheelchair lifts, “and it’s against regulations for an American transit company to buy a bus without them. And the dashboard configuration is not to our standards either, and would have to be changed if we decided to buy them.”