Motor Coach Mania

Scott Richards didn’t stop taking the bus to school when he got his driver’s license at 16. He just started driving one, a 35-foot 1966 General Motors Transit Diesel Hydraulic he’d restored a month before. At 18, Richards owned six full-sized transit buses. Today, the 36-year-old’s Riverside lot holds a 29-bus collection spanning most of L.A. transit bus history from the late 1940s to the early 1990s. “I’ve never had a thing for cars,” he says. “Even as a kid, I would ride to L.A., look at all the buses and hop back on the bus to Riverside.”

Fellow collector Adrian Mandese caught the transit bug while growing up on MTA (originally RTD) buses as he shuttled between school and foster homes. He befriended the drivers, absorbing the history of their vehicles and their routes. When a few youthful tickets kept him from bus-driving professionally, Mandese decided to start collecting. The 29-year old social worker now owns three, all late ‘80s versions of the Flxible Metros that ply L.A.’s streets every day.

Richards drove three years for the Riverside Transit Agency before realizing that his calling was collecting buses, not fares. To support his collection, and himself, Richards rents the buses to film shoots. Wesley Snipes jumped in front of former Riverside Transit Agency bus No. 111, a 1966 General Motors TDH 4519, in “Blade”; former L.A. RTD bus 7728, a 1980 Grumman, has appeared in the film “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo” and in a video for the Wallflowers.

Richards’ favorite is that 1966 GM TDH 4519 he used to ride to school. He admires older buses for their curved, frameless construction and durability. “For me, it’s about 12 tons of aluminum and rivets holding together something that tears through the streets every day,” says Richards. “They’re like Cadillacs.”

And like Cadillacs, they cost. While a bus can auction for less than a grand, new tires run $500 each. Motor coaches average 3 mpg, and as for insurance, don’t ask. Then there’s parking. Facing complaints from the city of Palmdale over just one bus, Mandese recently moved to a house on a 2 1/2- acre Lancaster lot whose mixed-use zoning allows bus storage. Richards and Mandese collect separately (they met through a Web index of bus enthusiasts), but share a preference for transit buses. “Road buses are nice, but there’s no difference. If you get on a Greyhound, they’re all the same,” says Richards. And both find school buses a little down market. “There are transit bus people, and then there are school bus people. I am not one of those,” Mandese jokes.

While Mandese drives a convertible (the plates read “FLXIBLE”), Richards drives his buses even to the store. On weekends, he cruises surface streets to Los Angeles, rarely topping 45 mph. “I’m like a little old lady when I drive,” says Richards. “If I get into a car with someone driving 80 mph, it scares the hell out of me.”

Speaking of speed (or more accurately, “Speed”), could the 1966 GM TDH 5303 in the 1994 action film really have jumped off the freeway from a missing overpass? “It could,” says Richards. “But there wouldn’t be anything left when you were done.”