New Flyer D60HF 5519
Location: Lexington Avenue at East 75th Street, New York, NY
Operator of Vehicle: MTA New York City Transit
Date of Photo: April 25, 2012
I’ve spilled some digital ink on the retirement of various New York City Subway cars and the venerable RTS buses, but other buses in New York City that have distinctions of their own have been retired in the time I was redesigning the New York City section of this website. This post will profile one of them, the New Flyer D60HF, the first articulated bus to operate in the Big Apple.
The first D60HF buses arrived in 1996 and debuted in The Bronx on the Bx1 route. In late 1999, they were introduced to Manhattan on the M79 and M86 routes. Ultimately, New York City Transit (and the MTA Bus Company) would order and operate several hundred D60HF buses. For most of their careers, they operated in The Bronx and Manhattan. They also made some appearances on routes in Queens and Brooklyn towards the end of their careers in New York.
In addition to being the first articulated buses in New York and the only high floor articulated bus model ever ordered by NYCT, the D60HF was one of the first bus models in New York to be built with a front door wheelchair lift, and was the bus type that was used when the first Select Bus Service route, the Bx12, was launched in 2008.
As a busfan, I enjoy getting to ride articulated buses, and I really enjoyed sitting in the pair of seats in the D60HF’s articulated joint. However, commuters were not always as excited by the sight of articulated buses on their routes. When converting a route from standard buses to articulated buses, the MTA often reduces the frequency of the buses slightly since each articulated bus can carry more people than a standard 40 foot bus.
Although the D60HF made its last revenue trip on March 31, 2019, articulated buses remain a significant part of New York City’s bus fleet. They operate in four of the five boroughs, and while some of the articulated buses in the current fleet were built by NovaBUS, New Flyer’s articulated Xcelsior model has replaced some of their D60HF predecessors.
For more photos of NYCT’s New Flyer D60HF Buses, please click here.