NovaBUS LFS 107

Location: Tower Road and East Avenue, Ithaca, NY
Operator of Vehicle: Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit
Date of Photo: April 16, 2007

Last month, the first four of eleven new Gillig Advantage buses for Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit (TCAT) arrived in Ithaca.  These buses will be replacing all of TCAT’s remaining NovaBUS LFS buses (such as the one in this photo) and some of the New Flyer D40LF buses as well.  Like Orion I 914, which was featured as the bus photo of the month in February 2016, the NovaBus LFSs are now about as old as many of their passengers.  These buses were delivered in 2001, so a Cornell freshman is about as old as the bus he or she might be riding to class.  Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many of them might be aware of that fact?

The NovaBUS LFSs were the first 40 foot buses in the TCAT fleet.  This made them outliers initially, but that is no longer the case.  As the fleet has been renewed over the years, ordering 40 foot buses has become the norm for TCAT and now nearly every bus in the fleet is a 40 footer.  These buses also operated for about half of their service lives before and about half of their service lives after the implementation of a major route restructuring that took effect in 2010.  

For more photos of TCAT’s NovaBUS LFS buses, please click here.