New Flyer XDE40 7098

Location: 9th Street, NW at Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC
Operator of Vehicle: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority
Date of Photo: April 11, 2011

Beginning with the launch of its first “MetroExtra” route in 2007, WMATA attempted to brand the new service with specially painted buses.  This branding eventually evolved into what are often referred to as the “MetroLocal” and “MetroExtra” schemes where most of the bus is painted silver with the back portion being painted red for local buses and blue for MetroExtra buses.  However, after about 14 years of the current schemes being in use, Metro is repainting all of the MetroExtra buses into the “standard” red Local scheme.  Instead, passengers will need to rely on the destination sign to identify MetroExtra services.

I suspect some of this stems from the fact that blue MetroExtra buses often wound up on local routes and vice versa, and I mentioned this as a reason I tend to dislike branded bus schemes in a post six years ago.  Frankly, I’m not a huge fan of the current Metrobus paint schemes and hope that when the livery is next updated that it is an improvement over the current one.

For more photos of WMATA New Flyer XDE40 buses, please click here.