Bus Photo of the Month: January 2025

NABI 42-BRT CNG F2222

Location: 1st Street at Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA
Operator of Vehicle: Foothill Transit
Date of Photo: March 10, 2022

There are many different transportation providers in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.  While the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, better known as “Metro”, probably comes to mind first for many, there are about 20 other bus systems operating within Los Angeles County.  (Los Angeles County is not coterminous with the City of Los Angeles, there are 87 other incorporated cities within the county).  One of these other transit providers in this portion of southern California is Foothill Transit. 

Foothill Transit operates in 22 of the incorporated cities in Los Angeles County, mostly in the San Gabriel and Pomona valleys in eastern Los Angeles County.  The system’s two bus yards are located in Pomona and Arcadia, while the administrative headquarters are located in West Covina.  The agency has over 350 buses serving 37 routes, though actual operations are carried out by Keolis at the Pomona Yard and by Transdev at the Arcadia Yard. 

The most notable aspect of Foothill Transit’s fleet is how the agency began moving to alternative fuels earlier than most other transit agencies.  Foothill Transit began operating compress natural gas buses, such as the one pictured here, in 2002 and retired its last diesel buses in 2013.  In 2010, Foothill became the first agency to operate an electric bus manufactured by Proterra.  Foothill Transit acquired two electric double decker buses from UK manufacturer Alexander Dennis in 2021.  That same year, Foothill Transit ordered 33 XHE40 hydrogen fuel cell buses from New Flyer; these buses entered service in 2022.

For more photos of Foothill Transit, please click here.  

Some Things Are Worth Waiting For…

Very observant visitors to this site might have noticed two things recently.  First, it has been a very long time (nearly two years in fact) since any announcements of new photos being posted to Oren’s Transit Page have been made.  Second, the January 2023 Bus Photo of the Month came from a city that was not included on Oren’s Transit Page before.  The reasons for this are several fold.  In 2021, travel was slowly resuming and the Oren’s Transit Page Baby (as he was known then) required a level of care that was age-appropriate but one that does not facilitate frequent website updates.  In 2022, travel really took off again, as my travels took me not only up and down the Northeast Corridor but to the Florida panhandle, San Diego, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Israel, and Greece.  As you can imagine, travels that extensive generate lots of photos, which in turn, take time to organize, touch up, caption, and post.  The good news is I’ve made some headway on that front, and I believe any photos I took prior to May 2022 are now online.

The “highlights” from this update in my opinion in “chronological” order are:

The rest of 2022’s photos are still to come, and I’ve already taken one trip within the US in 2023 and I’m sure more are to come, so stay tuned.  The photos from all those travels will be posted.  Eventually.

Here is the full listing of where new photos were added to the site, with new sections highlighted in bold and italics.