Tag Archives: Grand Canyon National Park Shuttle Buses

Bus Photo of the Month: July 2024

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New Flyer C40LF C-27

Location: Grand Canyon Visitors Center, Grand Canyon Village, Arizona
Operator of Vehicle: Paul Revere Transportation, L.L.C.
Date of Photo: August 20, 2019

If I were to ask you what entity in the United States operated nearly 800 transit vehicles carrying over 26.6 million passengers during 2022, would you think of the National Park Service?  The National Park Service operates transit services for a variety of reasons at many of its facilities across the country, such as to provide mobility to or within a park or for interpretive tours.  These services are provided through a combination of concession contracts, service contracts, or cooperative agreements.

The South Rim Shuttle Service at the Grand Canyon provides transportation to and within one of the most visited NPS units in the entire country.  The fleet of about 30 CNG powered buses is owned by the National Park Service and the actual operation is managed and run by Boston based Paul Revere Transportation, L.L.C. under a contract that currently runs through November 2030.  The South Rim Shuttle Service has been in operation since 1974 and prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, approximately 7.5 million people used the shuttle buses each year.  In 2022, there were over 4.4 million boardings, making it the third busiest “transit system” in the National Park Service’s portfolio.  The NPS transit services carried nearly 46 million passengers in 2019 prior to the pandemic, so like many other transit systems in the United States and around the world, ridership is still recovering from the impact of Covid.  

Have you been on any of the 80-plus transit systems within the National Park Service’s inventory?  If you aren’t sure, you can see the complete list of systems and their characteristics in Appendix D (starting on page 45) of the 2022 NPS National Inventory System List.

For more photos of shuttle buses at the Grand Canyon, please click here.  

Enough Teases, Here’s What’s New and Updated for the Start of 2021!

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Ventura County Railway No. 2
Anyone who knows where I’ve traveled or has visited the site with some frequency over the years may have noticed that the Bus Photo of the Month for January 2021 was from a city that had not been included on Oren’s Transit Page before, and that I’ve been highlighting a number of new website sections over the past few weeks. 

The biggest and most noteworthy additions are the brand new sections for Baltimore, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Austin.  As I noted in a recent post, there was a certain amount of irony to the fact I grew up 40 miles from Baltimore and am an avid Orioles fan, yet the city had not been featured on this site until recently.  Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Austin were destinations that I traveled to in late 2019 and early 2020 before the Covid-19 pandemic, and I am thankful to have had the opportunity to make those trips when I did.  

I also took advantage of some time I had recently to move some photos that had been on the Uncaptioned Photos page for quite awhile and put them in more appropriate places on the website, most notably, the photos of the Pikes Peak Cog Railway now have their own page.  Perhaps you found the new material on your own, but if not, here is the full listing of where new photos were recently added to the site, with new sections highlighted in bold and italics.