Bus Photo of the Month: April 2023

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Oren

Gillig Advantage 8005

Location: Snelling Avenue at University Avenue, St. Paul, MN
Operator of Vehicle: Metro Transit
Date of Photo: April 12, 2017

Six years ago this month, I rode the Metro A Line in Minneapolis and Saint Paul for the first (and to date only) time. There are now two additional BRT routes in the Twin Cities, but this is the first one to have opened. The A Line incorporates some standard features of bus rapid transit in order to provide improved trip times over the local bus service in that same corridor. Most notably, these are priority signaling at intersections, off board fare collection, all door boarding, wider doors, and high profile station designs with level boarding, on demand heating during the winter months, and other features. However, Metro Transit opted not to construct bus lanes in this corridor, saying that they would not significantly improve travel times. Despite the lack of bus lanes, travel times along the A Line have decreased since the line first opened and ridership has increased. Some even call the A Line the best bus route in the entire United States.

Have you been on the A Line? Do you have thoughts about what the best bus route in the United States (or somewhere else) might be? How do you even determine what the best bus route is? Leave a comment below in response to any or all of these questions!

For more photos of Metro Transit buses, please click here.

Rail Photo of the Month: March 2021

Posted on March 1, 2021 by Oren

S70/Avanto LRV 211

Location: Mall of America, Bloomington, MN
Operator of Vehicle: Metro Transit
Date of Photo: April 9, 2017

Advertising wraps on transit vehicles can be controversial among transit enthusiasts. Some argue that they are ugly, make it difficult to see out from inside the vehicle, and there’s already too much advertising on transit properties. Others argue that they change things up and make an otherwise uniform fleet of vehicles have some variety among them. I think some wraps look good, and others I could do without. However, who doesn’t like Pacman? This wrap, advertising a new Minnesota lottery scratch-off game in 2017, features Pacman and the ghosts from the eponymous video games. I certainly think it is an eye catching design since these characters are so well known (who hasn’t heard of Pacman?). The train itself is at the Mall of America station, the southern terminus of the METRO Blue Line, which was renovated in 2019.

Are there any transit advertising wraps that you particularly like or dislike? Share your answer in the comments below!

For more photos of the Metro Transit Light Rail, please click here.

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

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Oren

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.

United States

Just in time for the summer travel season, Winter 2018 photos have been posted!

Posted on May 14, 2018 by Oren

The first part of 2018 here at Oren’s Transit Page headquarters has been busy. The next few months also have some travel planned both to places I’ve been before as well as new ones, but in this post, I wish to let everyone know that new photos from the past few months from a variety of places are now available on this site. You may have noticed some recent photos of the month were from locations that had not been featured on any part of this site before.

I made my first trip to Memphis, Tennessee back in November 2017. Unfortunately, it was before that city’s Main Street Trolley reopened, but I guess that just means I’ll have to go back some day. However, I did get some photos of MATA’s all Gillig bus fleet, which you can find in the new Memphis section on this site.

In January, I spent two weeks in Brazil and Argentina. While I had been to Rio de Janerio back in 2010, I didn’t take any photos of that city’s subway on that trip. That has changed, and there is now a Rio Metro page here on Oren’s Transit Page. There are also additions to the existing Rio bus page. After Rio, I was in Iguazu Falls, where I had also been in 2010, but there are no new photos from here. The following stop was Buenos Aires, marking my first time in that city, and I have plenty of photos from that city. The Buenos Aires Subte (Underground), while small, has a rich history and also has the distinction of serving the southernmost subway station in the world.

You might recognize some of the 6000 Series cars on the Buenos Aires pages from Madrid and that would make sense, as Buenos Aires bought them secondhand from the Spanish capital. The network of buses, known locally as colectivos, is an impressive sight to see as they crisscross the city in just about every imaginable direction. Each colectivo line is operated by a private firm, and each private firm only operates a handful of lines at most. The buses on each route have unique liveries to make identification by waiting passengers easier.

At the end of January, I was in the Boston area for a weekend, and at the start of April I spent a weekend in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

As is often the case, I also added a number of photos from around the DC area. Most of the new photos are additions to pre-existing galleries, but I also finally added photos of Shuttle UM, the campus bus system for the University of Maryland-College Park, and Loundoun County Transit.

Below, you’ll find a complete list of pages with new photos. Enjoy!

Rail Photo of the Month: June 2017

Posted on June 1, 2017 by Oren

S70/Avanto LRV 237

Location: Capitol/Rice Street Station, St. Paul, MN
Operator of Vehicle: Metro Transit
Date of Photo: April 10, 2017

As you may have seen earlier today, Oren’s Transit Page has new photos from my recent trip to Minnesota. Naturally, it seemed appropriate to feature one of them for the June 2017 Rail Photo of the Month. The Twin Cities’ newest light rail line, the Green Line, connects Minneapolis and Saint Paul, providing a rail transit connection between the two cities’ downtowns that had not existed since the streetcar era ended in the early 1950s. Now three years old, the line is quite successful, and has even operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since it opened in 2014, making it one of the only 24/7 rail lines in the United States. As it approaches Downtown Saint Paul, it skirts the Minnesota State Capitol grounds, allowing for the opportunity to get photos of the new light rail with the capitol dome, modeled after the dome at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Can you think of other capitol buildings or famous buildings where this kind of opportunity exists?

For more photos of METRO Transit’s Light Rail vehicles, please click here.

Twin Cities Revisited!

Posted on June 1, 2017 by Oren

When I went to visit Minneapolis and Saint Paul for the first time in 2014, I planned my visit around my favorite baseball team’s schedule as opposed to major events in the area’s public transit network. Had I planned for the latter rather than the former, I would have not visited a mere month and a half before Metro Transit’s Green Line, a light rail line that connects Minneapolis and Saint Paul, opened. This past April, I was back in the Twin Cities for another visit, and needless to say, I made a point of riding the Green Line from end to end. I also got photographs, which you can now find here on Oren’s Transit Page.

This update is almost entirely contained within the Minneapolis-Saint Paul section, with updates to the Metro Transit Light Rail, Metro Transit Buses, Plymouth Metrolink, Minnesota Valley Transit Authority, and SouthWest Transit galleries (for those of you keeping track, that’s every existing page within that section). There are also some new photos of Union Depot on the Amtrak Stations page. Union Depot was restored and Amtrak service returned to this grand train station in downtown Saint Paul in 2014, so while the station was open during my last visit, it is now a multimodal transportation hub and certainly worth a visit if you ever find yourself in the Twin Cities.

As always, time permitting, I look forward to highlighting some of my favorite photos from this update in future Travelogue posts.

Bus Photo of the Month: November 2016

Posted on November 2, 2016 by Oren

Gillig Advantage/HEV 7125

Location: Nicolet Mall at Washington Avenue, Minneapolis, MN
Operator of Vehicle: METRO Transit
Date of Photo: May 1, 2014

No matter where in the world you are, it would be hard to believe that you are not aware of the fact that a presidential election is taking place in the United States next week. In light of this fact, it seemed appropriate to feature a photo from METRO Transit in Minneapolis, which offered free rides on Election Day in 2014 to make it easier for people to get to the polls. I have yet to find word about whether or not METRO Transit is offering that again, though I have been told that free rides are being made available in Houston (a city that Oren’s Transit Page has yet to visit) to access the polls both for early voting and on Election Day itself.

Do you know of other transit systems that offer free rides on Election Day? If so, let others know by posting a comment below this post. Finally, if you are eligible to participate in the US election next Tuesday, please take the time to go to the polls, cast a ballot, and make your voice heard. (If you don’t live in the US, you are encouraged to do the same at the appropriate time for the location in which you live.) Our freedoms, including the right to be able to photograph transit vehicles in public rights of way, depend on our participation in the democratic system.

For more photos of METRO Transit buses, please click here.

New Arrivals

Posted on January 28, 2016 by Oren

Over the course of redesigning Oren’s Transit Page, I was also continuing to travel, take photos, and add them in to the queue to be included in the redesigned website once it launched. Now that the redesigned website is here, keep reading to find out what new material was added in conjunction with the redesign. This isn’t an exhaustive list but rather just the “highlights”, there is plenty of new content scattered around the whole site.

NABI 60-BRT 9574 on Main Street at Aliso Street
Los Angeles, CA
July 11, 2014

Starting off in the United States, I traveled to a number of places for the first time in my life in 2014. I made a Midwest swing in May 2014 that resulted in the creation of sections for Minneapolis-St. Paul (just prior to the Green Line opening) and Kansas City. After that, in July 2014, I did some long distance Amtrak travel (with some flights in between) and visited Los Angeles and San Diego for the first time. Also on this trip were stops in Denver (in time for the soft reopening of Denver’s Union Station), Chicago, and San Francisco. I had passed through Denver before but I had never used or photographed its mass transit prior to that summer. The stops in Chicago and San Francisco were my first in each city since 2007 and were quite brief, but there are new photos in those sections as well, including my first photos of the CTA 5000 Series cars.

The Washington, DC section now includes photos of some of the newer buses to ply the region’s streets, such as WMATA’s New Flyer XDE40 buses and Ride On’s Gillig Advantage/CNG buses. On the rail side of things, there is now a gallery for photos of the new WMATA 7000 Series railcars, manufactured by Kawasaki.

PCC 3263 at Capen Street
Milton, MA
May 2, 2011

I last traveled to Philadelphia in 2012 and was able to get a last round of Silverliner II and Silverliner III photos, in addition to my first Silverliner V photos. I made two trips to Boston, one in 2011 and the other in 2013. On the 2011 trip, I rode the southern end of the Orange Line for the first time, and both trips included a number of trips on the Green Line and Red Line. I also was able to get photos from along the Ashmont-Mattapan High Speed Line right of way and of various MBTA buses, including the trackless trolleys, in Cambridge. Finally, for the first time since Oren’s Transit Page’s initial launch over 15 years ago, there are new photos in the Atlanta section.

There are also new photos from New York City, but due to the immense size of that section, it was decided to leave it “as is” in the old format and add the new photos to the Uncaptioned Photos gallery for now. The New York section will be updated with the new design as soon as possible.

North of the border, there is a new section for photos from Niagara Falls, Ontario. My only trip to South America to date was in 2010 so there isn’t anything new in the Brazil and Argentina sections (while Buenos Aires is on my bucket list, I haven’t found the occasion to get myself down there just yet).

Crossing the ocean to Europe, I visited both Hungary and Portugal for the first time. My stop in Budapest was a layover between flights in 2011 that was measured in hours rather than days, but it was enough time to photograph some of the city’s trams, buses, and trolleybuses and whet my appetite for another trip there that will be longer 13 hours. I spent almost a full week in Lisbon, a city that shares many similarities to San Francisco including the fact that its trams are a tourist attraction in and of themselves, and visited continental Europe’s westernmost bus stop for good measure.

Bombardier Flexity Outlook “Cityrunner” 3069 at Place Royale
Brussels, Belgium
November 21, 2013

In 2008, I unexpectedly found myself with 90 minutes in Brussels due to a missed train connection, which was just enough time to get some transit photos before the next train to my destination came. In 2013, I was in Brussels yet again, this time for a full 8 hours between flights, so that section has seen some additional expansion including a new gallery for photos of the Belgian National Railway.

Finally, in the Middle East, the Israel section has expanded further and to my knowledge, Oren’s Transit Page’s Israel section is the largest of its kind on any English language website. The Jerusalem Light Rail opened to passengers just after I began the long process of overhauling the website, so many photos of revenue service along the length of the entire line are now included on the site. The Metronit bus rapid transit system in the Haifa region opened in 2014, and there are also photos of that. In addition, there are many new photos of the many bus operators that operate throughout the entire length of the country.

I hope you enjoy exploring the site, whether you choose to browse the new sections, old sections, or a mix of both! And if you have a favorite section, let everyone know what it is in the comment section below!

Oren's Transit Page

Tag Archives: Minneapolis-St. Paul