Metro began Monday to return 164 buses to regular service but said it could not determine what caused the stalled engines that had prompted the vehicles being taken out of service for inspection.
The buses — composing nearly 10 percent of Metro’s fleet — were removed from service on March 28. Since then, riders have had to make do with a reserve fleet of 80 buses covering those 164 buses’ routes.
“Most buses are cleared for service,” Metro spokesman Richard Jordan said in an email to The Washington Times. “The balance will be back in passenger service later this week.”
On Thursday, Joe Leader, the transit agency’s chief operating officer, said that bus manufacturer New Flyer Industries concluded an inspection and “investigators were unable to define a specific cause” for the engines stalling.
New Flyer representatives said that increasing the engines’ idling rate would prevent future stalling. Mr. Leader wrote that the Canada-based company cleared the vehicles for service after the buses passed several tests mimicking “real-world conditions (without passengers).”
Not everyone is satisfied with the result. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, which represents Metro bus drivers and mechanics, said its members are “very concerned” about the safety issue.
“I think the explanation about the engineering failure has brought up more questions than answers,” said ATU Local 689 spokesman David Stephen, whose group is in contract arbitration with Metro.
Mr. Jordan said that New Flyer will monitor the 164 buses after their release this week.
The inspections were prompted when a Metrobus driving under 10 mph stopped suddenly on March 19. A similar incident on March 28 prompted Metro to pull the buses for inspection.
Mr. Jordan said that Metro responded with an “abundance of caution,” but “a single event is not necessarily cause to pull an entire subfleet of buses.” The transit agency requires at least two incidents within a short time period to prompt inspections, he said.
Mr. Stephen, the union spokesman, said he hoped Metro would work with the union’s elected safety officials when making such decisions.
“Our safety officials have first-hand knowledge of how to operate these buses, and it gives them a unique perspective to identify if it is a systemic problem,” he said.
On Sept. 25, a Metrobus going 60 mph on Interstate 395 in Northern Virginia stalled and had to use the highway barrier to slow down, WAMU Radio reported. Despite bus personnel reporting a safety issue with the bus’s master switch, the fleet remained in operation until a second bus stalled and crashed on Sept. 28 along the P-18 route in Southeast Washington.
Both buses were part of a fleet manufactured by the North American Bus Industries (NABI) in 2014, a company acquired by New Flyer not long after. Metro ultimately took the entire NABI 105-bus fleet off the roads for an inspection. The transit agency found that one bus stalled because it lacked proper signaling for its overheating engine, and the other had an improperly wired master switch.
“It shouldn’t be any more common if your car were to stall,” said Mr. Stephen. “It should be the exception, and not the rule.”
New Flyer did not respond to request for comment.
In the meantime, engine mysteries add to Metro’s struggle to retain ridership. Officials told WTOP Radio in February that Metrobus ridership has been hit hard over the last year by the transit system’s 25-cent fare hike in May, an increase in passenger injuries from bus collisions and a general dissatisfaction in service.
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