Vehicles
In 2005, Halifax Regional Municipality purchased twenty new buses from New Flyer Industries of Winnipeg, Manitoba. It was assumed at the time that HRM would purchase New Flyer's D40i Invero model, which New Flyer was marketing towards BRT services, however HRM resisted and ordered 20 model D40LF instead, and were given fleet numbers 600 - 619. The D40LF was the current bus of choice for Metro Transit's regular fleet, so they opted to keep the status quo.
These twenty buses feature a new livery on the outside, air conditioning on the inside (a first for Metro Transit), bike racks, carpeting on the walls and ceiling to reduce road noise and vibrations, and larger plush high-back reclining chairs with arm and leg rests and custom designed fabric design. Also differing these buses from the rest of the Metro Transit fleet are onboard transmitters for the 3M Opticom system. Opticom is the system in place in HRM used by fire services and MetroLink, to allow emergency and transit vehicles to hold green lights and prevent them from turning red until the vehicle has got through the intersection. The system is also used to trigger transit priority signals at certain intersections, allowing MetroLink buses to move into the intersection using special bus-only lanes before the rest of the vehicles can proceed. This allows MetroLink buses at a red light to "jump" ahead of waiting cars.
Read more about this topic: Metro Link (Halifax)
Famous quotes containing the word vehicles:
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)