VICTORIA – This year, 60 Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) buses have been added to the Victoria Regional Transit System fleet, providing a quieter, greener transit experience and reducing the average fleet age.
Twenty five new medium-duty CNG buses have now been activated in Victoria, joining 35 heavy-duty CNG vehicles that also replaced existing aging buses in February. BC Transit is constantly updating our fleet to provide the most reliable, comfortable service to our customers. While the average conventional fleet age in Victoria prior to this year’s CNG implementation was 12.5 years, it is now 9.8.
CNG buses are part of BC Transit’s Low Carbon Fleet Program to support provincial targets for greenhouse gas emissions and align with the provincial CleanBC plan. The benefits of CNG technology are both environmental and economic, with reductions in tailpipe emissions and operational costs.
FortisBC supplies natural gas for BC Transit’s CNG fleets, while the CNG fueling station, located at the Langford operations and maintenance facility, is maintained by Clean Energy.
Ten of the buses replaced by the latest medium-duty CNG buses were aging Dennis Darts. The Darts have been in service in Victoria for more than 18 years and have logged roughly 14.4 million cumulative kilometres here.
This includes Bus 226, which has been in service since 2002 in various systems and has travelled a total of 985,995 kilometres in that time. This Dennis Dart was donated to the Camosun College Truck and Transport Mechanic Program.
