New Buses Bring Silence to the Streets

Any New Yorker who has ridden a city bus might be forgiven for believing a banshee is buried under the floorboards. Engines idle at an alarmingly high volume, and acceleration is often accompanied by a symphony of cracks and snaps, the squeals of aging machinery with little eagerness to perform its assigned task.

So the newest addition to New York City’s formidable bus fleet — an experimental turbine hybrid known as the DesignLine — is notable mainly for a feature it does not have: noise.

“Quiet as a tomb,” declared Doreen M. Frasca, an appointee to the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who has taken the bus several times in the last month.

When the DesignLine stops short, or takes off from a light, there is little more than a low groan. An onboard air-conditioner usually drowns out any sound from the engine.

The other day, one block north of Astor Place, James Sollecito sat down behind the wheel and gradually eased the bus onto Fourth Avenue for a 90-minute trip to Washington Heights. The engine hummed softly as its driver peered out from the extra-large Plexiglas windshield, a sheer single pane that resembled an astronaut’s visor writ large.

“I never drove anything that accelerates like this,” Mr. Sollecito, who has driven city buses for 15 years, said approvingly, as the bus glided along the street jerk-free.

Silence, that rare commodity on the city streets, is achieved by throwing out the most basic element of automobile design: internal combustion. Instead of a noisy, piston-based engine, the DesignLine operates on a spinning turbine that recharges a lithium-ion battery, a green energy source more commonly found inside laptop computers. That means fewer moving parts, and fewer ways to create a racket.

Three of the buses are operating in Brooklyn and Manhattan, at a cost of $559,000 each. If the pilot is approved, 87 more will arrive by the end of next year, part of a $60 million contract with DesignLine, a New Zealand-based manufacturer.

The buses have 37 seats inside a brightly lit interior with glowing LED panels. The rear doors open after a slight nudge, and the batteries recharge every time the driver hits the brakes.

“It’s the most advanced vehicle we have,” said Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit.

On the trip to Washington Heights, not every passenger had the same reaction. Valerie Murray, on her way home from Bellevue Hospital Center, boarded near Madison Square Park and made her way to the bus’s elevated rear seats. She quickly returned. “It’s too high,” Ms. Murray said, frowning at the seats, which are closer to the roof than in other city buses.

But is it smoother? “It might be if the road wasn’t this bumpy,” she said. “But it is bumpy, so it’s the same thing exactly.”

Maria Principe, an Upper East Sider, took a seat near the front after boarding just north of 42nd Street, where she had been shopping at Willner Chemists, an upscale pharmacy. “It feels like the air is cleaner, lighter,” she said, glancing around the bus and adjusting the fox-fur lining on her khaki coat. She squinted through her sunglasses. “It’s still noisy, but it’s nice that it’s bright.”

Other riders were immediately struck by the lack of racket. “There’s no hissing back there,” said Darryl Samuel, an employee at the Department of Education who lives on 142nd Street. “There’s usually a lot of engine noise. It’s a lot quieter; it makes me think it’s electric.”

Malachai Williams, a second grader at Public School 171 in East Harlem, put it more bluntly. “This bus is awesome!” he said, plopping into a seat toward the back. “It smells like a bus that takes you to different countries and states.”

Malachai appeared to find the ride smoother, too; he was fast asleep within minutes.

Jay H. Walder, the new chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, helped run the transit system in London, where buses are taken twice as often as the subway. In New York, the reverse is true, but Mr. Walder has vowed to change that. He has plans for dedicated bus lanes, GPS tracking devices and fare cards that can be waved over a sensor, reducing boarding times.

The authority will buy nearly 2,500 new buses between 2010 and 2013, an investment of $1.96 billion. Nine of 10 buses will replace a vehicle older than 12 years. Officials also hope to expand a pilot program on Fordham Road in the Bronx, which lets riders buy their tickets ahead of time and see how many minutes until the next bus arrives. New York City Transit wants to bring that system to six locations, including First and Second Avenues in Manhattan.

While quieter and smoother buses may attract more passengers, some problems could remain out of the authority’s control. It took more than an hour for Carmen Johnson, in town from Georgia, to make her way up Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and across the island to 168th Street and Broadway, the route’s final stop.

“This bus is too long,” Ms. Johnson said as she disembarked. “That’s all I got to say.”