TomNelligan wrote:For what it's worth, new city transit buses are always delivered from the builder to their destination on their own wheels.
Ditto for school buses. Often there are actually two sets of trips involved: from the builder to the regional dealer/distributor, and from the dealer/distributor to the customer.
To give a local example: Blue Bird Corporation drives its new school and transit buses from Fort Valley, Georgia, to O'Connor Blue Bird in Portland, Maine. O'Connor does the final prep work (installation of aftermarket accessories, that sort of thing) and then drives the buses to their final destination. In many cases this might be as far away as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, or Connecticut, since O'Connor's territory covers almost all of New England.
The same scenario happens with Thomas Built Buses: they're driven from the plant in High Point, North Carolina, to W.C. Cressey & Son in Kennebunk, Maine. Cressey does their thing and then delivers them to the customer, who could be as far away as northern Vermont.
It does seem awfully inefficient, but as Mr. Nelligan points out, we can assume that they've looked at this from every angle and found there's no better way to do it.