I’ve never seen an articulated coach bus before, but apparently such a thing exists. Can you imagine one of these rolling along the Beltway?

Holy cow. Photo by Paul A. Bateson, aka Busman Extraordinaire on flickr.

This bus is called a Prevost H5-60. It was produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and seems to have eventually been discontinued. It must have been a beast to operate and maintain.

But there would be benefits to a monster bus like this. It costs commuter operations like OmniRide a ton to run out-of-service buses back and forth in the reverse-peak direction at rush hour (a process called “deadheading”). High capacity buses would mean they’d have to pay fewer drivers to deadhead, and there would probably be fuel savings to using a smaller number of larger vehicles.

Plus, imagine the branding opportunities. Buses often blend into the background, but people notice unusual things. Buses like this would market themselves in ways that other buses don’t.

There seems to be a bit of an online cult following for the Prevost H5-60 among bus geeks. Another flickr user, MegaMoonLiner, has created a blank template for people to photoshop their own livery design onto an H5-60 frame. Sounds like fun:

Possibly a new low in BeyondDC transit geekery.