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There’s some good, and there’s some bad.” Paulette Doolittle rides an RTC bus to work in Las Vegas on Wednesday, July 17, 2019. “It might take a little longer to get where you’re going, but it’s okay. “It’s all right it’s convenient,” Doolittle said.
She carpools to work with friends some days, but if not, this is her commute. Her shift starts at 8 a.m., but Doolittle hopped on a bus near her northwest valley home at 6:25 a.m. She caught the bus at the Bonneville Transit Center en route to her job as a porter at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. Paulette Doolittle boarded the double-decker bus driven by Preciado just after 7 a.m. The bus accelerates forward, on to the next stop. “Do I have any takers for Fashion Show, Wynn, Encore?” Preciado said over the bus intercom on a recent morning. Ridership and revenue have fallen dramatically since September 2015, when ride-share companies legally began operating in Southern Nevada. For the first time since the double-decker buses made their Strip debut in 2005, the RTC started subsidizing the resort corridor route in the most recent fiscal year. The route generated a yearly $6 million profit, which the agency used to subsidize other residential routes. The RTC’s bus route in the resort corridor - from downtown Las Vegas to the south end of the Strip - was one of the only profitable lines in the United States, she said. “There was a time not very long where we were seeing a profit along the Strip, and, in the transit industry, there’s really no such thing as a profit,” said Tina Quigley, chief executive officer of the RTC. The reason: ride-share companies such as Uber and Lyft, which have been siphoning riders who prefer door-to-door service over a public transit bus that makes multiple stops. Preciado estimates the Deuce buses are at 60 percent capacity most days, down from the heyday of 90 percent.
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Her buses haven’t been as full in recent years, though. Victoria Preciado drives an RTC bus in Las Vegas on Wednesday, July 17, 2019.
“I get an office with a view,” Preciado said.
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Preciado drives the RTC’s Downtown Loop, a free shuttle service, on her fifth day of work. She said it’s like “driving a Volkswagen on steroids.”įour days a week she commandeers the Deuce, answering tourists’ questions along the way. They’re formally called the Deuce On The Strip, but Preciado has a different way of describing the mammoth buses. For the past 11 years, Preciado has driven the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada’s iconic two-story buses that traverse the casino-lined roadway. She turned that vision - and spontaneous decision - into a career.
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After only brief discussions with the seller, I made a deal, and headed for Texas to get it and drive it home to Vegas.On the day Victoria Preciado saw double-decker buses roll down Las Vegas Boulevard, she quit her job as a hotel shuttle driver and imagined herself behind the wheel of a new vehicle. Then I found this 1985 Leyland Olympian in Texas. I certainly like the older style busses, but they are not mechanically practical or large enough. I searched online for double decker busses, and they were either too old or too expensive. I considered other types of busses, but only a double decker would work for this idea. From that moment, everything happened, well, like a runaway bus, but in slow motion.
I don’t know exactly where the concept came from, but I do know when: on a peaceful Sunday morning in October, 2016. Finally, we turned it into the art gallery and coffee shop that travels to its customers. (And I became an English bus mechanic by default). Next, we restored it, which involved replacing numerous major parts so it would run properly again. We first had to drive it from El Paso, Texas to Las Vegas. Through it all, this old, dirty, smoking, faded brick of a vehicle transformed into a restored, clean, bright, distinctive bus with a new purpose, although none of the process was easy. It became this unique creation organically rather than by forceful planning. The deep passion behind it, the extreme yet satisfying difficulty in getting it on the right path and keeping it there, and the exciting inspiration it creates through its one-of-a-kind qualities of being a bus, a coffee shop and an art gallery all at once, make Art Bus Coffee the biggest single project of my life. This led to what is now Art Bus Coffee, a concept and a bus that became a very big project designed around making my photography and photo paintings easily available and mobile. I wanted to find a good way to bring art to people so they could experience it in person instead of through a phone screen.
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