San Francisco Muni bus for sale in Sacramento, and it could be yours for $8K
A San Francisco Muni bus has popped up on Facebook Marketplace in Sacramento, meaning some lucky buyer could add this public transit icon to their private fleet.
The 2007 electric hybrid bus — with no passenger seats and an asking price of $7,997 — has had its San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency insignia stripped from the outside. However, bus buffs will note the red striping on pale gray, the original Muni 1912 color scheme and the main color scheme for the past 30 years. A less-informed bus buyer could refer to the Muni logo on the interior and the sign telling passengers to hold onto the strap and visit SFMTA’s website or call 311 for information anytime.
First reported by SFist, the bus was listed six weeks ago and supposedly still runs, though it “might need new batteries or a jump start.” In photographs on Facebook, it has two mattresses propped up inside in lieu of passenger seats. A photograph of the odometer shows 41,608 miles.
In the model year of the bus, the Federal Transit Administration at the U.S. Department of Transportation put out a report that said Muni “uses 12 years as (the) economic useful life of buses,” but that “Muni’s buses are often in service for up to 16 years.” In 2017, when the bus was 10, Muni’s bus fleet plan said that buses reached “middle age” between 5 to 7.
The bus, like the federal report, is now 18 years old. Based on some back-of-the-napkin math, it seems implausible that a hardworking bus could have been on the road for more than a decade and only traveled 41,608 miles.
Did the bus retire early? Unclear.
The mattresses and the lack of passenger seats suggest the bus has been used for non-traditional pursuits, but The Sacramento Bee has no specific answers because the Facebook Marketplace seller did not immediately respond to a request for the bus’s backstory.
Still, some biographical information can be gleaned from other sources. The San Francisco Examiner reported that Muni sends its retired buses to a special yard where some are scrapped for parts and some are resuscitated and reassigned. A second life for these vehicles could span from “mobile shower bus” to “airport shuttle” to “mass casualty event bus on standby in case of horrifying emergency.” On very rare occasions, the Examiner reported, vehicles may go on to join a fleet in South America. Muni sells other buses — including, perhaps, the one now on Facebook Marketplace — to hobbyists.
This bus, about 30 feet long, likely climbed some of San Francisco’s toughest streets as part of a specialized smaller fleet. Muni says that these “pint-sized coaches ensure access to transit in neighborhoods where standard-length buses cannot go.” The agency acquired a new fleet of Orions — like the expat now in Sacramento — in 2007, and began to phase out that fleet in 2022.
Although it’s permanently out of service, an interested buyer still has a chance to catch this bus.
