Bus spotting is the interest and activity of watching, photographing and tracking buses throughout their working service lives within bus companies. A person who engages in these activities is known as a bus spotter, bus fan, bus nut (colloquial British English) or bus enthusiast.
There are many enthusiasts of the bus and coach industry across the globe. Like train and aircraft spotters, bus spotters activities include monitoring bus route allocations, sharing knowledge about buses and taking pictures of buses. Some may be so keen that they might track a vehicle through its life, knowing for example which fleet numbers it has carried with different owners and when mechanical parts or interior fittings were renewed.
Since bus spotting involves urban mass transit, it often goes hand in hand with metrophily. Such enthusiasts can be known as "transit fans".
There are a number of magazines aimed at bus enthusiasts and spotters, e.g. Buses Magazine.
Preservation of buses
See also: Bus preservation in the United Kingdom
Some bus spotters may list or trace the whereabouts of surviving retired vehicles from a particular operator to purchase them for preservation purposes. The preserved buses can then be taken out to be driven either on discontinued services or through a set route for an event.4
Gallery
See also
- Buses portal
References
Nathan Belofsky (3 August 2010). The Book of Strange and Curious Legal Oddities: Pizza Police, Illicit Fishbowls, and Other Anomalies of the Law That Make Us All Unsuspecting Criminals. Penguin Publishing Group. p. 97. ISBN 978-1-101-18896-5. 978-1-101-18896-5 ↩
McCarthy, James (4 July 2015). "Forget selfies and One Direction, this teenager is a bus spotter". WalesOnline. Retrieved 30 August 2017. http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/forget-selfies-listening-one-direction-9586170 ↩
Hermann H. Field; Hermann Field; Kate Field (2002). Trapped in the Cold War: The Ordeal of an American Family. Stanford University Press. p. 275. ISBN 978-0-8047-4431-7. 978-0-8047-4431-7 ↩
McLean, David (8 September 2021). "Vintage Edinburgh buses will be appearing on city streets this weekend". edinburghlive. Retrieved 26 September 2021. https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/vintage-edinburgh-buses-appearing-city-21519116 ↩