The fleet figures in this brief were written from the city's 2024 federal filing, and the city's own roster is newer. That roster, released to us on 24 September 2026 under a public records request, lists 30 buses in service, but not the same 30. Seven of the fourteen buses past their replacement age have been taken out of service and marked surplus. Seven new buses went into service, three in November 2025 and four in September 2026. So seven of the 30 buses in service are past their replacement age, not fourteen, which leaves 23 within it. Nine are past the roster's own working life of 12 years. Rush hour needs 19. The city's replacement schedule lists twelve buses ordered between July 2023 and June 2026: the seven new ones and five more due in January 2027. The brief's main finding, in the box below, is unchanged. Unless a passage says otherwise, the fleet figures below are from the 2024 filing.
The city says it needs about four new buses a year. The budget pays for one.
Asheville reported 35 buses for 2024. Five of them are electric buses that were all reported idle in January 2026, which left 30 it could actually put on the road. In that 2024 filing, fourteen of the 30 non-electric buses had passed the replacement age the city set for them. That left 16 within their replacement age, and rush hour needs 19. All fourteen were still running that year. On those figures, rush-hour service could not run without buses past the replacement age the city set. By September 2026, seven of the fourteen had left service. The update above has the September 2026 figures.
Why it matters. The arguments about coverage, frequency, and the proposed redesign all start from the same assumption: 19 buses can leave the garage in the morning. If that number is wrong, those arguments start from the wrong number. Those arguments, priced →
From here on this brief counts 30, not 35. Asheville still owns the five electric buses and still carries them on its books, but they cannot be sent anywhere. They are taken out of the working fleet here, and put back only where a comparison needs them. One note on timing: the 14 comes from the city's 2024 report to the Federal Transit Administration. The five stopped buses were reported in January 2026. Both are true, but they come from two different dates, not one snapshot. Counting 30 also assumed every non-electric bus on the 2024 filing could still be sent out. The city's September 2026 roster also lists 30 in service, but seven of the fourteen oldest have left service and seven new buses have joined; section 02 has the detail. Every figure here, with its basis and its limit, is on the working detail page.
01Most of the buses are either new or old
In 2024, seven buses were one year old. Seven were three to five years old. Two were ten. Fourteen were twelve or older.
Judged by its average age, the fleet looks normal. On the fleet it reported, Asheville's buses average 7.51 years old. Comparable systems average 7.68. The split does not show in the average.
There are new buses at one end and old buses at the other, and almost nothing in the middle. Buses bought in the same year grow old in the same year. The city bought nine buses in one year, so nine buses reached their replacement age in one year. A fleet shaped like this does not wear out a little at a time. It wears out in groups, and the money to replace it is needed in groups too.
02In 2024, 40 percent of the reported fleet was past its replacement age
Measured against the city's own replacement age, not an outside rule
Each bus system tells the federal government how many years it expects a group of its buses to last. That number is called a useful life benchmark. A system can set its own number or take the federal default, which is 14 years for a bus. Every group the fourteen sit in was filed at 12 years, so the standard here is Asheville's own, and it is tighter than the default. Fourteen of the 35 buses Asheville reported for 2024 were at or past that age, and five more do not run at all now.
Of the fleet Asheville reported for 2024, 40 percent was past its replacement age. The middle system in the comparison group is at 19 percent. That is the median line on the chart. And 113 of the 143 systems have a smaller share of their own fleet past its replacement age than Asheville does. The five stopped buses are counted inside Asheville's 35 here, because every system in the comparison is measured on the fleet it reported.
The city has a yardstick of its own here as well. In an August 2024 staff report to City Council, staff said the goal is for at least 80 percent of the fleet to be within its "useful life," and that "due to resource constraints" the city has not been able to achieve it.
Past replacement age does not mean unsafe. It means the bus has been in service longer than the age the city's filings expect its group to last. All fourteen were still carrying passengers in the 2024 reporting year. They were not parked: those fourteen buses drove 486,860 miles that year, more than a third of all the miles the fleet covered.
The city released its bus roster to us on 24 September 2026, under a public records request. It lists seven of the fourteen still in service, all of them from 2012. The other seven are out of service and marked surplus: all five buses from 2010 and two from 2012. The records requests we filed in August 2026 are listed at the foot of this page, with what the city has released for each.
03The replacement budget used to be larger
Same budget line, same section of the plan, about a third of the money
Bus replacement is paid for out of the city's capital plan, the part of the budget that covers big purchases. In the plan adopted in 2021, the city set aside $19,552,550 for bus replacement over five years. In the plan adopted in 2026, the same line sets aside $6,707,441, also over five years. That is about a third.
One budget line, one year apart, shows the change most clearly. In 2025 the city said $1,238,000 would buy two diesel buses. In 2026 the same $1,238,000 buys one. Neither budget says why.
The same budget paragraph says staff keep looking for vendors and for grants, "to work towards a replacement schedule that supports a healthy transit fleet." If the city is still working toward a schedule that supports a healthy fleet, the schedule in place now is not one. The city has said the harder half directly: in August 2024, staff told Council the city had already paid $326,793 in extra maintenance "for major repairs and components of the buses the City is operating that are beyond their useful life."
04The city added buses. Rush hour service barely grew.
The fleet grew from 22 buses in 2018 to 35 in 2024. Buses out at rush hour went from 17 to 19.
Spare buses are a normal part of a bus system. Buses break down, and buses go in for repairs, so a system with no spares has to cancel trips. On the fleet Asheville reported for 2024, it held nearly twice as many buses as it put on the road. A typical system in the middle of the comparison group would run those same 19 rush hour buses with a fleet of about 28.
The Federal Transit Administration prints Asheville's spare ratio as 84.2 percent. That counts all 35 buses as available, because that is what the city reported for 2024. That is 16 backup buses above the 19 used at rush hour. Five of those 35 were reported idle in January 2026. Count only the 30 the city can use, and there are 11 backup buses above the same 19, about 58 percent. That is close to the 28 a typical system would keep.
On the buses that still run, Asheville is not carrying an unusual number of spares. It did not plan its way down to 30. It got there because five buses stopped.
Only the reported figure of 84.2 percent can be compared with other systems, because every system's number in the comparison is also a reported figure.
The simplest explanation for the fleet's growth is that old buses stayed on the books when new ones arrived. Nothing in the city's report rules that out. Every bus was listed as available in 2024. That means none was set aside in the documented emergency reserve that federal rules allow once a bus has served out its minimum federal life. That reserve is for emergencies, and it runs on a different test from the replacement age in this brief. Taking an old bus off the list is not hard either. These buses were bought with federal money, and a bus disposed of before its minimum federal life needs FTA approval and a repayment. The fourteen are past that line. Past it, once a bus is worth $10,000 or less, the city can sell it or scrap it, keep a record, and owe the federal government nothing. The city's September 2026 roster lists seven of the fourteen as out of service and surplus, with no note of a sale.
05Five buses that stopped running
Bought in 2018, in service by June 2019, all five idle by January 2026
The news organization Asheville Watchdog asked the city about the five electric buses in January 2026. The city said all five are "currently not running due to several factors, primarily the inability to procure parts." The city had tied the parts problem to the maker before: in December 2023, a spokesperson said the buses were out of service "due to issues with obtaining parts from the company, which is in bankruptcy proceedings." In February 2026 the maintenance director at RATP Dev, the company that runs ART for the city, took the date of each bus's last repair as its last day on the road. The earliest was 20 February 2024 and the latest 28 April 2025, both later than the city's December 2023 statement. The city owns the buses outright. The batteries are leased, and by January 2026 the City Attorney had spent months trying to end those leases.
Nobody is trying to find replacement batteries. The city is trying to get rid of the buses. Staff told Asheville Watchdog they are working with the City Attorney "regarding the eventual disposition of the buses." The City Attorney said he hoped the city would "no longer be subject to ongoing financial responsibility for these vehicles or the associated electric batteries by early 2026." One lease has been ended early. A second is still being negotiated. So the five buses are not coming back. They stay on the city's books until the leases are settled. The battery lease was still on the city's contract register in August 2026.
This is not an argument against electric buses. One order from one maker in 2018 cannot settle that larger question. What it changes for this brief is simpler: the working fleet lost five buses, and in 2024 it already had fourteen others past their replacement age.
06What the next ten years look like
Replacement comes due in steps, because the buses were bought in groups
Nine buses reached their replacement age in 2024 alone, because the city bought nine buses in 2012. After that the pace is slower: two more in 2028, two in 2029, three in 2030. If the city kept all 30, every one would be past its replacement age by 2035.
Count the five electric buses back in, and eight buses would have crossed their replacement age together in 2030. Five of those eight were the Proterra electric buses. They did not last until 2030. They were idle by January 2026, nearly five years before the replacement age set for them. The cost of replacing them is here now, not four years from now.
None of that is a city forecast. It is arithmetic from the city's own fleet records. Buses do get retired, rebuilt and replaced, and any of that changes the line. By September 2026 the city had taken seven of the fourteen oldest buses out of service and put seven new ones in. The chart shows the size of the job, and the size of the job is what any plan has to be measured against.
07Three ways to close a gap like this
The city has done the first one before
Find more money
Most of this fleet was bought with grants, not city money. A regional planning grant put in $5.7 million in 2018, and a federal award added $4.2 million in 2022.
Keep running buses past their replacement age
This is what is happening now, and it is common. The cost shows up later, as repair bills and as trips that do not run.
Keep fewer buses
This one has mostly happened already, and not on purpose. On the 30 buses that still run, Asheville is close to the 28 a typical system would keep to put 19 on the road. The extra room that existed on paper closed when the electric buses stopped.
The capital plan does not say which of these three paths the city is taking. Money set aside for buses fell to about a third of what it was. In the newer budget, what the money buys gets one sentence, and the sentence is about buying one diesel bus.
08What this brief is not saying
Three things to be clear about
- This brief is not saying the buses are unsafe. A replacement age is a planning benchmark, not a test of whether a bus is safe to drive.
- It is not saying Asheville is unusual for buying a few buses at a time. Small systems often do. The city ordered three buses in the year to June 2024, four in the year to June 2025 and five in the year to June 2026. What stands out is that the bus-replacement line in the budget adopted in 2026 sets aside enough for one in its first year. In 2024 city staff said about four a year were needed at the service level of the time.
- It is not comparing prices. The 2018 electric buses and a diesel bus in the 2026 budget are different vehicles, priced in different ways. This brief does not set those prices side by side.