I will add that a lot of the urban areas in Washington state probably have contractors like First Student who get profit by cutting costs i.e ordering cheap stripped down buses.
Corporations like First Student, Durham etc will place massive orders of thousands of buses at a time. They have trouble even paying for an extra interior fan or a basic air ride seat. They couldn't even comprehend speccing out the nice toys like auto chains, driveline retarders, bigger motors, etc.
Whenever I see nice auction buses from Oregon and Washington state they're usually from smaller rural district-owned bus operations or places up in the mountains where that sort of thing is a necessity.
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