You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Japanese. (March 2023) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,398 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Japanese Wikipedia article at [[:ja:バスファン]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|ja|バスファン}} to the talk page.
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.[1]
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.[2][3] 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.[citation needed]
Since bus spotting involves urban mass transit, it often goes hand in hand with metrophily. In New York, the two are often combined into "transit fan", a person who studies both bus and rail rapid transit, with the same diligence. This practice is popular in the Greater Toronto And Hamilton Area in Canada.
There are a number of magazines aimed at bus enthusiasts and spotters, e.g. Buses Magazine.
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]