The Flatbush Depot is a Brooklyn Division depot located in Flatlands, Brooklyn, near the Kings Plaza shopping center, where a number of bus routes terminate. The depot occupies two blocks, bounded by Fillmore Avenue, East 49th Street, Avenue N, and Utica Avenue.
The Brooklyn Heights Railroad (part of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company) opened the depot in mid-1902 along its Flatbush Avenue Line (later the Bergen Beach Shuttle) on Avenue N. It eventually served a number of lines from the Flatbush area, including the Bergen Beach Shuttle, Flatbush Avenue Line, Nostrand Avenue Line, Ocean Avenue Line, and Utica Avenue Line. The barn began serving buses in 1931, and was acquired by the city in 1940. The depot was reconstructed under municipal operations in the late 1940s, designed by architect D. R. Collin of the BRT, and was intended to be the first of a new system-wide design. Few of the former BRT/BMT depots were rebuilt to match such designs. Only Ulmer Park Depot's garage building somewhat matches his new architectural design. The new Flatbush Depot opened for bus service on January 15, 1950, along with Ulmer Park Depot. An adjacent parking lot was added in 1965, and the depot was rehabilitated in 1991. In 2009, the depot became the first to dispatch buses equipped with Plexiglas partitions to protect drivers, after the December 1, 2008 murder of Edwin Thomas, a bus driver who was operating a bus on the B46 Limited route when this incident occurred.
Fleet operation history:
Standard
RTS (1980's-2019)
Nova Bus RTS Hybrid (2010-2019)
Orion VII NG. Hybrid (2008-Present)
2014 XD40 (2015-present)
2018 XD40 (2018-present)
Articulated
2011 Nova Bus LFSA (2013-2019)
2017 XD60 (2019-present)
2019 XD60 (2019-present)