RTD-Denver runs three different types of buses on the open roads, plus the mall shuttles on 16th Street Mall downtown. For the sake of being able to identify them, I'll call them standard, double-length and coach buses. In my travels over the last several months I've been on at least one of each of them, though my normal bus has been a coach bus every time but one.
Coach buses are tall, have every seat facing forward, and have luggage-compartments underneath them. Since I'm usually riding the AF that goes through downtown to the airport, it is perhaps no great surprise that the AF is almost always a coach bus. At least that's what it appears to me. Coach buses have six wheels - two in front and two pairs in back. I also noticed a couple days back that one of the two pairs in the back are tied to the steering. They seat 55 in the configuration RTD uses, and have room for one wheelchair next to the wheelchair lift without impacting the other seating at all. That may sound like a lot of seats, but during the first few weeks of classes at Auraria, I've seen 5-10 people standing because there weren't any seats left.
A standard bus has a mix of seats facing forward and inward, usually with the inward-facing seats over the wheels, of which there are four. I've seen standard buses other places around the country, so I suspect that they're about the same pretty much everywhere.
The double-length buses are, for all practical purposes, a standard bus with an attached passenger trailer. The trailer-like part has forward-facing seating, except around the pivot-join from the front part of the bus to the back.
I haven't ridden anything but the coach buses with any great frequency, though I spent a few weeks before the schedule-change experimenting with taking the bus all the way from home to work and all the way back, so I've had a bit of exposure to the standard bus configuration now too.
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