action, but told city officials that it was "necessitated" by an impending problem with federal taxes. New buses During its first few years, RCT's bus fleet was rather old. As of 1958, some buses over 20 years old were still in service, and the youngest buses in the fleet dated from 1951, when 27 buses had been purchased. The company made its first purchase of new buses in 1961, but of only five vehicles, 35-foot General Motors "New Look"-type buses. At that time, the active fleet comprised 202 buses, and 182 were scheduled to be in service each day in peak periods. When the city council granted RCT a 10-year operating franchise in 1962, one stipulation was that the company had to purchase at least 70 new buses within five years. The company complied, proceeding to purchase another 70 buses of the same type, delivered in four batches between 1963 and 1966. These 75 buses (numbered 501–575) were the only new buses RCT ever bought. The paint scheme of Rose City's buses was red and cream, originally a bright red as used in pre-RCT days by the Portland Traction Company, but later changed to a darker red. Nickname Rose City Transit dubbed a new downtown "shoppers' special" route as "Rosy" when the service was introduced in 1957, but "Rosy" later became a nickname for RCT itself, used both by the company and by the general public. The company also used the name "Rosy" for an advertising character, a bus with eyes and an elephant's trunk, a reference to a popular resident of the Portland Zoo (from 1953–1993), a pachyderm named Rosy who was the zoo's very first elephant. Problems The privately owned company struggled financially during several periods. Providing mass transit service was increasingly an unprofitable business during the post-World War II period, when private car ownership in the U.S. was growing rapidly. Portland transit ridership declined steadily every year, and several of RCT's requests for permission to raise fares were turned down by the city council. Numerous times over the years, RCT and the council argued about fares and service issues. Tensions between the two at times prompted calls for the transit system to be municipalized, as had already happened in several other West Coast cities, including San Francisco and Seattle. At the beginning of 1962, Portland and San Diego were the only two major West Coast cities whose