Growing up Kai Ang Bowes regularly took the bus with his mother as they didn’t have a car. Little did he know at the time that it was instilling a lifelong interest in marketing and transit.

The rides sparked a passion for building buses with LEGO. Over the years, Kai has built about 12 that he has constantly improved by adding extra details. Today, the LEGO buses not only resemble the real-life ones in their livery (paint scheme), but they also feature many of the decals and ads you would find on a real bus.

Kai is now also a student at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business where he’s studying for a bachelor of business administration.

Watch the video to learn more and see Kai’s LEGO buses!

Video Transcript

So I’ve always been into the design of buses like the livery, the way certain windows are placed, or the seats are placed, or even the ads on buses.

Whenever we would have like a bucket of LEGO at school or daycare or something, my instant thought was, how can I make a bus out of this? Where can I get the wheels? What like window frames can I get that looks most similar to a bus? What doors? And I was always like interested in the seat placements for example.

The inspiration first started from a LEGO set like based off the way that these ones look here. But a lot of it’s trial and error. Like a lot of these have been made like maybe ten years ago.

A lot of it is just like a lot of editing now, fixing the livery, changing the ads, changing destination signs on the buses. Also, the livery is drawn with a Sharpie, so they do tend to fade out a lot. A lot of people I know that make LEGO transit buses online, they like to make the livery out of bricks. But want the livery to be smooth and realistic for example. So Sharpie was really the best way for me to do that.

When it comes to ads, I try to, you can see here we have the TransLink, the little octopus safety octopus ad. I just try to pick ads that I really thought were interesting as a kid that really stood out to me since I’m into advertising and into marketing.

It’s always continual improvement. They’re never done being built, but I would like to build a new trolley whenever that comes around in the future.

The one thing I would really like to do is build like the new battery-electric bus. And I’d love to design a wrap and try to print that out, and try to stick it onto the bus.