“In reality, when it worked you could go about three miles an hour, if you weren’t going up a hill, and you could go a short distance and then you would lose your battery pack,” Donaghy said. The Skodas came equipped with a battery pack meant to allow the ETB to divert around an accident or other obstruction off-wire for a limited distance. In addition, the plan included refurbishing RTA’s 123-mile electric trolley overhead wiring system and that’s when the current Chief Maintenance Officer John Thomas came to Donaghy with an idea the CEO dubbed “John’s magic bus.” As a result, Donaghy had his senior leaders create a 15- to 20-year plan on replacement of RTA’s rolling stock. After working with the University of Dayton to complete a cost/benefit study in 2009, it determined it made financial sense for RTA to continue its electric bus operations. At the time, it had 57 Skoda ETBs purchased between 1996-1998 that would need to be replaced at a price tag of approximately $1 million per vehicle-a major financial undertaking. That included considering what the agency’s needs were moving forward, particularly as it related to the ETB fleet.ĭayton is one of five agencies in the U.S.
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Working with a brand-new board of trustees, who made it clear that part of fixing this problem was ensuring RTA’s assets were in good order. When Donaghy started his career in Dayton, the agency was in the midst of a financial calamity. This was exactly the way Donaghy wanted it. But with the NexGen system, the transition was seamless and likely unnoticed by the agency’s 30,000 daily riders. Normally that would mean pulling the electric trolley buses (ETBs) out of service as they would struggle to divert around the construction.
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RTA’s main transit center was forced to close for a month at the end of 2020 due to a city road construction project. Fifteen years of carefully archived information can be verified by glancing out the window as dozens of electric trolleys quietly and effortlessly glide into the makeshift transit center at the corner of Third and Main streets in Dayton, Ohio.
#Dayton rta windows
Looking down from his office windows with a 360-degree view of the streets below, Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority (RTA) CEO Mark Donaghy says normally one can “judge my projects by how many binders I have at the end.” But in the case of the agency’s NexGen electric trolley bus system, he doesn’t need the sprawling pile of five-inch binders, stacks of notes, mockups and reports before him to measure the success.