page_title: Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority
section_title: Trolley buses
hierarchical_section_title: Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority / History / Trolley buses
caption_attribution_description: Dayton trolleybus 9834, a 1998 ETI 14TrE2, southbound on Jefferson Street between Third Street and Wright Stop Plaza in downtown, southbound on route 7. No. 9834 was originally equipped with rollsign-type destination signs (as were all of Dayton's ETI trolleybuses), but its rollsigns were replaced in 2011 by flip-dot-type signs taken from a retired diesel bus.
context_page_description: The Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority, formerly known as the Miami Valley RTA, is a public transit agency that generally serves the greater Dayton, Ohio area. The GDRTA serves communities within Montgomery County and parts of Greene County, Ohio, USA. There are 31 routes. RTA operates diesel and electric trolley buses seven days a week, 21 hours a day, and provides services to many citizens within the area. RTA's current executive director is Mark Donaghy.
  Greater Dayton RTA is Ohio’s fourth-largest public transit system, serving Dayton and 23 surrounding communities in Montgomery County and parts of Greene County. RTA provides more than 11 million passenger trips per year on its buses.
context_section_description: One notable feature of the GDRTA system is its use of electric trolley buses. Only five cities in the United States currently have electric trolley buses: Boston, Dayton, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle. The first electric trolley bus (ETB) operation in Ohio occurred in Dayton, on April 23, 1933, when the Linden–Salem line was converted from streetcars to trackless trolleys — or trolley buses, as they are most commonly known today. The RTA renewed its commitment to electric transit with a Board of Trustees vote to continue the trolley bus service in 1991, and the purchase of a new fleet of ETBs from Electric Transit, Inc., a joint venture of the Czech company Skoda and the U.S. company AAI Corporation, based on Skoda's model 14Tr. Final assembly of the vehicles took place in Dayton in 1995–98. In 2014, the system added its first low-floor trolley buses, with four dual-mode prototypes purchased from Vossloh Kiepe (now Kiepe Electric) and using bodies from Gillig, for testing and evaluation.  In January 2018, RTA placed an order with Kiepe for 26 production-series dual-mode trolley buses to the same design as the prototypes, with Gillig low-floor bodies, for delivery starting in 2019.
  Electric streetcar service in Dayton had started in 1888, and it continued through to, and indeed beyond, the start of trolley bus service. Therefore, electric transit service has been operated continuously in Dayton since 1888, which is longer than in any other city in the United States.
caption: One of RTA's ETI trolley buses, in 2016
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