Jonesboro, AR – (JonesboroRightNow.com) – Oct. 9, 2024 – The Jonesboro Economic Transportation (JET) will begin unveiling five new trollies in its fleet with Trollies on Tour.
The trollies are expected to arrive starting in mid-October, however, they will not be “revenue-ready,” meaning they won’t have certain safety/security features or fare collection installed.
To promote the vehicles as this equipment is implemented, JET will take a trolley to local groups such as classrooms, congregations, civic groups, and more as they become available.
Shelley Anderson, JET Marketing Coordinator, said they expect trollies to be revenue-ready within a month of a vehicle’s arrival.
“Say for instance, we go to one of the schools, the students can go onto the bus, sit down and see how it works, and at the same time, I will be explaining to them what a transportation service does, what we do for the city of Jonesboro,” Anderson said. “[We’re allowing] people that tactile experience of getting on them, sitting down, being one of the first ones to see them, that sort of thing.”
Registration is open and available for Monday through Friday in November and December. Registration information can be found here.
With these new vehicles comes new routes. The green route, which extends from Industrial Park to Martin Luther King Drive includes the A-State campus and extends into Hilltop, will be split into two routes.
The first route, Route 17 will include the A-State campus and parts of Matthews Avenue, Nettleton Avenue and Caraway Road. A full map is below. Scheduling information can be found here.
The other route, Route 53, will include parts of Johnson Avenue, Highland Drive and Dr. Martin Luther King Drive. A full map is below. Scheduling information can be found here.
The new vehicles are rubber wheel trollies, so they can be driven on roads and do not require any guide rails or trolley tracks. This means no additional infrastructure will have to be installed in Jonesboro.
They are part of a 2022 initiative to provide more environmentally friendly transportation in Jonesboro.
The trollies are hybrid vehicles. They will have gasoline motors, but they will also have backup batteries. The batteries are charged by the vehicle braking, which then powers the trolley.
“The vehicle is making frequent stops. Every time we stop at a bus stop to pick up passengers, we are recharging those batteries, which are then, in turn, reducing the emissions for the amount of gas that we’re using to travel our vehicles all day,” said Lee Wells, Director of Transit. “During a daily route [with our non-hybrid vehicles], we’ll burn an entire tank of gas. So, by jumping to this hybrid mode, this is going to allow us to have that better economical and healthier value.”
Funding came from the FY 2022 Low or No Emission Grant Program, a federal grant program that provides state and local governments with the funds to purchase/lease zero and low-emission vehicles.
The grant totaled $878,584.14. The city of Jonesboro said they would match funds totaling $155,044.26, which came from the City of Jonesboro General Funds or Street Funds, bringing total costs to $1,033,628.40.
Even with the addition of these new trollies, Wells said there is no plan to retire existing vehicles in the JET fleet yet.
“It is unfortunate that with hybrid vehicles, the amazing value that they offer, they are sometimes at a premium cost upfront,” Wells said. “The cost, value and availability of going to fully electric is just not something that is in place for transit quite yet.”
However, Wells added that JET is still working on acquiring more funding for low-emissions vehicles.
“We are already on a second low-emission grant process that we are attempting to try to get finalized to continue,” he said. “To expand and grow our fleet in this hybrid ability and then as we continue to move forward, that will always be a project that we look at being able to do.”