NFTA fleet

The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (also known as "NFTA" or "Metro") operates a fleet of buses and light rail vehicles in the cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls and the surrounding Erie and Niagara counties. It is the second-largest transit system in New York state after New York City's.

The NFTA inherited a large number of General Motors New Look buses from the private carriers that were absorbed into the agency. In addition, a small fleet of Highway Products' Twin Coaches and Mack buses that were nearing the end of their life span were also added to the fleet. The first major purchase of new buses by the NFTA began in 1975 with AM General's "Metropolitan" series buses. These buses were later withdrawn from service in 1987 due to severe structural issues. To address this immediate shortage of buses, the NFTA purchased a number of recently mothballed GMC buses from the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system (DART), Flxible buses from Rochester's Regional Transit Service and General Motors New Looks from Broome County Transit (BC Transit) of Binghamton. This temporary arrangement filled most of the gap left by the removal of the AM General buses.

The next major purchase of new buses came from GMC, in their RTS-II Series. These buses were purchased between 1978 and 1983. As mentioned earlier, in 1987, due to the premature retirement of the AM General buses, the NFTA purchased a number of used, earlier series RTS series buses from Dallas' DART system. These buses provided comfortable padded seats, normally not seen on standard NFTA transit coaches. These buses operated for a number of years and were a deal to the NFTA in that the coach bodies previously did not experience earlier damage from road salt, sometimes referred to as "salt-free" miles, extending their usefulness a number of years because of the frames having a later start being introduced to corrosion from road salt.

In 1985, the NFTA purchased seven new suburban-configuration buses from Orion Bus Industries (OBI) to begin replacing the older inherited GMC buses from previously private agencies. This purchase marked the last purchase of non-lift equipped buses, and the first non-American purchase of new buses. Over the next seven years, OBI received additional orders of buses from the NFTA with purchases of two different models, the Orion I series and the Orion V, which the NFTA later purchased in 1993 as their first natural gas powered buses.

In 1992 and 1994, the NFTA purchased from two manufacturers, new to the NFTA; Motor Coach Industries, in their Classic series of transit coaches and New Flyer Industries, in their D40 series. In 1995, a third manufacturer was added, with North American Bus Industries/American Ikarus in their 416 series transit bus.

• Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority