A visitor to the city could hardly miss the boxy trolley buses zipping about downtown Providence, their faux-Victorian bells pealing, on their way to the Jewelry District or Federal Hill in a blur of deep green paint and varnished wood. They are perhaps the most visible mark left on the Renaissance City by Beverly Scott during her first three years as general manager of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority.
Since the compressed natural gas-fueled trolleys hit the streets last June, RIPTA’s Providence LINK service has been hailed as a boon to the city’s burgeoning tourist trade, a potential solution to its parking woes and an intermediate step to getting Rhode Islanders out of their cars and onto public transit.
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“The goal for the trolley system to me more than anything is a goal of being able to change the notion of how mobility is handled in the downtown Providence area,” Scott said.
All paid for–including 15 trolleys that run $320,000 a pop–by millions in grants from Uncle Sam.
But the federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement grants that cover the service’s $1.5 million-a-year price tag will have been exhausted by the summer of 2002. Then it’s decision time.
The 50-cent fare today only raises enough money to cover about 17 percent of Providence LINK’s operating expenses.
“Is RIPTA going to raise the fare for the trolley. If I raised it, what would I raise it to?” Scott wondered. Or would legislators be willing to increase RIPTA’s subsidy to pay for the service?
In her experience, Scott said, communities almost always are willing to pay for a service they find valuable.
“Our strategy on the operating side,” RIPTA spokesman Lee Beliveau added, “is to go to the business community and say, ‘Here’s the value of these things. Now we need to partner because they’re important to you.’ ”
To that end, RIPTA is planning to commission a business survey to nail down Providence LINK’s value to Jewelry District merchants and Federal Hill restaurateurs among others. An earlier survey of trolley riders found that 94 percent of those surveyed called the service “good to excellent.”
Linda Bunn of North Kingstown couldn’t agree more.
“It’s really a wonderful thing that they’ve got that system,” she said. “It’s big improvement.”
Before Providence LINK, Bunn regularly missed her bus home thanks to the chronically late service between her job on Wickenden Street and Kennedy Plaza. “I’d have to wait 20 more minutes out in the freezing cold,” she said. “It was very inconvenient because I have somebody at the other end waiting for me.”
Some of RIPTA’s unionized bus drivers aren’t such big fans of the service. Although it’s paid for by federal grants, some seemed to see it as a distraction from RIPTA’s ailing bus service.
“Some nights there’s not enough buses to pull your run out, but there’s six or seven trolleys sitting there in the front yard,” said one driver who asked not to be identified by name.
“These trolley cars that are riding around the city,” added another driver, “they look great, but they aren’t carrying anybody.”
RIPTA’s Beliveau said the service carried roughly 275,000 riders in its first six months of operation. That works out to about 50,000 passengers per month and 2,000 per day, he said.
Thus, with six trolleys making the circuit about five times an hour from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., each trolley carries less than five passengers per trip on average.
But a new transit service generally takes more than a year to build up a substantial ridership. “You can’t get people to jump on overnight,” observed University of Rhode Island Associate Professor Scott Molloy, a former RIPTA bus driver and transit union leader.
Daniel Baudouin, a member of RIPTA’s board of directors, jumped on the trolley on a recent snowy day to make the trip from his office in the Union Station complex to the State House.
“We’ve got some empty seats we still need to fill,” he said, “but it’s performing better than projected.”
