Aloha trolley

Claremont's trolley has moved on to greener pastures. And sandy beaches. At Tuesday's city council meeting, city manager Jeff Parker announced that the city had sold the trolley to a buyer in Hawaii.

Since the council decided to end the trolley experiment in April, the vehicle has been collecting dust while parked at the city yard.

Using a trolley broker, the city sold the trolley to the buyer at a cost of $75,000. During the planning stages, the city estimated the total cost of the trolley to be $1.3 million over 3 years. It only ran for about 5 months.

The trolley was shipped off from a Long Beach port last week and could already be at its destination. Several city officials I talked to didn't know who bought it or what it will be doing.

Bon Voyage trolley! While you were the butt of many jokes in Claremont, you will also be missed by many in the community.

Death of the trolley?

Maybe. The fate of the Village trolley remains in the hands of the Claremont city council. At tonight's meeting, the council will decide if the lackluster trolley will have a future trucking around downtown Claremont.

The council basically has 3 options to consider. They could continue with the trolley for a while longer as it is currently running, hoping that warmer weather will attract more people into the Village.

The council could tinker with the schedule or travel route, with consideration for the Claremont Colleges, the Old School House or Claremont High School as possible destinations.

Or they could decide to abandon the pilot program altogether, basically admitting that the trolley was a bad idea to begin with.

Unfortunately, there’s not much going for the trolley. The ridership numbers have sharply dropped off since its inception. In November, there were 12.3 riders per hour, 10.7 in December, about 7 per hour in January, February and March.

Even at its peak, the trolley never attracted its benchmark ridership goals of 15 per hour that the city would consider the pilot program “viable.”

There should be an interesting debate tonight. I would expect new Councilmember Larry Schroeder to speak out more tonight than he did during his first council meeting, where he said very little.

During his campaign, he was critical of the trolley and felt the money ($886,670) should have been used for a more useful purpose. We’ll see if he and other Council Members are already willing to throw in the towel on the trolley idea.