By Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
PROSPECT PARK — The Heart of Brooklyn trolley is experiencing somewhat of an “identity crisis,� having aimed to lure visitors to more than one attraction on its loop through Prospect Park and area cultural institutions, but oftentimes finding the riders are simply tired locals lugging shopping bags.

Now that the summer is coming to an end, Heart of Brooklyn Executive Director Ellen Salpeter said the non-profit is reviewing ways to refashion the six-year-old trolley service, including creating separate routes for inside and outside the park, and making more connections between commercial corridors and cultural institutions.

Salpeter said they’ve been awaiting the outcome of a Center for an Urban Future report on the city’s trolley buses, which was officially released yesterday.

According to the report, “The Brooklyn trolley rarely exceeds a handful of passengers per trip, and few of the passengers actually get off the trolley and walk through the doors of one of the HOB institutions.� Those institutions include the Brooklyn Museum, Public Library and Botanic Garden, Prospect Park, and the Prospect Park Zoo.

The trolley service from Grand Army Plaza to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum was discontinued last year due to its low impact on the museum’s attendance. Though the Children’s Museum is the most transit-challenged of the above institutions and the trolley averaged 150 riders per weekend, its sponsors concluded that the greatest beneficiaries were “Crown Heights residents who used the trolley to get to Grand Army Plaza and back.�

At more than $20,000 a year to operate, the service didn’t provide the type of return the Children’s Museum was looking for.

“If you talk to the trolley drivers, it’s the same lady and her three kids every Saturday at 3 p.m. and they’re going from ballet on the west side of the park to something else on the east side of the park,� Salpeter told the Center, referring to the Brooklyn trolley.

Salpeter said Heart of Brooklyn, which spends about $30,000 a year “absent marketing� on the trolley, has no plan to do away with the service or charge riders to cover costs. And next year, she said the service could reconnect to the Children’s Museum, which will have just completed a $39 million expansion doubling its size.

She said the non-profit isn’t interested in paying for a service that’s “redundant to mass transportation.� But it is interested in brainstorming ways to bring Manhattan tourists to Brooklyn and visitors of the Brooklyn institutions to commercial corridors such as Vanderbilt and Seventh avenues, and Washington Street — partnerships that could help in desperately needed marketing for the trolley.

“Even if they weren’t to put up funds, the [business improvement districts], the local merchants, the local institutions can do a lot to contribute to marketing,� said Tara Colton, author of the trolley report. She pointed out that neither the city nor the state’s tourism agencies mention the service on their Web sites, a missed opportunity considering that many out-of-towners consult the sites when planning their trips.

Colton said she envisions the service hosting special events, making runs from Bay Ridge to the Heart of Brooklyn geared toward senior citizens one day, and then from Williamsburg, geared toward hipsters, the next day, for example. “In a borough as big as Brooklyn, it’s hard to just bring people around within it.�

Last year, the Brooklyn trolley, which operates hourly on weekends and holidays from noon to 6 p.m., averaged 200 to 250 riders a weekend. Oftentimes, that means only eight to 20 passengers a run. The most successful runs, by far, were during the winter “Prospect Park in Lights� festival, when three trolleys ran every 20 minutes throughout the evening and were packed every time.

Salpeter said experiments with evening service shuttling visitors between Target First Saturdays — the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s monthly night of free programming and entertainment — and commercial corridors proved promising as well.

“In two or more months we’ll have a lot more meat� on the revision to the program, said Salpeter. A $475,000 capital contribution from Borough President Marty Markowitz toward revamping the trolley line will certainly help. She said a large portion of the money would go to purchasing new trolley buses. The current one gets six miles per gallon of gasoline.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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