Trinity Metro plans to replace downtown Fort Worth’s favorite bus. Here’s what to know
November 18,2024
See full Fort Worth Star-Telegram article by Jaime Moore-Carrillo here.
Tarrant County’s transit authority plans to rebrand and replace Molly the Trolley, downtown Fort Worth’s no-cost bus service.
Trinity Metro planners pitched the Blue Line to the organization’s board Monday afternoon. The route would follow Molly’s path, ferrying tourists and bar-hoppers between the convention center, Sundance Square, and other downtown hotspots.
“This will be the retirement of Molly the Trolley,” Melissa Chrisman, Trinity Metro’s vice president of marketing and communications, told agency leaders. “She has had a good, long life.”
The agency appears, for now, to be changing little more than the bus’ color. Blue Line rides will still be free, according to a Trinity Metro spokesperson, but run a bit more frequently — every 10 minutes instead of Molly’s 15 minute intervals. It’s unclear if Blue Line buses will follow Molly’s exact schedule — 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week — or something more expansive.
The Blue Line will have six busses in its fleet, absorbing the vehicles that once serviced the now-defunct Dash, which pinged between the Cultural District and downtown until September.
Molly began running through downtown in 2009. The bus, modeled after a Fort Worth trolley of old, took its name from the city’s bovine mascot. Budgetary pressures compelled Trinity Metro to impose fares on the ride in 2017. The austerity period lasted roughly six months, when Downtown Fort Worth Inc., Sundance Square and other downtown businesses agreed to subsidize the route.
Trinity Metro expects to put its replacements on the street sometime before the summer of 2025. The same cohort of downtown power brokers that kept Molly humming also pushed for its revamp, according to Chrisman.
“They wanted something modern,” she said. “We love our trolleys, we love our vintage look. For them, they just don’t fit that mold.” (Downtown groups and the agency are still collaborating on the final exterior designs of the Blue Line buses.)
Optimism about the route’s potential stems in large part from the early apparent success of the Orange Line, a repainted and slightly expanded version of the 15 bus that linked downtown to the Stockyards and portions of the north side.
Orange Line buses, decorated wheel-to-wheel with blown-up prints of square dancers and cow-wranglers, debuted Sept. 15. They outperformed their predecessors’ ridership numbers by margins ranging from 13.3% to 74% during their first seven weeks in circulation, according to Trinity Metro data (rides were free until Oct. 31).
The Blue and Orange Lines will overlap in downtown’s core.
“You’re looking at very condensed frequencies in downtown” as a result, Chrisman said.
The adjustment arrives as developers unfurl downtown projects with price tags in the hundreds of millions. The investments, and Fort Worth’s untamed growth, have prompted city hall to explore more serious expansions of public transit in the city’s more densely populated areas.