Will the Dodger Trolley return?

I was driving in WeHo Friday afternoon when the phone rang. I tapped the talk button on the phone speaker and got ... "It's Rosendahl." It was Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl and he was ticked.

Not at me. At the Dodgers. He had earlier in the day been in the City Council's Transportation Committee and heard a report on the Dodger Trolley. It seems the shuttle between Union Station and Dodger Stadium went over budget due to its popularity (blogdowntown reported this last month) and Rosendahl said that the price had gone from an expected $70,000 to $150,000. About 704 people on average took the trolley to games, according to a city report released last month.

What really steamed Rosendahl was that, according to him, city officials were saying it would cost $350,000 to run the trolley for a full season in 2009, if the council decides to continue it. This past year, the trolley was basically a test program and didn't start until late July.

Furthermore, Rosendahl was ticked because the Dodgers wouldn't pick up any of the cost this year, saying that baseball teams shouldn't have to pay for mass transit. That's government's job, the team said. Of course, not every team builds its stadium far from the downtown street grid, behind residential neighborhoods, and surrounds it with 16,000-plus parking spaces that are currently going for $15 a pop.

"The city isn't going to pay for it if I have my way," Rosendahl said.

He also wanted the Dodgers to open their books for the city. Good luck with that -- the players union has wanted to see the real books of Major League Baseball teams for years. Nonetheless, as ESPN reported at the time, the last labor negotiations in 2006 were a cinch simply because teams were making so much money.

This will be a fun standoff, should it transpire. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is saying the city budget is already deep in the hole, but the Dodgers have proved in the past to have a lot of friends on the City Council. At the same time, the Dodgers may be rolling the money trucks up to free agent Manny Ramirez any day now -- giving the team cause to plead poverty.

What do you think should happen? Should the city send the Dodgers to the showers? Or is the city getting good bang for its buck (or in this case 350,000 of them)?

-- Steve Hymon

Dodger Trolley needs more hustle

From my colleague Peter Viles of our L.A. Land blog:

I love the idea of the Dodger Trolley – you really feel like you’re going to a big league ballgame when you get on a bus with a bunch of excited fans wearing the home team’s colors. I had flashbacks to subways to Fenway and Yankee Stadium. The idea is great. The experience, however, stinks.

The problem is, a bus in gridlock goes nowhere.

For Mondays’s 5:22 pm playoff start, I boarded the trolley at Union Station at 4:30 p.m. In ten minutes, the trolley traveled about four blocks. It was festive on the trolley at first, and then it became restive. I asked the driver if I could get out and walk. A lot of people on the bus laughed. I got out and walked. Not only did I beat the trolley to the stadium, I passed another trolley that had left ten minutes prior to the one I'd boarded, and I beat that one too. And I don’t walk very fast.

It’s a great idea, but in rush hour traffic on Sunset, it’s a joke. I missed the Star Spangled Banner and the first pitch, and so did everyone on that bus.