Greensboro’s new downtown “Hopper” trolley service hits the streets this week, free of fare.

The trolleys will run Thursday-Saturday from noon to midnight, and Sundays from noon-10 p.m. The route runs north and south along Elm Street from the Union Square Campus to the LoFi neighborhood. 

Previously, the trolleys were scheduled to run seven days a week from morning to around midnight depending on the day, however in the last few weeks, the hours were cut back. The route has remained the same.

Marketing and Communications Manager for Greensboro Transit Agency Kevin Elwood told Triad City Beat that the decision to cut down on operating days came “about a month ago.”

“Basically in order to stay within the funding that they had allocated for it, they wanted to reduce the number of hours and also days during the week,” Elwood explained.

The pilot program is funded to run through the end of the year.

“We’ll be monitoring it and making adjustments as we go along,” Elwood said, and that depending on how successful the project is, the decision of whether it would continue “would be made probably with the city manager’s office and the city council.”

Trolleys will arrive at stops at a frequency of seven minutes.

Dollars for the project are coming from American Rescue Plan funds as well as participatory budgeting, a process where members of the community vote on how a portion of the city’s budget can be spent. The trolley project received the highest number of votes during the process in 2019.

Out of more than 500 submitted ideas, the “Hopper” was a favorite according to the city. In a news release from the city, Department of Transportation Director Hanna Cockburn said that the name evokes “how people will use the service,” by hopping on and off.

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