by Ronald Drenger

Residents and tourists should soon have a new way of getting from one side of Lower Manhattan to the other. A free shuttle bus service, using fully electric buses, is scheduled to begin operating in the late spring, according to officials of the Alliance for Downtown New York, which will run the service.

The buses will run between the western end of Chambers Street and the South Street Seaport, via a route that runs through Battery Park City, around the tip of Manhattan at Battery Park, and up Water Street to the Seaport. The service will run 7 days a week, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

The Alliance hopes to have eight buses running on the route, with just 10-minute intervals between them. Each bus will have 20 seats and standing room for an additional 10 passengers. The route will include 16 stops in each direction, most of them existing stops used by other bus services, and the approximately 5-mile round trip is expected to take one hour.

“We’re optimistic that the buses will be delivered by late spring and that they’ll be running by June,” Frank Addeo, assistant vice president for operations at the Alliance, told Community Board 1’s Battery Park City Committee on Jan. 7.

The service had been scheduled to start last fall, but was postponed because of manufacturing delays. The buses, which are being produced by a company in Chattanooga, Tenn., will not produce any environmentally harmful emissions and will run on an overnight electric charge.

The project’s $2 million startup costs, including $222,000 for each bus, is being paid for by the Alliance, largely with government grants tied to the use of the emissions-free electric vehicles. The Alliance will hire a company to operate the service.

Some community board members and other Battery Park City residents at the committee meeting complained that the Alliance’s new service will not start as early in the morning or run as many hours as the shuttle bus currently operated by the Battery Park City Authority. The residents said they had come to rely on that service, which the Authority recently extended by six months, through the end of July.

But Addeo said that the Alliance’s new shuttle was not intended to replace the Authority’s service.

“Small buses like these can never handle all the commuter service,”Addeo said. “Our decision was that by starting later in the day, we can give coverage to the greater Downtown community, not just the commuters.”

Leticia Remauro, vice president for community relations at the Authority, said her agency was exploring ways to continue some kind of bus service after the spring.

“It’s very important to us that we have a shuttle,” she said “But I cannot make a commitment now beyond the 6 months.”

Several Battery Park City residents also suggested that the western end of the Alliance’s route be extended to take passengers across West Street on Chambers Street, to Greenwich Street or Church Street. Addeo said the Alliance would look into that option, but that the route’s length was limited by how far the buses can cover each day on their electric charges.