When I was a kid, I took the trolley to middle school. The streetcar line, one of the last vestiges of Philadelphia's once extensive suburban interurban network is one of two on their own semi-exclusive right of ways: one takes you from 69th Street Terminal, the transit hub for much of Philadelphia's western suburbs, to the county seat at Media. The other takes you into the dense inner suburbs of southeast Delaware County.
I never really considered how lucky I was. The trolley was just there.
Philadelphia's trolley network once was so extensive a person could, on a single ride, take the trolley from Center City or Upper Darby's 69th Street terminal all the way to Allentown. Or out to West Chester, or as far as Lancaster.
Lots of cities in the US had trolleys. Most were not publicly owned, but they provided an essential public service.
And most are gone now. The Depression killed many lines. Then GM came along and killed the rest. The rise of cheap automobiles, the creation of the interstate highway network, and the conversion of many lines to buses sounded the death-knell for the interurbans that connected suburbs to central cities. The aforementioned trolley line to West Chester was gone by the 1950s when they widened the road to support the suburbanization of Delaware County (it's a bus route now). Most of the right of way on the trolley line to Allentown is occupied by a utility right of way. The only surviving part of that line is the Norristown High Speed Line. In the western suburbs, only the Norristown HSL, Route 101 and Route 102 trolleys remain.
Philadelphia once had trolleys all over. When most were converted to bus, the city simply paved the tracks over. Sometimes they reappear when winters are rough. Philadelphia was lucky, though and today maintains the nation's largest network of trolleys (within North America, I believe only Toronto's is larger). Pittsburgh's formerly extensive streetcar network was all but gone by 1967. The Port Authority's T is all that remains. From the end of World War Two through the sixties, city after city decided to abandon important infrastructure.
After an absence of a half-century, trolleys and their commuter rail counterparts are returning. That's great, right?
Well, no, not really, in a good many cases. Some of these projects are seriously dumb. They're based on the nostalgia held by many urban planners, political vanity, and whatever happens to be trendy in transport and urban planning academia. There is a paradox in this. The American public is generally pretty supportive of transit, but that same American public overwhelmingly doesn't use it. Let's talk about that, and how we can we be better at this.
Let's take a look at what's going on around the country. Despite the current crisis in US transport funding, one that's a couple decades old now,there is a lot going on. Granted some of these are Bus Rapid Transit but a good many are trolleys/light-rail, aka streetcars. There's some good ones in there and a lot of these projects look good on paper. There are some on this list that should not be built.
And some, from previous years, that I wonder why they were built. Let's look at some.
TAMPA
Tampa once had an extensive streetcar network that by the early 1950s was completely gone. That's too bad, considering that like most Southern cities, its population expanded considerably.
They built a heritage streetcar line. It looks really cool. Like wow, really cool. But who does it serve?
The track is 2.7 miles long, connecting downtown Tampa with Ybor City. Sounds good, yes? Despite the growth of edge cities, in part spurred by the construction of beltways, central cities (aka Downtowns) are still vital job centres nearly all over the country, and our transit systems continue to reflect that with central hubs that usually are downtown and lines that radiate outward.
It gets 700 riders a day, at best. It has no peak hour trains in the morning, and in fact it doesn't look like it starts service until almost noon. It serves tourists.
Now I'll stop right here and bring up the trolley I rode to middle school. It gets now, perhaps, 4,400 riders a day. But it's not a tourist line. People use it to commute into Center City, and people use it to travel to spots in-between Media/Sharon Hill and 69th Street. Places like Springfield Mall, Drexelbrook, Delaware County Memorial Hospital. Two large Catholic High Schools are directly on the route, and Springfield High School is adjacent. Upper Darby High School, Pennsylvania's largest, is a five minute walk away from the line, as are numerous grocery stores, walkable shopping streets, churches, clinics and so on.
That trolley line serves people. Call me an old-fashioned purist when it comes to transit but "LOOKS REALLY COOL" should not supersede "WHO ARE WE SERVING AND HOW ARE WE SERVING THEM."
Heritage Trolleys are a thing now. City after city has built them, and they serve little purpose except to cater to someone's nostalgia or some city's political vanity. They look really cool, like Savannah's River Line, but what's the point of it? Does it connect people in neighborhoods to jobs? Does it get people out of their cars?
Cities have got to say no to this, without a deeper look.
SALT LAKE CITY
I can't say anything bad about Salt Lake City's light rail. It really is an amazing success.
But I can about the Sugar House line. It's 2 miles long. It serves at most 1,000 people per day. What if you built it and no one came? That seems to be what's happened here. Yonah Freemark explains why (snips to follow, but I really recommend clicking the link and reading the article).
At $37 million for two miles of track, Salt Lake City’s new S-Line, sometimes referred to as the Sugar House Streetcar, was one of the cheapest rail transit projects recently completed in the United States, with per-mile costs equivalent to the typical bus rapid transit project. From a capital cost perspective, it’s a great success.
Too bad the S-Line is such a dud when it comes to ridership. According to recent data from the local transit system, the project is serving fewer than 1,000 riders a day, far fewer than the 3,000 expected for the project. One explanation is that the short route doesn't attract many people. Another is that the line’s frequency is simply too low to convince people to orient their lives around it.
The thing is, providing new rail lines isn't enough — service standards really matter when it comes to attracting people to use transit. And on that front, too many transit agencies around the country are failing to offer the services people can rely on. The problem extends far beyond New Orleans and encompasses a large share of the cities that are investing in new rail lines today, ultimately limiting their effectiveness and cutting down on ridership.
We must commit our transit agencies to providing a minimum level of transit service on their lines, particularly those in which it has been deemed necessary to invest millions of dollars in capital upgrades.
That's the thing, here and elsewhere with many new light rail, commuter rail, and street car projects. They look cool. They serve very few. And that leads us right on back to our paradox: Americans like transit to the point where they're, in general, willing to vote to tax themselves via the things they buy in stores to pay for them, or borrow money via bonding. Americans overwhelmingly don't bother using it.
A reason why, one of many, is service. At 2 miles, with service once on the half hour or more, I'm better off walking or biking than I am taking your trolley. I can cover 2 miles in 10 to 15 minutes on my bike and in a half an hour on foot, even in the somewhat poor shape that I happen to be in these days.
Click the link and read the article. At the bottom of that article is a chart. If you expand the chart to include everything you'll get every LRT and Streetcar project built in the last 15 years. There are 49.
Someone noted in the comments:
In summary: Only 13 out of 49 offer service every 15 minutes of better all-day… and only six (!) offer service every 12 minutes or better.
Welp.
"If You Build It, They Will Come?" More like "If You Build It, and Provide Great Service, They Will Come" (and incidentially, that's why highways seem to operate on "If You Build It, They Will Come and Sprawl Out Everywhere." The Level of Service is usually great.)
Yonah Freemark's criticism is that Federal Transit Administration's New Starts program does not require minimum service standards. I agree. Without minimum service standards, this makes so many projects that look cool end up as really stupid projects that serve no one and go nowhere.
WASHINGTON DC's STREETCAR LINES
There's been so much ink used to write about the DC Streetcar in recent months. I'm going to add to that ink.
It looks cool, and the grand vision the District of Columbia has actually IS cool. Like most cities, the District once had an extensive streetcar network that no longer exists in any form. DC would like to bring that back--a streetcar system coupled with Bus Rapid Transit that Goes Places and Serves People (GPSP). It connects with WMATA.
DCDOT has chosen as their demonstrator project the H Street Corridor. A project that appears to Go Nowhere and Do Nothing (GNDN). Its connection with WMATA is on an overpass near Union Station. It traverses a rapidly gentrifying corridor, a corridor with some of WMATA's most heavily used bus lines, lines that actually connect a mixed variety of neighborhoods with each other and with job centers. It does not connect major job centers. It barely connects anything. It might get 1,500 riders a day (those buses? 12,000 per day). There's a lot wrong here. A friend of mine on twitter calls this "gentriportation", because that is exactly what this looks like. Transport for upwardly mobile folks around my age through their 40s and so on, popping about to trendy shops and bars and restaurants before heading home to their gentrified townhomes. If I lived in DC--this would be me, using this. But this streetcar is at the expense of already existing service that serves far more people and again, I feel transit should serve as many people as possible. 1,500 riders a day is not the business, but at least it gets a few yuppies out of their cars, eh?
Granted, DC's new streetcars were first proposed in the 1990s and the District was very different then. But why did the city choose H Street? Looks like gentrification to me, and something perhaps a little more gross.
There is a stigma about riding the bus, and about those who ride the bus. Many of those 12,000 riders per day who ride WMATA's buses along the H Street Corridor are black. Many of the 1,500 riders a day that the streetcar might get will not be. For what it's worth, where I live, no such stigma seems to exist, but largely it's because buses are all we have. Our commuter rail network in Harrisburg died in the 1960s too.
I also have to note here that overseas, there isn't that much of a stigma. Mexico City loves its bus rapid transit, and China of course is the leader in constructing it, as it lately is in all things infrastructure.
The part that looks like gentrification makes the trolley the agent of private real estate developers, the ones who are largely not building homes for low-income residents but for people with money. In effect they're doing what real estate developers do in the suburbs: they're getting the government (and thus the public) to pay for the things that will benefit their pockets, and not everyone. A streetcar that gets people of all incomes from home to work? Great! One that just shuttles trendy yuppies from Williamsburg-clone neighborhood to Williamsburg-clone neighborhood? Not so great.
Matt Yglesias, for once, is right. This project is awful.
THIS IS A HOT MESS. HOW TO FIX THIS?
First things first; planners really gotta drop the "gosh, this is trendy. Let's do this" without a deeper look at this.
Like Transit Oriented Development (TODs).
TODs are often used by streetcar advocates. I think TODs are awesome and lets face it, the inner ring suburbs around a great many US cities basically are TODs---a street car or what we'd classify now as light rail was extended out from a central location and around stops, little towns developed, for middle and upper-middle class office workers (usually all male) to commute back and forth. In the Philadelphia area now, some of these original "streetcar suburbs" are the most expensive zipcodes in the metro. I look at the rents at TODs in Washington, and the prices for lofts and apartments for sale, for example, and wonder who is served here. I'll note here and offer without further commentary that "back in the day," real estate companies and other corporate interests built their own streetcars into the central cities, and "public transit" was privately-owned and operated.
Heritage Street cars is another thing that needs to be dropped without a good deep look. If they go nowhere, and serve no one, how is that getting people out of their cars? I accept that most American cities sprawl--I in fact now live in what increasingly is an exurb. I don't accept that it's not possible to encourage people to use transit. Calgary, Alberta does, and much of Calgary is low density sprawl. But its transit system is hugely used. Again, Yonah Freemark:
Calgary is a boomtown — the center of Canada’s resource economy, whose explosion in recent years has led to big gains in Calgary’s population and commercial activity. It’s the sort of place that might seem completely hostile to public transit; 87 percent of locals live in suburban environments where single-family homes and strip malls predominate; surrounding land is mostly flat and easily develop-able farmland; the city is almost 10 times bigger than it was in 1950, meaning it was mostly built in a post-automobile age; and big highways with massive interchanges are found throughout the region. Even the transit system it has serves many places that are hostile to pedestrians and hardly aesthetically pleasing.
It’s an environment that looks a lot more like Dallas or Phoenix than Copenhagen.
And yet Calgary is attracting big crowds to its transit system, and those crowds continue to increase in size. Like several of its Canadian counterparts, Calgary is demonstrating that even when residential land use is oriented strongly towards auto dependency, it is possible to encourage massive use of the transit system. As I’ll explain below, however, strong transit use in Calgary has not been a fluke; it is the consequence of a strong public policy to reduce car use downtown. It provides an important lesson for other largely suburban North American cities that are examining how to reduce their automobile use
Granted Calgary lacks a beltway (although it's building one now, as I understand) like cities similar to it in the US would have and generally has a somewhat smaller footprint. But there are many US cities that have streetcars/light rails, and also lots of sprawl, that don't have projects that are dumb.
Houston?
Dallas?
San Diego?
Los Angeles?
Denver?
Phoenix? All of these are fairly successful projects, and many have planned extensions.
Planning extensions though, that can be a problem, if your service is terrible. Expanded service can serve more people if ones headway is shorter. Streetcars do have to deal with traffic (light rails largely do not, but I use the terms interchangeably), but that can be built into schedules. Tourist traps like Tampa's TECO are a waste of money if the goal there isn't to get people out of their cars, and DC's Streetcar is a debacle if it's just gentriportation that has minimal connections to other transportation modes and actively disrupts successful ones, like heavily used bus routes.
The intent of this isn't to bash a mode of transportation, but to fix its many, many problems. I'm a transit user--I might live in an exurb, but I still don't have a drivers license.
Yielding the floor to you, now. I could go on, and on, and on, and on about poorly thought out projects that don't help, but I'd rather hear from the rest of you on this.