Search Results for: streetcars

Promise Rapid Transit, Deliver Streetcars

By | | Transportation
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On November 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Austin voters foolishly agreed to raise property taxes in order to build 28 miles of light rail at a projected cost of $5.8 billion. To avoid congestion, the downtown portion of light-rail lines would go through a four-mile-long tunnel.

Artist’s impression of light rail running near downtown Austin.

No one reading this blog will be surprised to know that, in the short amount of time since then, projected costs have nearly doubled to $10.3 billion. Early this week, the city’s transit planners announced a new plan that would build fewer than half as many miles of light rail. Continue reading →

Let’s Start Scrapping Streetcars

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Good news: Washington DC is thinking of scrapping its streetcars, which have been in service for just two years and whose ridership is still so poor — about 3,000 weekday riders — that the city is afraid to start charging fares.

Bad news: City officials are only thinking of scrapping the streetcars and not the tracks; instead, they wants to replace the streetcars with brand-new ones because it’s so hard to get spare parts for the ones they have. Each new 30-seat streetcar would cost roughly ten times as much as a 40-seat bus, but cost is no object when you are playing with other people’s money.

The modern streetcar craze, which was only partly fueled by federal funding (Portland, Tacoma, and Washington purchased their first streetcars without federal support), provides a lesson for the writers of Trump’s infrastructure plan. They hope that giving local, not federal, politicians the authority of where to spend money would result in better decisions. In fact, local politicians are just as willing to waste money on gleaming new urban monuments as federal ones. Continue reading →

Dublin Learns the Joys of Streetcars

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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It cost $433 million for 3.66 miles, or $118 million a mile. It’s slower than walking, at least for some trips. It significantly increased street congestion and has had an especially “negative impact on other forms of public transport,” namely buses. What is it? Dublin’s new Cross-City Tram.


Note that the videographer had to speed up some scenes so people wouldn’t lose patience with watching the slow-moving tram.

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Cincinnati Streetcars’ “Catastrophic Failures”

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Cincinnati streetcar–now known as the Cincinnati Bell Connector since Cincinnati Bell paid $3.4 million for naming rights–is barely six months old, and already is having problems. Four streetcars broke down in one day a few months ago.

Now the company that is contracted to operate the streetcar has warned that poor quality control by the railcar maker has resulted in “catastrophic failures” of three different major systems that cause regular breakdowns of the vehicles. Cincinnati Bell is upset enough to demand possibly illegal secret meetings with the city council over the streetcar’s problems.

Cincinnati once counted itself lucky that it didn’t order streetcars from United Streetcar, the short-lived company that made streetcars for Portland and Tucson, many of which suffered severe manufacturing defects. But it turns out the vehicles it ordered from a Spanish company named Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles (CAF), which were delivered 15 months late, weren’t much better.

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Streetcars, Non-QWERTY Typewriters, & Zoopraxiscopes: Technological Equals

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Washington, DC opened its streetcar line last Saturday, and in a blog post elsewhere the Antiplanner compared it with a zoopraxiscope. That got the attention of another blogger. In case you missed it, I’m cross-posting my blog post here.

Washington, DC opened its long-delayed streetcar for business on Saturday. Actually, it’s a stretch to say it is open “for business,” as the city hasn’t figured out how to collect fares for it, so they won’t be charging any.

Exuberant but arithmetically challenged city officials bragged that the streetcar would traverse its 2.2-mile route at an average speed of 12 to 15 miles per hour, taking a half hour to get from one end to the other (which is 4.4 miles per hour). If there were no traffic and it didn’t have to stop for passengers or run in to any automobiles along the way, they admitted, it would still take 22 minutes (which is 6 miles per hour).

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Streetcars and Commuter Trains Are Hot

By | | Transportation
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Ridership on Atlanta’s new streetcar is 18 percent below projections–and the projections assumed patrons would be charged a $1 fare, but (as of the date of the ridership numbers) the city was still offering free introductory rides. Meanwhile, operating costs have proven to be a mere 50 percent more than projected.

Washington, DC’s new streetcar hasn’t yet opened for business, but it has already proven to be hot–as in one of the streetcars being tested on H Street caught fire the other day. DC residents aren’t exactly looking forward to the streetcar, which is increasing traffic congestion and slowing bus service in the corridor. This is just one more example, locals note, of “corporate welfare and the edifice complex.”

Just outside of DC, a new report reveals that the Maryland Transit Administration has done a poor job of tracking consultant costs on the proposed Purple and Red lines. This doesn’t bode well for taxpayers if construction ever begins on these two lines, both of which are expected to cost more than $2 billion.

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Skeptical about Streetcars? You’re a Racist!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Count on someone at the Washington Post to play the race card in the postmortems over the Arlington streetcar. “Lower-income, racially diverse South Arlington has been counting on the Columbia Pike and Crystal City streetcar projects to deliver a jolt of growth,” says Post columnist Robert McCartney. The county board’s decision to kill the streetcar will therefore “deepen” the “class and racial divisions” that afflict the county.

Yet the people who were against throwing close to $600 million down a couple of ratholes ($358 million for the Columbia Pike streetcar and $227 million for a Crystal City streetcar) aren’t racists. They were just unlike McCartney in their ability to see through the rhetoric and lies used to promote these boondoggles.

Compared with buses, streetcars are inferior in every way but one: they are slower, have fewer seats, add more to congestion, and when one breaks down they all have to come to a stop. The only thing that streetcars excel in is spending other peoples’ money. After seeing the county blow through nearly $1 million on a bus shelter that didn’t even shelter bus riders from the elements, voters were fed up with spending what was supposedly other peoples’ money.

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Light Rail and Streetcars

By | | Mission
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The Antiplanner (along with co-author Jeff Judson) has an op ed in the San Antonio Express News on what San Antonio should do now that it has given up on the streetcar. My presentation to the San Antonio Tea Party on a similar subject is available for download as a 35-MB PDF.

At least some people in San Antonio think the city should adopt a smart-growth plan to deal with the million people who are likely to move to the area in the next 30 years. But roughly a million people moved to the area in the last 30 years without dire consequences (except for the congestion that resulted from planners’ obsession with rail transit while they ignored efficient solutions such as traffic signal coordination), so it isn’t clear why a new plan is needed.

Here are the speaking events I know about for the next few days. First, this afternoon (Monday, September 8), from 4:30 to 6:30 pm, I’ll be speaking about the Pinellas light-rail plan at a public forum at the IRB Sushi Restaurant in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida.

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Streetcars Pro and Con

By | | Mission, Transportation, Urban areas
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Last week, the San Antonio Express News published a pair of op eds for and against construction of a downtown streetcar. In opposition was Representative Lamar Smith, whose congressional district includes parts of both San Antonio and Austin.

A streetcar, he wrote, would be expensive, impractical, and would “likely make congestion worse.” “There are better uses for the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars now slated for streetcars,” Smith observed, adding that most residents of San Antonio seem to oppose it and should at least have the chance to vote on it.

Writing in support of the streetcar was planner Bill Barker of Imagine San Antonio, a smart-growth group. Barker was previously the Senior Management Analyst in the City of San Antonio’s Office of Sustainability. Barker’s argument in favor of the streetcar was simple: the people who oppose the streetcar are evil, so should be ignored.

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TriMet Tramples on People’s Credit; Streetcars Still Late

By | | Transportation
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Portland transit follies are increasingly scrutinized by the local media, something that should have happened years ago when there was still a chance of stopping projects such as the $1.5 billion boondoggle low-capacity rail line to Milwaukie. (The video below shows why it is such a boondoggle.)

Joseph Rose, the superreporter who can walk faster than a speeding streetcar, has found that the fare machines for Portland’s low-capacity rail lines are in service a lot less than the agency claims. Some are down more than 35 percent of the time. Since they give out $175 tickets to people who don’t pay their fare, this can be distressing.

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