Washington’s H Street streetcar line may be shut down before it even begins operation. In testing since last fall, the line has already experienced collisions with 11 automobiles and one railcar spontaneously combusted.
DC has already spent $200 million on the project and once had planned to spend a total of $2 billion on streetcar lines in the district. But, aside from accidents, testing revealed that the streetcars created major congestion problems and slowed down buses that carry people to work on H Street. The city predictably blames most of the accidents on the auto drivers, but if the city hadn’t put the streetcar there, most of the accidents never would have happened.
“I’m not going to ask for money from the citizens of this jurisdiction nor from this council for something I can’t manage,” says the director of the district’s Department of Transportation. The city has asked the American Public Transportation Association–hardly an unbiased source–to review the streetcar project.
