Streetcar Entitlements

The response of Sacramento streetcar advocates to voter rejection of their pet project reminds me of a little boy who has a temper tantrum when he doesn’t get the expensive Christmas present he wants. Like the little boy, it apparently never occurs to the streetcar crowd that the extraordinarily high cost of their scheme was too much for taxpayers to support. Instead, they act like they are entitled to the streetcar, and anyone who doesn’t want to help pay for something they will never use is just a grinch.

Building a streetcar requires tearing up perfectly good pavement that can be used by cars, trucks, and buses and inserting tracks. The cost of one mile of streetcar line can be more than the cost of a mile of a suburban four-lane freeway, yet the streetcar will never move more than 2 or 3 percent as many passenger miles per day as that freeway.

The streetcars themselves have fewer seats than a standard, 40-foot bus, yet cost nearly ten times as much and occupy more street space and so contribute more to congestion. Analysts predicted that a proposed streetcar in Anaheim would reduce the capacity of the streets to move cars by four times as much as the number of cars it would take off the road.

The Antiplanner has shown that streetcars also cost twice as much to operate as buses, which would be fine if they carried twice as many people. But most streetcar lines carry fewer riders, on average, than the average number of riders on buses in the same cities.

Then there is the claim that streetcars promote economic development, a claim first made by officials in my former home town of Portland, Oregon. What those officials don’t say is that they routed the streetcar line through three urban redevelopment districts and then spent more than $500 million in tax-increment finance subsidies to help developers build along the line in those districts.

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The Portland streetcar also went through one Northwest Portland neighborhood that was not a redevelopment district and received no development subsidies. Years later, streetcar proponents could find almost no new developments in that neighborhood, at least no more than would ordinarily be expected to take place over the course of a decade. It was subsidies, not streetcars, the stimulated the new development in the other districts.

Ironically, the Portland streetcar and the subsidized housing along its route have contributed to a decline in transit commuting. Former transit riders who moved next to the streetcar quickly realized that the streetcar was slower than walking, so they now walk and bicycle to work.

According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, between 2008 and 2013, Portland gained 21,500 new jobs. About half drive to work and many of the rest bicycle and walk to work. The number of transit commuters, however, declined by more than 1,000.

The surge in bicycle commuting has created a huge safety hazard. A survey of more than 1,500 Portland cyclists found that two out of three have suffered accidents when their wheels were caught in the streetcar tracks.

So this is what Sacramento can expect if it builds a streetcar: increased traffic congestion; inferior transit service; huge subsidies to developers (or no new development); and safety hazards for cyclists, all at a cost that would be many times greater than simply running buses along the same route. No wonder voters rejected the plan.