DC Streetcar Still Not Open for Business

Speaking of poorly managed governments, Washington, DC’s streetcar, which has been planned for at least nine years, won’t be carrying any revenue passengers in 2015. That’s news because, just a couple of months ago, the city promised that it would be in business by the end of this year.

The string of embarrassing accidents, fires, and other problems have proven so embarrassing that someone has rewritten the Simpson’s monorail song for the DC streetcar.

Despite all those years of planning, the streetcar continues to be accident-prone, partly because the streetcar route is too close to a parking strip and partly because streetcars, unlike buses, can’t swerve around poorly parked cars. When the streetcar hit a city police car that was parked over the white line, the city suspended the streetcar driver for five days without pay, but otherwise DDOT blames the motorists for improper parking. Of course, it wasn’t the motorists who decided to run inflexible, 30-ton vehicles down a busy street just inches from a parking strip.

Not all of the collisions have been with parked cars. Just last month, one of the streetcars ran into an articulated bus. H Street, where the streetcar tracks go, is used by lots of Metro buses. The Antiplanner suspects DDOT blames the bus driver while Metro blames the streetcar.

In preparation for the eventual opening, DC police are handing out “tickets like crazy” to auto drivers who park their cars a millimeter over the white line. But keeping cars on their side of the line won’t stop drivers and driver-side passenger from opening their doors in front of the streetcar.

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Washington, DC has been known as the nation’s worst city government, but these problems go beyond just bad management. Instead, they are representative of problems with the nation’s transit industry as a whole.

First, the industry is obsessed with expensive, obsolete technologies that don’t make sense in America, or indeed anywhere in the world outside of a handful of extremely dense core cities such as New York. Buses are cheaper, faster, safer, and can be just as attractive to riders as streetcars if they include such amenities as WiFi, comfortable seats, and frequent service.

Second, the fact that transit agencies typically get just a quarter of their revenues from transit riders means they have lost sight of their market in their rush to chase after tax dollars. Transit agencies are no longer particularly interested in gaining new riders, but only in gaining political support from powerful interest groups such as unions and rail contractors who will help expand their budgets.

Third, and as a result of reason two, transit agencies and other transportation departments have suffered mission creep. DDOT stands for District Department of Transportation, not District Department of Economic Development. Yet instead of providing transit systems that will cost-effectively transport large numbers of people, DDOT and other cities and transit agencies across the country are building urban monuments that will supposedly promote economic development.

The economic development argument is itself a hoax and merely a way to justify spending more money moving fewer people. DC’s H Street has already gentrified, and the businesses on the street would be perfectly happy if there were no streetcar bashing their customer’s automobiles.

As the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Marc Scribner, argues, the best thing DC can do now is declare victory and walk away from the streetcar project. Scrapping the line sounds foolish after spending $200 million, but it makes more sense then spending untold millions more operating it, maintaining it, and paying off the damages from future collisions. While DC is unlikely to follow Scribner’s advice, we can at least hope that it won’t build any more of the 37 miles of streetcar lines that the city had planned. At $100 million per mile, the cost of such a system would be more than enough to repave all 1,500 miles of streets in the city, which would do far more for transportation than building more Disney-type rides.