The Consultant Report on Why Seattle’s
Latest Streetcar Line Is Late Is Late

Construction of Seattle’s latest streetcar line is late and over budget, so the mayor halted construction and hired a consultant to find out why. Now the consultant report itself is late.

The city knew that the problem had to do with the fact that construction turned out to be more complicated than the city anticipated. Now the consultant says that figuring out the problem turned out to be more complicated than the consultant anticipated.

Seattle shouldn’t have had to pay a consultant $146,000 to figure out the problem. The problem is simple: streetcars are stupid. They are obsolete technology. When invented in 1888, they averaged 8 mph. Now, after 130 of technological improvements, they average 8 mph. The tracks intrude into the streets, creating problems for other utilities and cyclists. When one breaks down, the others can’t go around it.

Not only is the new line now expected to cost at least a third more than originally anticipated, Seattle’s first streetcar line has gone way over its operating budget. It was budgeted to cost about $3 million to operate in 2017, but cost an extra $0.5 million. Fare revenues are only about a half million dollars a year.

As if that isn’t bad enough, the city has recently discovered that the streetcars it ordered for the new line may be too big to fit. It ordered the cars from a different manufacturer from the one that made the cars it already owns, and the new cars are longer and heavier, which may make them too big to fit into the city’s streetcar maintenance facility.

Seattle’s streetcar experience mirrors, on a tiny scale, New York City’s subway system. A few months ago, the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority announced it would cost $37 billion to rehabilitate the subways and, if it had the money, it would take two-and-a-half years to complete the job. Now, after the agency has spent a year and a “mere” third of a billion dollars tinkering at the edges of the problem, the New York Times, like a petulant child, complains that the trains are still late.
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Meanwhile, New York Governor Cuomo, who is nominally in charge of New York transit systems because some of them (though not the subway) cross municipal boundaries, spent $30 million installing blue and yellow (supposedly the state’s colors) stripes of tiles in a subway station when white would have been sufficient. That shows he has his priorities straight!

Beyond the bickering, the real problem is that all forms of rail transit are expensive — far more expensive than buses. But they also provide lucrative and endless contracts for a wide variety of consultants who always recommend that new lines be built before old ones are repaired.

Politicians continue to support wasteful projects like the Seattle streetcar because they can get away with it. As the American Public Transportation Association gleefully reported, a recent survey found that 74 percent of Americans support more subsidies to transit, no doubt hoping that other people will ride it so they can drive on uncongested roads. In an age of rapidly declining transit ridership, this is about the only good news that APTA can report: that it continues to hoodwink a majority of Americans into thinking that transit subsidies are worthwhile.

“An 8 a.m. commute where everyone is driving in a car by themselves cannot be Denver’s future,” proclaimed Denver’s mayor Michael Hancock in his 2018 state of the city address, which is pretty much a repeat of what he said in his 2017 address. But the reality is that most people do drive alone to work: 76 percent in the city of Denver, nearly 82 percent in the Denver urban area. All the rail lines Denver has built since 2000 haven’t helped: in 2000, just 71 percent of city of Denver commuters and 79 percent of urban area commuters drove alone to work.

Instead of writing unrealistic plans for cities in which people behave the way the mayor would like them to, it makes more sense to plan for cities in which people behave the way that works best for those individuals. And that means spending no more money on obsolete forms of travel.