Visitors to Washington, DC’s gentrifying H Street NE have a new obstacle to contend with: the streetcar that the city began testing on September 24. According to one source, these tests began “right on schedule,” but in fact, says another source, they only began after “months of delays and missed deadlines.” “Years of delay” would be more accurate, as the city actually bought the streetcars in 2006, and they’ve been sitting in storage since 2007 as the city contended with debates over routes and the aesthetics and legalities of overhead wires.
A pedestrian tests the ability of the streetcar to stop quickly.
The tests quickly led to reports that the streetcars would significantly increase congestion in the corridor. “Buses are facing significant delays behind the streetcars,” says the report, and the buses carry eight times as many people per day as is projected for the streetcar (and even more passenger miles as bus trips are longer). Of course, autos are also delayed, but who cares about them? They’re evil.
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The city is so fearful that no one will ride its piddlydink 2.2-mile streetcar line that it has given up plans to charge a dollar a ride, at least initially. It has also scaled back plans to build a 20-mile streetcar system: not it plans a mere 8 miles costing a mere $800 million.
Critics used to say that Washington, DC has the worst city government in the country, but lately cities like Portland have been strong contenders for the title. By engaging in a comedy of errors in building its streetcar system, Washington is attempting to firm up its position in the race.
One of Washington’s problems is that it has some of the worst poverty in the country. The city’s perennial solution is to use tax dollars to gentrify poor neighborhoods in order to attract middle-class office workers while pushing the poor people to the suburbs. H Street, which many people considered too dangerous to visit at night a few years ago, was a part of that gentrification. Regardless of the moral and equity questions of a policy that “fixes” poverty by displacing poor people, the streetcar is likely to be more of a hindrance than a help as it prevents people from reaching shops, restaurants, and other destinations along the route.
Meanwhile, Washington’s Metro system is suffering from declining ridership, probably because deferred maintenance is making the system less desirable to ride. Washington can’t afford to maintain what it has, so it is foolish for the city to build more rail that it won’t be able to afford to maintain.
The WMATA rail is a remarkable mess. Speeding the thing up by closing a few stations and replacing some of the carpeting in the car would go a long way to increasing ridership.
“A pedestrian tests the ability of the streetcar to stop quickly.”
A jaywalker, who appears to be wearing headphones, is trying to win a Darwin Award.
This is apparently a much higher priority than maintaining an adequate, usable public school system.
The picture shows an overhead electrical line providing power to the streetcar. What a modern concept! For $100 million a mile, you would at last expect underground power along the streetcar line. But, I assume, that would add another $100 million – which would make this project even more non-affordable than it already is.
I’ll bet the wires come down in the first snow/ice storm.
The Orange/Blue line passes over the end of the street car line providing a good aerial view of it. You can clearly see how much surface street was lost to the rail line. The power lines look pretty durable, don’t think they are coming down. But you raise a good point, not sure how some of the street will get plowed when curbing seems to ‘box in’ the street car path not leaving enough space for a wheeled snow plow. But I’m sure they thought it all out!!!
Prior to the end of the process that converted the D.C. streetcar network to buses, which ended in 1962, there was an extensive and well-maintained network of electric street railways in D.C. one of the heaviest used lines was along the H Street, N.E./Benning Road corridor, where the streetcar line was built.
But streetcar service in this corridor was converted to buses in 1947, well before Congress ordered the end of streetcars after a long and unpleasant transit strike in 1956 (in those days, Congress ruled the District of Columbia directly with an iron fist). Why was streetcar service ended? Because buses did not gridlock traffic in the corridor, and buses carried as many (or more) patrons.
A corporate raider destroys the streetcar company’s finances, leads to a strike, congress gets pissed and orders the streetcars removed, and you take that as an indictment of steel wheeled vehicles.
ahwr, cp zillicious cited that bus service served more riders more efficiently and, as you put it, and you take it as a queue to invoke the old wives tale that the reason streetcars failed were nefarious forces?
The root problem that rail faces is that it’s capital intensive. It takes a huge amount of resources up front. Because of this even In the best of times streetcar systems, in the best of times they were marginally profitable. Their high capital costs meant that an erosion of service, in the case of streetcars use more than halved in less than a generation, meant they lacked capital to maintain and reinvest in the lines.
That late in their history some folks with low morals got involved is a symptom of the problem. It was not the problem. Countless other business models have endured the same problems and gone on to survive. At the end of the day, streetcars were unable to compete with a superior technology.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/17/nyregion/police-report-mob-infiltration-of-businesses.html
Court ordered the largest shareholder to sell its shares in the DC system. It was a bad market. So a corporate raider scoops up the shares on the cheap. Distributes the company’s large cash holdings as a dividend to shareholders. Unions demand a raise. Company is broke now, so has to increase fares to pay a raise. Congress says no. Union strikes. Congress gets pissed, makes the corporate raider sell his shares and orders the rail network dismantled even though the new owner wanted to keep it, and felt it was economical to do so. Congress said no to bust the union.
Nothing to do with technological differences between steel and rubber wheeled vehicles.
ahwr,
What were the systems revenues in 1920? 1930? 1940? 1950? 1960?
What were the systems expenses in 1920? 1930? 1940? 1950? 1960?
I have a hard time believing that DC somehow was different than any other street car system in the US and saw anything but these things tank. The technology is key. Rail, including streetcars, require an enormous amount of capital ( aka resources ). They can only make money with high volumes.
Unless the DC did the exact opposite of trolley systems in the US, they saw a precipitous drop in ridership from 1920 to 1940, one they could never hope to recover from. With a ridership dropping by over half in a generation, they couldn’t afford to sustain operations let along make the capital investments needed to be viable in the long.
For example, Twin Cities Rapid Transit ridership:
1920 – @22O million
1940 – @105 million