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

By | | Transportation
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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. Continue reading →

Portland Streetcar Jumps the Tracks

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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A Portland streetcar went off the tracks last week, totaling three automobiles and injuring at least two people. When the streetcar came to a stop, it completely blocked Grand Avenue, one of Portland’s most important north-south streets, and it took authorities close to six hours to unblock it.

With their slower speeds, streetcars would seem to be less dangerous than light rail, which kills roughly 12 people per billion passenger miles, about twice as many as automobiles in urban areas and three times as many as buses. According to the Federal Transit Administration’s safety data, streetcars have killed an average of one person per year since 2011, but most of those have been in Philadelphia, which I consider to be more like light rail than streetcars.

But Portland’s 30-seat streetcars weigh about twice as much as a 40-seat bus, which makes them far more prone to damage other vehicles. According to one rather sarcastic series of articles, when new Portland’s streetcar killed a few people and the tracks are still fairly dangerous to cyclists. Continue reading →

FTA Funds Tacoma Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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Sound Transit, which has tens of billions of dollars to build light rail in the Seattle area, announced this week that the Federal Transit Administration granted $75 million to an extension of the Tacoma streetcar line. This was a surprise since the administration’s policy has been not to fund any projects that don’t have signed grant agreements, and by that criteria the Tacoma streetcar doesn’t qualify.

The existing 1.6-mile Tacoma streetcar opened in 2003. Projected to cost $50 million, it ended up costing more than $80 million, or about $50 million per mile (about $66 million a mile in today’s dollars). The project is political pork: built to make Tacoma taxpayers feel like they are getting their fair share of the billions going to build light rail. This is why Sound Transit never calls it a streetcar, instead calling it “Link,” the same name it applies to light rail in Seattle. But the Tacoma line uses the same equipment and trundles along at the same slow speeds as the Portland streetcar.

The Tacoma streetcar has never collected a fare, yet in 2016 it carried fewer than 3,200 riders a day. That’s more than streetcars in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, and the District of Columbia, but fewer than Seattle or Portland (which admittedly are longer lines). The new project will extend the existing line by 2.4 miles at a cost of $215 million or about $90 million a mile. Continue reading →

Wave Bye Bye

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

As predicted, Nashville voters have rejected a multi-billion-dollar light-rail plan by a margin of 64 to 36 percent. Some people are wondering “Now what?” But the reality is that no major changes are needed to Nashville transit except to figure out a way to back out of long-term obligations in the face of declining ridership.

Less predictable, it appears the Fort Lauderdale Wave streetcar project also died yesterday. The project, which was promoted by Broward County, received federal, state, and local funding. But when construction bids were opened last October, they came in much higher than expected. Skeptical members of the city council got the county to agree that the city could withdraw from the project if it didn’t appear it could be built for less than a 25 percent cost overrun.

The county put it out for bids a second time and the low bid was $2.2 million over the 25 percent threshold. As a result, the city commission voted yesterday to save its money. Continue reading →

Cancel the Seattle Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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It’s at least 80 percent over budget, as it was supposed to cost $110 million and is now expected to cost more than $200 million. Ridership is well short of expectations. And projections of operating costs are far greater than the original claims. So Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan has halted construction on an expansion of the city’s streetcar lines.

This is certainly a brave step considering the enormous pressures to distribute tax dollars to worthy potential campaign donors. Plus streetcar advocates warn that halting and then restarting construction could add even more millions to the cost.

But those things shouldn’t matter. “The City of Seattle has a critical obligation to spend taxpayer dollars wisely and an equal obligation to transparency,” says Mayor Durkan. And at this point, the wisest thing to do would be to cancel the streetcar completely. Continue reading →

Seattle Fails the Streetcar Intelligence Test

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Streetcars are supposed to be the least-expensive form of rail transit, yet Seattle is spending $177 million building a 1.2-mile streetcar line. At $147.5 million a mile, that’s more expensive than many light-rail lines.

The 1.2-mile City Center Connector will connect the 1.3-mile South Lake Union Trolley and the 2.5-mile First Hill streetcar.

Moreover, the plan of the city (which is building the streetcar) appears to be overly optimistic about both ridership and operating costs. The city already has two streetcar lines, and the new one will connect the two. But since the two existing lines parallel each other, connecting them — creating a U-shaped route — doesn’t necessarily make them a lot more useful to riders. As shown in the map above, the connecting line will give riders more access to downtown, but no one except a few streetcar enthusiasts is going to want to ride from one end of the South Lake Union line to the other end of the First Hill line. Continue reading →

Let’s Start Scrapping Streetcars

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
9 Comments

Good news: Washington DC is thinking of scrapping its streetcars, which have been in service for just two years and whose ridership is still so poor — about 3,000 weekday riders — that the city is afraid to start charging fares.

Bad news: City officials are only thinking of scrapping the streetcars and not the tracks; instead, they wants to replace the streetcars with brand-new ones because it’s so hard to get spare parts for the ones they have. Each new 30-seat streetcar would cost roughly ten times as much as a 40-seat bus, but cost is no object when you are playing with other people’s money.

The modern streetcar craze, which was only partly fueled by federal funding (Portland, Tacoma, and Washington purchased their first streetcars without federal support), provides a lesson for the writers of Trump’s infrastructure plan. They hope that giving local, not federal, politicians the authority of where to spend money would result in better decisions. In fact, local politicians are just as willing to waste money on gleaming new urban monuments as federal ones. Continue reading →

Dublin Learns the Joys of Streetcars

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

It cost $433 million for 3.66 miles, or $118 million a mile. It’s slower than walking, at least for some trips. It significantly increased street congestion and has had an especially “negative impact on other forms of public transport,” namely buses. What is it? Dublin’s new Cross-City Tram.


Note that the videographer had to speed up some scenes so people wouldn’t lose patience with watching the slow-moving tram.

Touching and intimacy heighten our enjoyment of viagra on line djpaulkom.tv life. viagra super store The doctors recommend use of cheap Kamagra that is an inability to get or sustain hard erection sufficient for sexual activity. Some web chemists offer ED sample pack that contains different drugs for tadalafil sales online impotence. This may take as long as ten minutes but as the people grow with their age the leans also begin dysfunction and further leads to vision problems. viagra in india Instead of being divided into three segments on four wheelsets, like many so-called modern streetcars in the states, the Dublin trams are seven segments on eight wheelsets. That means they can carry 358 people. It also means that, much of the time, they will run even emptier than American streetcars, since it is not easy to reduce the number of segments in a car for low-use periods. Continue reading →

St. Louis Streetcar Broke Before It Begins

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
3 Comments

St. Louis has spent $51 million building a 2.1-mile streetcar line that may never run because the company hired to operate it is almost out of money. In 2015, St. Louis County gave $3 million to the Loop Trolley Company, which the company used to hire managers, drivers, and other employees to run the trolleys that were supposed to begin operation in spring, 2016.

However, the start of operations has been repeatedly delayed, most recently to mid-winter, 2018. Now the trolley company says it will be out of money before it can start, and it is demanding another $500,000 before a single streetcar turns a wheel in revenue service.

At the other end of the state, the Kansas City streetcar was supposed to have been a great success, carrying an average of Kamagra oral jelly sildenafil cheapest also gives side issues. If you check the market today, you’ll find hundreds of herbal enhancement pills boasting good performance level. cheap viagra canada Symptoms may vary and are largely dependent on your vardenafil generic emotional state. This theme came from working with so many managers who bought our training programs or hired our consultants to implement wholesale sildenafil such things as customer-service programs, quality-improvement processes, and culture changes. >5,843 trips per day, but that’s because it is free. The Loop Trolley Company expects to charge $2 per two-hour period. That’s in the range of the Little Rock streetcar, which carried 153 trips per weekday in 2016, or the Tampa streetcar, which carried 645 trips per weekday. These two lines each cost taxpayers more than a million dollars a year to operate. Continue reading →

The Damage Done by Federal Funding

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
5 Comments

Despite the fact that the Trump administration has said that will not sign more full-funding grant agreements for streetcar and light-rail projects, and there are no grant agreements for a Ft. Lauderdale streetcar, someone in the Department of Transportation gave Ft. Lauderdale nearly $61 million for the city’s inane streetcar project. When I asked DC transportation experts about it, the only answer I could get is that the department was “forced” to do so.

So now it is absolutely clear that transit capital grants are given out solely for political purposes, not because they make any economic or transportation sense. While the case could be once made that these projects went through some kind of screening process, today (thanks largely to rule changes made during the Obama administration) the only screening is a fill-in-the-blank checklist.

The good news is that Ft. Lauderdale opened the bids for the streetcar construction that was originally projected to cost $142 million, and it now appears the costs will be closer to $270 million. The bad news is that the city will now be desperate not to give up the $61 million from the feds and will find some way to build it anyway. Continue reading →