Hybrid Streetcar Begins Operations in Tempe

Leave it to the transit industry to take a good idea and distort it beyond recognition or wisdom. That was my reaction when I learned that Tempe, Arizona began operating a hybrid streetcar last week. The three-mile streetcar line cost $200 million, or $67 million per mile.

For a mere $200 million, Tempe now has a streetcar that doesn’t work as well as a bus route that would have cost only about $3 million dollars. Photo courtesy of Valley Metro.

For rolling stock, Tempe elected to buy vehicles that cost $6.5 million apiece. At first glance, they look like other so-called modern streetcars, but have batteries that allow them to operate where there are no overhead wires. This makes them, according to their manufacturer, “the Prius of the modern streetcar market.” Continue reading

St. Louis Streetcar May Live Again

Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Reason magazine to Planetizen seems to be worried about the future of the St. Louis Loop Trolley. Nearly everyone in St. Louis agrees that it was a failure, but the Federal Transit Administration has demanded that the city keep running it or repay the $37 million in federal funds used to build it.

The trolley trundles down Delmar Boulevard. Photo by Paul Sableman.

There is supposed to be a good reason for the federal “claw-back” policy: if local officials know they will be required to fund operations, they might be reluctant to ask for federal funds to build a project in the first place. Unfortunately, elected officials have time horizons measured in election cycles, so they really don’t think far enough ahead to worry about operating costs. Continue reading

Portland Has Too Many Loose Screws

A loose screw caused the Portland streetcar crash that took place a couple of weeks ago, reports TriMet. The screw jammed up the streetcar throttle, making it difficult to impossible to slow the streetcar down.

Of course, this invites all sorts of invidious jokes that the Antiplanner can’t resist making, mainly because it’s nearly midnight and I’ve been working on too many other projects to have written a more incisive blog post for Thursday.

Anyone who watches Portlandia, which some consider to be more of a documentary than a comedy, knows there are a lot of loose screws in Portland. One of the first real examples of loose screws was the decision to build the streetcar line that opened in 2001. There was some plausible justification for light rail, at least at first glance, but streetcars made no sense at all when buses were better at everything streetcars could do except spending lots of money. Continue reading

How Does Kansas City Measure Success?

The $102 million Kansas City streetcar is supposed to be a great success. Projected to carry 2,900 people per weekday in its first year, it actually attracted 6,800 people per weekday in its first few months of operation. In fact, the cars are supposedly so crowded that the city is ordering two more cars.

On the other hand, the city so far hasn’t dared to charge fares. When Atlanta began charging fares, ridership fell more than 50 percent. It is hard to claim success with a straight face when you are giving something away. In addition, the ridership projections did not count event-related riders, while actual ridership numbers include a “large event-related market.”

The streetcars go through downtown Kansas City, an area that was already gentrifying with $6 billion worth of new development before the decision was made to build the streetcar line. Despite claims that the streetcar stimulated this development, the reality is that the streetcar goes through the heart of an urban redevelopment area that has benefited from tax-increment financing. Continue reading

Wave Bye-Bye

One of the projects likely to die if Congress doesn’t overrule Trump’s plan to stop funding new rail transit projects is the Wave, a 2.8-mile long streetcar line proposed by Broward County for downtown Fort Lauderdale. In order to assess the impacts of Trump’s proposal on Fort Lauderdale, the Antiplanner reviewed the environmental assessment (EA) and other documents for the Wave.

For $200 million, Broward County can buy five streetcars like this one and build 2.8 miles of track for them to run on plus a maintenance facility. The county would also have to pay nearly $4.9 million per year operating the streetcars every 7-1/2 minutes. Wikimedia commons photo by Cacophony.

Broward County wants to build the Wave because it believes it will stimulate economic development in downtown Fort Lauderdale, an area that is in the midst of a development boom without the streetcar. According to the EA, the transportation benefits of the streetcar are only about 20 percent of the costs, but the EA claims that the economic development benefits will make up the difference. Continue reading

Free for a Limited Time Four More Years

Washington DC’s H Street streetcar has failed in just about every way possible. The 2.2-mile line cost $200 million, which is enough to build ten to twenty miles of four-lane freeway; it opened years behind schedule; and–despite being free “for a limited time”–it carries a paltry 2,400 people per weekday, which in a sane world wouldn’t be enough to sustain a bus line, much less a more-expensive streetcar. Now, the city has decided to extend that “limited time” for four more years out of a fear that charging a fare would turn away the few riders they now have. Officials were acutely aware that Atlanta’s streetcar patronage fell by nearly 50 percent when it started charging a dollar fare.

Despite these problems, the city is still considering extending the streetcar line. One of the arguments for doing so, in fact, is that if the line is long enough, they might actually attract enough patrons to charge a fare.

It is order levitra however advisable never to take so much of stress in their life. These techniques generally involve the patient stretching and relaxing muscles against a counterforce applied by the osteopath. viagra cipla wikipedia reference All that you need to understand that timely treatment can improve your condition at the earliest. vardenafil india There’s a reason that oysters are known as an aphrodisiac – they contain plenty of zinc. levitra without prescription But isn’t the streetcar stimulating economic development? Hardly. H Street was revitalizing itself long before the streetcar opened. No doubt streetcar advocates will pat themselves on the back because a Whole Foods is opening on the streetcar line next month. But the company signed the lease to move in back in 2013, well before the streetcar opened. Some will say this was in anticipation of the streetcar, but I suspect the company, all of whose urban stores are located next to parking garages, was more motivated by the fact that its customers would have 199 underground parking spaces available for their use. As any commercial realtor knows, parking, not transit, drives retail.

El Paso Falls for Streetcar Scam

El Paso is spending $90 million building a 4.8-mile streetcar line. For that price, they could have built close to 9 miles of four-lane freeway. The streetcar will connect the University of Texas El Paso with downtown, which suggests that they don’t expect many students to go downtown. If they did, they would have provided a bus service, which would have been faster and could move more people per hour.

In the course of paying for the streetcar, the city paid $3.2 million to an email phishing scammer. Two payments intended for the construction company were “misdirected” to another account. The city discovered the scam in early October and tried to cover it up but held a press conference about it yesterday.

The Antiplanner applauds the city for admitting it fell victim to a phishing scam. Now I’m waiting for the city to admit that it fell victim to the streetcar scam. That will be harder. Washington DC, for example, is home to one of the most embarrassing streetcar failures in the country, yet it is already planning another line. El Paso is more likely to argue that the phishing scam it fell for will promote economic development than admit that the streetcar it is building is also a scam.
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Speed-Demon Streetcar

The latest report on Washington, DC’s new streetcar is that it goes somewhat faster than reported last week. On the opening day, a typical run took 29 minutes from one end of the two-mile line to the other. (My report last week said the route was 2.2 miles, but the extra 0.2 miles is non-revenue track to a maintenance facility.)


This photo shows one reason why the H Street streetcar is such a safety hazard: any automobile that is slightly over the white line gets crinkled. Flickr photo by Mariordo59.

The early trips were probably slowed by people wanting to get free opening day rides. During its first week, trips averaged 18 or 19 minutes and the fastest trip recorded by the Washington Post was 17 minutes 9 seconds. That’s almost 7.0 miles per hour. While that’s faster than most people can walk, several DC runners managed to beat it last Saturday.

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Streetcars, Non-QWERTY Typewriters, & Zoopraxiscopes: Technological Equals

Washington, DC opened its streetcar line last Saturday, and in a blog post elsewhere the Antiplanner compared it with a zoopraxiscope. That got the attention of another blogger. In case you missed it, I’m cross-posting my blog post here.

Washington, DC opened its long-delayed streetcar for business on Saturday. Actually, it’s a stretch to say it is open “for business,” as the city hasn’t figured out how to collect fares for it, so they won’t be charging any.

Exuberant but arithmetically challenged city officials bragged that the streetcar would traverse its 2.2-mile route at an average speed of 12 to 15 miles per hour, taking a half hour to get from one end to the other (which is 4.4 miles per hour). If there were no traffic and it didn’t have to stop for passengers or run in to any automobiles along the way, they admitted, it would still take 22 minutes (which is 6 miles per hour).

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A Streetcar Plan Grows in Brooklyn

New York is far denser than any other large American city, with an average of 27,000 people per square mile compared with 2,500 to 4,000 for most American cities. Although the city is criss-crossed by an extensive subway system, there are still some neighborhoods that are more than half a mile from a subway station.

So naturally, what those neighborhoods need is an ultra-low-capacity, high-cost form of urban transit: a streetcar. At least, that’s what Mayor Bill de Blasio thinks: last week, he proposed to spend $2.5 billion building a 16-mile streetcar line connecting Brooklyn with Queens.

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