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A Streetcar Named Liar

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Everything you’ve heard from the city of Portland about its streetcar lines is a lie. That seems to be the conclusion of the latest review of the operation by the city of Portland’s own city auditor.

Portland Streetcar, the private organization contracted to run the streetcar for the city, claims to have met the city’s on-time goals. The audit finds that it hasn’t. Portland Streetcar claims to have increased ridership by 500,000 riders in fiscal year 2014. The audit finds that that Portland Streetcar overstated ridership by 19 percent and actually ridership was 1.1 million trips less than claimed.

The auditor is also unimpressed by claims that the streetcar has generated billions of dollars worth of economic development. “Based on studies [Portland Bureau of Transportation] provided to us,” says the audit, “we conclude this research has yet to describe a causal relationship of how streetcars may affect economic development.” In other words, it’s just another fabrication.

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Streetcar Troubles

By | | Transportation
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The Washington Post has a story on Oregon’s United Streetcar company, which is supposedly geared up to manufacture 24 streetcars a year but has only managed to sell 18 and delivered all of them late. The story comes complete with photos of federal officials like Tim Geithner wearing ill-fitting sack suits like soviet commissars as they inspect the heavily subsidized factory.

For the Post, the story is not so much that the streetcars were delivered late, or that they were ineptly built, or that they cost $4 million while the Czech streetcars that they copied only cost $1.9 million. Although the article alludes to these problems, what appears to upset the Post the most is that giving millions of dollars in subsidies to an Oregon company that never built a transit vehicle in its life didn’t miraculously create a manufacturing powerhouse that is exporting streetcars all over the world. For some reason, other countries don’t want to pay twice as much for streetcars that are delivered late and fail to live up to promised specifications.

United Streetcar only managed to sell streetcars to three cities–Portland, Tucson, and Washington, DC–and they all signed contracts before the company developed its track record of late deliveries. Given that record, it isn’t surprising that other cities that are thinking about streetcars aren’t planning to buy Oregon.

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Skeptical about Streetcars? You’re a Racist!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Count on someone at the Washington Post to play the race card in the postmortems over the Arlington streetcar. “Lower-income, racially diverse South Arlington has been counting on the Columbia Pike and Crystal City streetcar projects to deliver a jolt of growth,” says Post columnist Robert McCartney. The county board’s decision to kill the streetcar will therefore “deepen” the “class and racial divisions” that afflict the county.

Yet the people who were against throwing close to $600 million down a couple of ratholes ($358 million for the Columbia Pike streetcar and $227 million for a Crystal City streetcar) aren’t racists. They were just unlike McCartney in their ability to see through the rhetoric and lies used to promote these boondoggles.

Compared with buses, streetcars are inferior in every way but one: they are slower, have fewer seats, add more to congestion, and when one breaks down they all have to come to a stop. The only thing that streetcars excel in is spending other peoples’ money. After seeing the county blow through nearly $1 million on a bus shelter that didn’t even shelter bus riders from the elements, voters were fed up with spending what was supposedly other peoples’ money.

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Columbia Pike Streetcar Cancelled

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The county board for Arlington County, Virginia, has voted four-to-one to cancel all planning for a proposed $358 million, 7.7-mile streetcar line along Columbia Pike. This should also effectively shut down planning for a Crystal City streetcar that was projected to cost $227 million.

The decision came on the heels of board member John Vilstadt’s re-election with 56 percent of the vote. Despite being an incumbent, Vilstadt was running at a disadvantage as an independent in a strongly Democratic district. Streetcar supported had hoped that Vilstadt’s election in a special vote last spring was “a fluke.” Yet, by making the streetcar the centerpiece of his campaign, he was able to prevail against a strong Democratic challenger.

Local political experts predicted predicted that Vilstadt’s decisive victory would kill the momentum behind the streetcar. “There is no way” that board members who are up for re-election next year can win “if they’re running as pro-streetcar candidates,” said Ben Tribbett. Tribbett’s prediction has come true. At least three of the other Arlington board members could read the election returns and agreed with the board chair that “the only way to move forward together … is to discontinue the streetcar project.”

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H Is for Headache

By | | Transportation
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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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Streetcar and Light-Rail Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
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Kansas City voters rejected a plan to build an extensive streetcar system. The city already has plans to build a short “starter” line, and the mayor wanted to build more. But voters agreed that buses were cheaper and more sensible. This is the ninth time Kansas City voters have rejected rail transit.

Meanwhile, the Antiplanner has given several presentations in the Twin Cities about rail transit and associated land-use planning. These presentations can be downloaded, with a summary of my narration in the “notes” section, as either Zip files that include several short videos or smaller PowerPoint files that leave out the videos.

  • Presentation to the SW Metro Tea Party: Zip file (111 MB) or PPT file (32 MB)
  • Presentation to Daytons Bluff neighborhood: Zip file (82 MB) or PPT file (39 MB)
  • Presentation to Metro North Chamber of Commerce: Zip file (98 MB) or PPT file (15 MB)

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No Streetcar for San Antonio

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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After being in office just one week, San Antonio’s new mayor, Ivy Taylor, proposed Monday that the city withdraw the $32 million it had promised to build a new $280 million, 5.9-mile streetcar line. Moreover, she persuaded Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, the region’s leading streetcar proponent, to join her in declaring the streetcar plan dead. Wolff has previously said that he is too busy waging a re-election campaign against a streetcar opponent to campaign in favor of the streetcar plan.


A planner’s fantasy of what a streetcar would look like near the Alamo in San Antonio.

The announcements come amid controversy over an initiative petition submitted by streetcar opponents asking that voters be allowed to approve or reject the plan in November. The city has tentatively rejected most of the signatures, saying they were improperly collected. The petitioners have a legal opinion saying the city is reading the law incorrectly. The new mayor may be hoping that, in announcing the plan is dead, the demand for a vote will go away. If the city rejects the petitions now and opponents go to court, the measure may have to go to voters in a later election.

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San Antonio Petition May Stop Streetcar

By | | News commentary, Transportation
23 Comments

San Antonio streetcar opponents submitted a petition today to allow voters to decide whether the region’s transit agency, VIA, should spend $280 million on a 5.9-mile streetcar. They needed about 20,000 signatures, and submitted well over 26,000 of which they personally pre-verified nearly 24,000.

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Unfortunately, this petition still has several hurdles to leap. First, the city is claiming that signature gatherers didn’t follow proper procedures; the petitioners claim they did, and that the procedures the city wants them to follow only apply to recall petitions. Second, even if the measure makes it to the ballot and is approved by voters, VIA argues that it won’t be bound by the results.

Castro Nomination Threatens Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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A few weeks ago, President Obama nominated San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro to be the next Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. While some suggest that this may be bad for Castro’s future political career, he wouldn’t be the first mayor to be tapped for a cabinet position and then return home to be elected to higher office.

What seems more certain is that Castro’s departure from San Antonio weakens political support for the city’s misbegotten streetcar plan. A couple of years ago, when the Antiplanner wrote a critique of a proposed San Antonio steetcar, proponents believed they had everything wired to build the line.

Opponents, however, hammered away at the proposal, arguing, among other things, that when voters rejected any funding for light rail in 2000, they were also rejecting streetcars. At that time, and until just a couple of years ago, the Federal Transit Administration classified streetcars and light rail as the same thing.

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$80 Million a Mile for a Piece of Junk

By | | Transportation
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The latest cost estimate for the proposed 4.5-mile Arlington, Virginia streetcar has risen to $358 million, or $80 million per mile. This puts it in the same ballpark as light rail, as current light-rail projects in Dallas, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Salt Lake City are costing $50 million to $80 million per mile (though the average for all current light-rail projects is nearly $110 million).


A model of the proposed Arlington streetcar. Local taxpayers will be lucky if the rail supporters in the Arlington County Department of Environmental Services will be satisfied playing with the model instead of forcing taxpayers to build the real thing.

What would Arlington get for all this money? Proponents, such as Arlington County manager Barbara Donnellan, still call streetcars “high-capacity transit” even though streetcars have about the lowest capacity of any transit system imaginable. Heck, minivans can probably move about as many people per hour as streetcars.

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