Tag Archives: streetcars

“When I go shopping,” said Cordelia Chase, the vapid “mean girl” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “I have to have the most expensive thing, not because it’s expensive, but because it costs more.” That seems to be the rule guiding Ramsey County, home of St. Paul, Minnesota.

A streetcar in Kansas City heroically manages to block five lanes of traffic all at once. Photo by Jason Doss.

The county is considering two major alternatives for a transit line from St. Paul Union Depot (SPUD) to the Mall of America (MOA) via Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport (MSP): a modern streetcar, which can move less than 3,000 people per hour at about 16 miles per hour and would cost $2.1 billion; and a bus-rapid transit line that could move 10,000 to 20,000 people per hour supposedly at 18 miles per hour (but I bet it could run much faster) and is estimated to cost $121 million to build and half as much to operate as the streetcar line. Continue reading →

Kansas City voters sensibly rejected spending money on light rail at least seven times. But that common sense apparently didn’t extent to streetcars, which are an even dumber idea than light rail as streetcars are slower than buses, far more expensive, and can’t get out of their own way if one breaks down.

Photo by Jason Doss.

Despite these disadvantages, Kansas City opened a 2.2-mile streetcar line in 2016 that it declared to be a great success. It carried almost 4,800 weekday riders in its first full year of operation, which is about as many as a mediocre bus route but more than streetcar lines in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Dallas, Little Rock, Seattle, Tucson, and Washington. Continue reading →

A video is going around of a Charlotte streetcar being delayed because someone left their car parked on the tracks.

The Antiplanner’s question is: who should be more embarrassed? The idiot driver who left their car on the tracks? Or the idiot transportation planner who thought it was a good idea to spend $150 million on a streetcar that can’t go around obstacles in the road when for a tiny fraction of that money the same (or better) service can be provided by buses that can easily drive around parked cars? Continue reading →

How much does it cost to repair the damage to streets done by streetcar construction when people finally figure out that streetcars are obsolete? In the St. Louis suburb of University City, which spent $51 million building the 2.2-mile Delmar Loop Trolley, the answer is supposed to be $1.5 million. But anything to do with rail transit has cost overruns, so it is likely to be more.

Streetcars are often touted as generators of economic development, but the Loop Trolley went through a business district that was already thriving. Photo by Paul Sableman.

The Obama administration loved streetcars so much that it gave $25 million of “urban circulator/livability project” funds to St. Louis to cover half the cost of this streetcar. Though that was in 2010, construction didn’t actually begin until 2015. Though construction was completed in November 2016, operations didn’t begin until November 2018. The streetcar ran for just over a year, but having attracted hardly any riders, it ran out of money in December 2019. Continue reading →

El Paso’s transit agency, Sun Metro, opened 4.8 miles of streetcar lines last November, attracting 37,000 riders in November and 32,000 in December. Then it started charging fares, and ridership fell to 14,000 in January and 9,000 in February.

El Paso’s streetcar rust in the desert, tempting nostalgia buffs to seek government subsidies for restoration. Flickr photo from Visit El Paso.

In 1974, El Paso became the last city in the United States to replace its streetcar lines with buses. Its last line connected the city with Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, and it only kept running streetcars on the route because the Customs Service said it was easier to deal with border crossings on streetcars than on buses. Continue reading →

Portland’s streetcar is slow and expensive, ridership is stagnant, and fare recovery is negligible. So obviously the solution is to extend the streetcar line. At least, that’s what Portland’s Bureau of Transportation proposes.

Streetcar ridership peaked in 2016 at 4.86 million trips per year. In 2018 they had fallen slightly to 4.79 million. Although the fare is nominally $2, actual revenues amount to just 17 cents per trip. Of course, those revenues don’t come close to covering costs, which average $3.50 per rider. The city spends $39 per streetcar revenue mile running it, where TriMet buses cost only $12.50 per mile.

Despite these flaws, the report proudly announces that the city has received a $1 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration to study the possibility of extending the streetcar a little over a mile to Montgomery Park, which is not a park but a former Montgomery Wards warehouse. The terminus would be near Forest Park, which is a 5,100-acre park with hiking trails in Portland’s West Hills. Continue reading →

Milwaukee opened a new streetcar line at the beginning of last November, and it is attracting fewer than 2,300 trips a day. Since it makes 144 one-way trips a day, that’s an average of fewer than 16 people per trip.

Fares are currently zero, so if they ever start charging fares — they’re supposed to after a year, but some that were supposed to eventually charge are still free — ridership will fall even lower. Despite this, the city has already committed $20 million to extend the line (though the Federal Transit Administration rejected an application for matching funds).

Meanwhile, in St. Paul, momentum is growing to have a streetcar there as well. “I’ve never met anyone who is nostalgic for a bus,” says an official with the St. Paul Streetcar Museum. Of course, if you were nostalgic for buses, you wouldn’t go to a streetcar museum, would you? Instead, you might go to the Museum of Bus Transportation in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Or, closer to St. Paul, you might go to Hibbing, Minnesota, birthplace of Greyhound and home of the Greyhound Bus Museum. Continue reading →

Milwaukee and Oklahoma City are both planning to open new streetcar lines later this year, so it is worth taking a look at how the dumbest form of transit is working in other cities. The table below shows all of the streetcar lines reported in the July, 2018 National Transit Database spreadsheet. Ridership numbers are shown for January and July and annual growth compares the last full year (August 2017-July 2018) with the year before that.

Continue reading →