In Brief:
- Washington, D.C., announced recently it will replace its streetcar service with a bus.
- In many cities, a recent resurgence of streetcars is being rethought and in some cases ended.
- There are a few bright spots, however.
American cities already lost their streetcars once. Now, some are losing them again.
In May, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser released a budget that funds operations on the DC Streetcar for two more years. At the end of those two years, however, the streetcar will be replaced by a bus that uses the streetcar’s existing cable lines — what Bowser referred to as a “next-generation streetcar.”
The DC Streetcar has several problems, but they boil down to a basic limitation of rail-based transit: A streetcar can’t move side to side. A train car operating on rails on an urban street has to deal with all the same problems as cars, from traffic jams to accidents and bad parking. In D.C.’s case, the streetcar was reportedly planned without ample space away from parking cars, leading to repeated conflicts and delays.
Ridership on the 2.2-mile line peaked in the first years of service but was never as high as hoped for. Despite gradually growing since a pandemic-era drop-off, city officials have said switching to bus operations will allow for a more “nimble” and less costly expansion of the service.
Washington isn’t the only city rethinking its streetcar strategy. Right now, public transit in general is facing major difficulties, with several big-city systems on the verge of collapse due to budget gaps created during the pandemic. A St. Louis streetcar has had some of the weakest ridership of any service in the country, and now operates a skeletal schedule on a seasonal basis. Some officials have called for years to end Seattle’s South Lake Union streetcar service, which runs just 1.3 miles between South Lake Union and downtown and doesn’t connect with the city’s other streetcar line serving Capitol Hill and other neighborhoods.
One mayoral candidate in Omaha recently campaigned on canceling the city’s streetcar project. Atlanta, which received a federal grant for a downtown streetcar, runs a downtown loop that has been widely criticized for being slow and costly and not providing useful connections.
“In the case of the Atlanta streetcar, I have actually walked that streetcar route faster than the streetcar can go,” says Baruch Feigenbaum, transportation director at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank.
The Wrong Focus
Most cities got out of the streetcar business decades ago, back when cars became common and interstate highways changed commuting patterns. A resurgence was supported with millions in federal grants during the Obama administration. Many streetcar projects launched over that time — including services in Atlanta, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Dallas and Cincinnati — were funded partly through the federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program. Streetcar projects received a total of $279 million in TIGER grants under the Obama administration between 2009 and 2013, with millions more distributed in 2014 and 2015.
Those grants, which funded local infrastructure projects, were focused partly on catalyzing economic development in the wake of the 2008 recession. In the early days of the resurgence, many cities were following the lead of Portland, Ore., which had established a streetcar service as part of a broader redevelopment of an entire neighborhood.
The basic economic argument for the streetcar was that, by investing in seemingly permanent infrastructure like a streetcar, cities could signal to developers that private investment in the area was a good bet. “This was a nexus of developers, architects and elected officials who were preoccupied with how to stimulate dense development to restore urban centers,” says Jarrett Walker, a public transit consultant based in Portland. “The definition of the problem was: What will cause dense buildings to be built?”
But Walker and others believe many cities got the basic formula backward. Successful streetcars in Europe and elsewhere were made possible because of dense urban development, not the other way around. Some streetcar skeptics have argued that the most recent generation of streetcar projects were in fact too focused on spurring development and too little on providing useful transit links.
Additionally, while federal funds are often available for capital construction projects, they’re almost never available for ongoing operations or maintenance. “The basic mistake that is so often being made and that was made here was to think of transit as an amenity, like brick pavers or planter boxes, and not understand that unlike those things, transit comes with an enormous operational cost,” Walker says. “You’re never finished with these things.”
‘Kind of a Joke’
Atlanta’s service was initially meant to extend beyond its current loop and connect to the Beltline, a much bigger park and urban infrastructure project. The expansion has been caught up in broader conversations about the future of the Beltline, including whether it will eventually carry rail transit.
“The streetcar is kind of a joke to a lot of people in Atlanta,” says Darin Givens, an urbanist and public transit advocate there. “It looks like a failure. It looks like a waste of money. It makes it much more difficult to be an advocate for expanding transit.”
Part of the reason the streetcar is “not very relevant to the city,” Givens says, is poor land use around its downtown stations, with lots of vacant buildings and surface parking lots. Extending the streetcar to the Beltline would make it more useful and likely boost ridership, he says.
But the city has lacked a comprehensive vision for the neighborhoods that the streetcar currently serves. “A rail line on the streets in the historic center should not be as irrelevant as the Atlanta streetcar has proven to be,” Givens says.
Jill Toyoshiba/TNS
Where Streetcars Might Work
Still, some systems are expanding. Kansas City’s streetcar, which started out as a short circulator offering free rides to downtown destinations, is opening an extension that will triple the length of the line, linking downtown with university areas and dense residential neighborhoods.
Kansas City does not have high transit ridership or an extensive public transit system, despite a yearslong experiment with free transit fares. But backers say the streetcar has increased patronage at businesses along the corridor.
Kansas City got a $10 million TIGER grant to create the “starter service” and a much larger Capital Investments Grant to help pay for the Main Street Extension. That extension, adding 3.5 miles to the streetcar route, will actually allow the streetcar to replace an existing bus service — the opposite of D.C.’s trajectory. It will still be vulnerable to street traffic. But with dedicated lanes and signal priority on a route that serves many more locations, the extensions will transform the “function” of the streetcar, says Tom Gerend, executive director of the Kansas Streetcar Authority.
“Our whole motivation with our system,” he says, “is to run a lot of service and carry a lot of people.”
