Washington DC Streetcar Proposal
by Lewis DerkinsJuly 8th, 2008, 9:52 pm
Today on the Metro, I was reading my copy of the Washington Post Express when the following quote jumped out at me:
“getting streetcars…is the single most important issue in DC transportation planning, so we’re writing to Councilman [Graham] for answers.”
This was attributed to BeyondDC.com, a local urban planning blog. I first thought, “Are you kidding? Have you looked at any of the interstates or ridden the Metro lately? Have you ever tried to ride the bus or dealt with the ridiculous tangle of taxi regulations that don’t allow certain taxis to pick you up in certain places and only recently started charging based on time and distance?”
I thought anyone who could make a statement this ridiculous was clearly an idiot. But when I looked into the matter, I noticed there are several groups advocating this, including The American Public Transportation Association, Arlington and Fairfax Counties, the City of Alexandria and lightrailnow.org. It turns out that our local infestation of clueless people extends deeper than I previously thought.
The author of the above comment got heated because a city Councilman, Jim Graham, opposes the diversion of $11 million worth of funds originally earmarked for 11th street bridge construction to pay for a streetcar line in Anacostia. Apparently Councilman Graham made the outrageous suggestion that we should hold a public meeting to determine if this is the right thing to do, and he requested some feasibility studies to see if a streetcar line was a good idea.
The 11th Street Bridge construction is part of an ongoing initiative to revitalize Anacostia, a poor, crime-ridden area of the district, called the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative.
The Anacostia Waterfront Initiative (AWI) is a multi-agency effort to revitalize the areas around the waterfront of the Anacostia River by creating a hub of Economic Development and bringing thousands of new jobs, residents and visitors. The Anacostia Waterfront Initiative envisions:
• environmentally responsible development
• unification of the diverse waterfront areas into commercial, residential, recreational, and open-space uses
• development and conservation of park areas
• greater access to the waterfront, communities, and business corridors
The 11th Street Bridge needs to be replaced because it forces freeway cars onto local roads in its current configuration, and as part of the whole waterfront revitalization, the new bridge will make Anacostia more accessible.
But opponents are lining up right and left to oppose the bridge.
The Sierra Club opposes “adding thousands of cars and trucks to neighborhood streets each day [translation: $$$ for a poor area of the city] and use up funding that could more effectively be spent on streetcars or bike and pedestrian saftey [sic] in our neighborhoods [translation: out to lunch – make rich neighborhoods richer at the expense of poor people].”
This comes on the heels of a survey in the Express yesterday that asked if it is “fair for DC to make it more difficult for commuters to drive into the city.” The results - 55% no, 45% yes – a slim margin.
Respondents were quoted along these lines:
“Progressive Cities like Portland, Oregon have actually found that roadway restrictions actually improve rush hour commutes over the long term” - PC Drew
That’s funny because an Oregon state sponsored 2005 Benchmark Report on traffic congestion shows a steady upward trend in traffic congestion, and experts attribute the only downward tick to economic recession, not roadway restriction.
So what we have is an organized group of advocates rallying for streetcars at the expense of transportation improvements that will revitalize a poor area and bring economic opportunity to some of the neediest citizens in the district.
DC also has a Metrorail system that is sorely in need of expansion. Instead of creating another transportation boondoggle, why don’t we expand the system we’ve got to encompass areas that need service? Then we would have one integrated system and you wouldn’t have to transfer from Metro to bus to streetcar.
Streetcars are limited in their carrying capacity, they carry less people than trains. They are more equivalent to buses, but not as maneuverable. Streetcars are not an ideal solution – they are a nice-to-look-at solution.
Streetcars are also potentially just as dangerous as automobiles. In the late 1800’s to early 1900’s, various companies operated streetcar lines in New York. These lines even gave the Brooklyn Dodgers their name - notice this involves dodging a heavy piece of machinery that can kill you, and it happened so frequently that it was considered an appropriate moniker for one of professional baseball’s first teams. Streetcars contributed to a rate of pedestrian fatalities in NYC in 1910 that was 41% higher than in 2007. Right now, deaths in New York are lower than at any point since recordkeeping began – with automobiles on the roads. The idea that streetcars are our saviors seems shaky.
The argument for mass transit has some legitimate points, but let’s be clear – Streetcars are far from being “the single most important issue in DC transportation planning.” Right now, we have well-to-do people in this city advocating against things that will benefit those in need so that they can have quaint streetcar systems that function mainly as tourist attractions. Councilman Graham is right to call for a public meeting and some feasibility studies to sort this out.
Posted in Bicycle Lanes, Bridges, Highways, Light Rail, Mass Transit, Politics, Spending, Subways |
Bottom line is that if streetcars were a superior mode of transportation, you’d see them all over the U.S.
You don’t.
Bottom line is that if streetcars were as heavily subsidized as roads, highways, automobiles and oil you’d see them all over the US and we’d have cities, towns and suburbs with as many transportation choices and as high a quality of life as places like this…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesintransit/2070996707/
Streetcars are just buses with a smoother ride but without the flexibility to respond to changing travel demand. What a waste.
DC needs to build some highways, but the planners want to shorten I-395.
DC does NOT need streetcars- better would be improved bus infratsure, such as bus stops with useful info and painting some marks on the roads to show where the bus routes go.
http://wwwtripwithinthebeltway.blogspot.com/2007/09/washington-dc-big-dig.html
http://wwwtripwithinthebeltway.blogspot.com/2007/11/i-395-extension-superior-option.html
The streetcar project may well not be worth going ahead with, but your take on the socioeconomic implications of the Sierra Club’s position is backwards. The streetcar demo would have been built entirely in Anacostia, while the 11th Street bridge project would benefit not only Anacostia but also the up-and-coming Navy Yard neighborhood, by connecting the latter to the interstate.
Douglas -
I couldn’t agree with you more. Streetcars don’t add anything here, and will probably only make the traffic worse.
cminus -
I’m confused about your comment. I didn’t mention the potential benefits for the neighborhood, but that’s not because I don’t think they exist. My main point is that in a toss up between a streetcar or the 11th street bridge for Anacostia - the bridge wins. It would be much better for the neighborhood.
Who would come to Anacostia to ride a streetcar? Until they start to bring money into that neighborhood and create businesses and jobs, that is going to be a poor, crime ridden area.
As for the Sierra Club - they oppose the bridge because they oppose any automobile infrastructure advancement. They aren’t concerned with the economic development of Anacostia one way or the other, they want transportation that they deem environmentally friendly.
There is something intangible about the permanency of rail lines that spurs development and ridership, something that buses can never accomplish> Look at the development of Washington D.C., Most early residential sections developed in a logical fashion as a direct result of the street car lines. Every major artery in and out of the city had at least one line. Please include a historical context the next time you discuss your outrage over the building of one new street car line as an experiment. The street car boom of the late 1800’s left us with the D.C. we all know and love! Walkable commercial districts on main arteries. What did the expressway building boom leave us? Useless waterfronts around the kennedy center thanks to an abandoned before it was started innerloop; countless blighted neighborhoods under elevated freeways where no one wants to live. D.C. hopes their new initiative for a street car line will eventually be connected to a complete citywide system in the next 20 years. You can’t build it all at once, can you? I applaud D.C. for starting the program again. The greatest source of pollution in that photograph are the horses. Please feel free to compare the emissions of an automobile carrying one person crossing your 11th St. bridge project to a per person average of a street car with 40 people aboard going the same distance. Which one pollutes more? Feel free to email me a response. Thanks for your time.
What neighborhoods are there beneath elevated freeways?
David -
Washington, DC is a planned city. It’s based on a design by Pierre L’Enfant and it existed in the configuration that currently includes the walkable communities before there were streetcars, and those areas have continued to develop without streetcars.
I agree that people are more likely to take a rail line than a bus line, and that rail lines can help spur development. However, rail lines alone do not guarantee development, and Anacostia, the subject of this post, is a perfect example. It’s a war zone with a Metro stop.
There are plenty of walkable communities in DC, and elsewhere in this country, that are nowhere near rail service - Shirlington is a great example. There is a new trend in development to intergrate walkable town centers into the design.
There are also plenty of communities that have developed along interstates - Tyson’s Corner, Herndon, Reston, etc… they’re not necessarily walkable - but that’s a result of poor planning, not highways, and those places employ tens of thousands of people, so it’s flat wrong to suggest that we’ve gained nothing from the expressway building boom.
In fact, most of the successful walkable communities exist in negihborhoods with access to both metro and highways - indicating that having both would be better than one or the other.
I understand that DC wants to build a citywide system of streetcars, but my point is that when we already have metro and buses, this is redundant and wasteful.
We need to expand the existing systems and make them efficient before we put a nice-to-look-at solution in place. Streetcars carry about the same number of people as buses, and don’t do anything to alleviate the traffic problems that buses are a part of - streetcars use the street and only add another layer to the mix, making the whole problem worse.
As for the comparison of which pollutes more - that really depends on too many factors to acurately compare here. We’re not talking about one car with one person versus one streetcar with 40 people, we’re talking about all of the cars across the 11th street bridge all day and all of the people they carry versus all of the streetcars and how many people they carry all day. If every car carries four people, and the streetcars are empty, which they will probably be since they service Anacostia and Bolling AFB, then the streetcars will pollute more. The streetcars will have to be powered somehow, and the powerplant running them will be polluting, so whether or not they are more environmentally friendly depends on how many people will ride them.
I don’t think many people will be riding them until Anacostia is safer and better developed. Why would I currently want to go from Bolling AFB to Anacostia via streetcar?
The entire proposed line is 1.1 miles.
http://www.ddot.dc.gov/ddot/frames.asp?doc=/ddot/lib/ddot/masstransit/streetcar/dcstreetcar_systemplan_2006-06.pdf&ddotNav_GID=1746
It starts in downtown Anacostia and drops you off at the entrance to Bolling AFB. The base is almost twice as long from end to end as the whole streetcar line, so I can ride this thing one third the way to work? What do I do once I get to the gate at Bolling? Going the other way is just as stupid - Why would I drive a mile to park and ride the streetcar a mile? And why would I go to Anacostia in the first place?
The 11th street bridge project will help make the neighborhood more accessible to outsiders, which in turn makes it more enticing to developers, and that is the only thing that’s going to turn Anacostia around. If you really want a streetcar system in DC, Anacostia is the last place you should use as a test bed - try building the line to Shirlington - from anywhere.
I still maintain that we should really expand the existing mass transit we already have. Streetcars in this town are a tourist attraction - not a necessarry part of the mass transit system.
Why the kneejerk reaction to anything that runs on rails? Pictures from 1910 mean nothing. Go see SF Toronto Seattle and more and find out for yourself.
I don’t get it. DC should spend more than 500 million on the 11th street bridges and not expand transit service. Wait - even if we build the 11th street bridges, DDOT’s own traffic analysis says the poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods alike will have more traffic than they do today within 15 years of ending construction.
We need to build a transportation system that can take people out of the cars instead of building more and more roads.
And what about the fact that one third of DC households do not own cars? Do you think they should pay for these new roads?
Which homes are you going to tear down to build those freeways you’re adovacting for? In case you hadn’t noticed, we’d have to start tearing down buildings to build new freeways because we’re out of room.
Put your money where your mouth is and offer up your house first! Otherwise, you might as well get on the transit bandwagon with the rest of us!!