A streetcar no one desired

You’ll find discussions in transit forums about how the streetcar’s best use is very narrow. Without its own right of way, the performance is poor, and you are often better off with a bus. With its own, then you might be even better off with a subway/ el-train, if you have enough capacity, because trains and pedestrians on grade aren’t a fun combination: Go see what is going on in Florida.

And let’s not forget the cases where it spectacularly fails: St Louis’ Delmar trolley, which cost a ton, had significant harms during construction, selected old timey rolling stock, which was expensive and unreliable, and then not even managed to get significant usage, as it wasn’t connecting anything to anything.

“Europe has more transit!” Yes dear, but they also have more density, making the transit valuable. A whole lot of US transit has very little usage, as there’s minimal activity in the catchment area. And in the US we see people proposing expensive solutions with stations surrounded by single family homes, which now have even fewer people per building than before.

Build transit connecting two very walkable areas: Places where, whenever you walk, all year long, you see a bunch of other pedestrians. And if you must put transit outside those areas, at the very least don’t spend a ton of money on it. If a bike lane fails in a low traffic street, at least all that was wasted was paint. Building train tracks ain’t that easy.

A streetcar operating in mixed traffic without signal priority is quite possibly the worst form of public transit, maybe even worse than a regular bus. It’s painfully slow, can’t navigate around cars parked in its path, and is at risk of collisions with vehicles and pedestrians. The increased capacity and potential for transit-oriented development of light rail vs. a bus is of dubious value if nobody is actually riding the damn thing because it’s too slow and inefficient.

I’m originally from Cincinnati. Public transit there is basically non-existent outside of a very shitty bus system (that almost nobody rides outside of the miserably poor with no ability to afford a car). A number of years ago, they built a token streetcar line in their urban core. It’s very much like the DC Streetcar in the sense that it doesn’t have dedicated lanes or signal priority, so it’s pretty slow. Its limited size also means it really only is usable for the (precious few) people who live downtown or for suburbanites/the extremely rare tourist who is just visiting. But at the very least, it connects many of the city’s major landmarks, and transit is such a novelty there that you’re going to get a lot of people who would never ride the bus if you paid them to at least try the streetcar when they’re downtown.

The DC Streetcar doesn’t have that luxury. It wasn’t in DC’s urban core, it was in a random neighborhood off to the east that the city really wanted to revitalize. It connected a spot vaguely close to Union Station to a random stop in a residential neighborhood a couple miles east. Even with its other faults, maybe you could’ve gotten more people to ride it if it actually spanned a significant portion of the city. It was basically useless unless you lived, worked, or were visiting that exact area, which wasn’t a ton of people compared to the actual downtown or maybe even a place like Georgetown. In a city that actually has really good transit, building a shitty, token little stub of a streetcar line outside of the urban core as a development gimmick is a terrible idea. That’s the sort of thing that should be reserved for car-centric second and third-rate cities that are probably never going to be able to have serious transit. This whole project was flawed from the start.

But I need to go 6 blocks in one direction away from union station!