[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
Yesterday, using as source material a discursive exposition by Samuel L. Scheib in Reason (October, 2012), we traveled through the birth, apex, and rapid decline of America’s streetcars as urban transport. Now we enter the modern era, and here the grid networks of America and Europe diverge, because World War II left the two societies with very different infrastructure challenges:
Berlin, 1945
Times Square, 1945
Back in Europe, a transformation of street-level rail transit was under way. While Americans were abandoning their cities for suburbs, Germans were busy reconstructing war-torn urban cores and looking for less expensive alternatives to the underground metro.
The result was called stadtbahn, or city rail, which combined the best parts of the streetcar (strassenbahn) and underground (U-bahn). Stadtbahn:
1. Ran at street grade but was isolated from other traffic
2. Had multiple cars, each with one or two double-width doors that would all open together at platforms for passengers to board and alight; and
3. Relied on fares that were paid off the vehicle, checked by roving inspectors.
Those are three critical attributes: speedy transit, speedy ingress/ egress, and speedy payment. A system with those three features can work for commuters; if they are missing, it’s torture, as I can attest from having ridden many a streetcar and many a subway.
I never listen to you when you’re being morbid.
– Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire
Is there something wrong with me?
[For more than four decades I’ve been a city kid, living in Cambridge’s full range of tenures and configurations, and for those four decades and then some, I’ve always commuted via public transit. In addition, I’ve ridden streetcars in San Francisco, Amsterdam, Dallas, Melbourne, and Istanbul, and subways in Boston, New York, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Istanbul. – Ed.]
Trams at Amsterdam’s Centraal Station
For commuters, speed is king.
There is nothing inherently wrong with streetcars as transit. The problem is in how they are deployed. The original streetcar systems were largely straight-line routes serving central business districts. The point was to get people to the CBD, where they would move around on foot. To this day the urban cores that lend their names to multi-county regions remain the most engaging, comfortable, and interesting places in the metro area to walk. The buildings are varied, attractive, and close to the sidewalk, street trees are common, and fenestration allows two-way communication between occupants of the buildings and the people on the street.
Unlike tourists, who make a journey once, commuters make the same journey ten times a week, five hundred times a year. A lost seven minutes per ride is to a tourist a breather; to a commuter, it’s one and a half work weeks, and that is a lot. The Stadtbahn was designed with efficiency in mind:
Stops—stations really—were spaced between a half mile and a mile apart. It was fast, efficient, relatively inexpensive, and entirely new to the transit world. “These were truly vehicles of mass transportation,” says Gregory Thompson, professor of transportation planning at Florida State University and chairman of the Transportation Research Board’s Light Rail Committee.
In the late 1970s North American cities began importing the German adaptation of the American streetcar, first in Edmonton (1978) and then in Calgary (1981). San Diego (1981) was the first American city to construct what was now called light rail transit.
San Diego light rail
I’ve been to San Diego a dozen times, and been to Old Town twice. I’ve never used its light rail.
Then, like a toilet-trained toddler who begins wetting his pants again when a new baby sibling arrives, America forgot everything it had learned from German light rail. Newer streetcars were built to operate in mixed traffic, with frequent stops, using only the front door for boarding while the driver collected fares.
Each of those decisions was wrong; collectively, they have rendered the urban streetcar useless or worse as an intra-city commuting device.
Question as to who had the right of way
“The [contemporary] streetcar is like a bus on rails, but it has no advantages over a bus,” says Thompson. “An effective light rail or streetcar has to be operated like a subway,” but most modern streetcars are not.
Actually, modern streetcars are quite a bit worse than a bus, as exemplified by Boston’s Green Line, which I hereby nominate as the Worst Transit System in America. I can do little better than quote some typical horror stories, found at random on Yelp, such as this hilarious rant by Anya S. from Minneapolis:
I found plenty of “Green Line crash” pictures
I speak three languages. I don’t know enough swear words to describe this pathetic excuse for a public transportation system.
The Green Line goes to all the important places in the city, but getting there can be quite hard, if not impossible.
B: Bad, breakdown, broken, bumpy.
C: Crowded, condemned, crazy, creepy
D: Damaged, dangerous, disastrous, disgusting, dreary, difficult, dirty.
E: Every 50 minutes, evil, erratic
I have no idea how they decide the order of the trains, but when you need a B, you’re going to get an E, E, C, D,D, D, C, E. When you need a C, you will get a D, D, D, B, D, B, E, D, B, E, When you need a D, you will get a B, C, B, C, E, B, B, C, C. And when you need an E, you will get a D, B, D, C,B, B, D, C, B, D.
I pay my fare, but I see so many sneak in without paying. And we’ve really got to eliminate the four Boston University stops. In order to avoid the freshman fifteen, walk your lazy bottom across the bridge
Similarly, Meridith H from Boston adds:
Park Street Station, with ear-splitting decibels
The outdated tunnels make nearly hairpin turns underground, making it impossible to run trains that are longer than three-cars (and those three-car trains are pushing the tunnels’ limits). The unfortunate consequence is that the D Line cannot accommodate the morning rush (running trains more frequently would just lead to a bottleneck and further delays downtown). In the morning, commuters are packed tighter than sardines, even in those three-car trains.
During the afternoon rush, don’t bother trying to board the D Line after Park Street. The train originates at Government Center and is known to fill to capacity at that first stop. Most trains still have room at Park Street (the second outbound stop). Commuters at Boylston are out of luck until later in the evening.
Non-rush hour trains have two cars, but on off hours, the D Line will sometimes run one car trains. Oftentimes, these single cars are also packed with travelers, even during the late night hours. One car trains are also run on the weekends, and can also get crowded (do you see a pattern here?). Occasionally the train will break down, and the conductor must shut down and restart the train at every stop. Also note that a lot of young families live along and use this line; on weekends the crowding is exacerbated by several strollers on board.
If you’re looking for an apartment or home near a transit line, avoid the D Line, especially if you work in downtown Boston and need to get to the office at a set time.
Overall, the D Line gives me a sense of what it would be like to live in Roland Deschain’s fictional universe, where the world has “moved on,” and all technology is a decaying shadow of its former greatness. I hate to rate it so low because I understand that the poor quality is not a result of malicious bad management (we all know that funds, especially those for public transit, are tighter than ever), but the D Line is of truly poor quality.
I’m very adaptable to circumstances
I said I was sorry three times!
– Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire
These horror stories notwithstanding, streetcars appeal to New Urbanist visionaries:
Tampa, Florida, has followed the streetcar’s parabola almost perfectly. At its peak in 1926, the port city (which then had a population of 100,000) had a network of 190 vehicles that delivered a whopping 24 million trips that year across 53 miles of track and 11 routes. The streetcar eventually disappeared for several decades, only to return in much different form in 2003.
In 2006 Tampa’s 578,000 residents took just 520,000 trips on the new, $63 million TECO trolley, or less than one each. Ridership was down 45,000 from the previous year. With an operating speed slower than eight miles per hour, the TECO trolley is in every way a transit mode worse than a bus.
But it’s so cu-u-u-te!
However, unlike its heyday a century back, here the streetcar is making a return not as a utility but as a nostalgic art form.
[Concluded tomorrow in Part 3.]