[Continued from yesterday’s Part 2 and the preceding Part 1.]
In the first age of streetcars, 1875 to 1925, as documented by Samuel L. Scheib in Reason (October, 2012), they revolutionized cities as a form of efficient, clean, cheap urban transport – and in remaking cities, they enabled us to invent suburbs. In their second age, 1945 to 1995, streetcars gradually went extinct, superseded by bus networks which are superior in every way when it comes to high-volume daily commuting for locals. Now, in the post-information-city age, some streetcar networks are re-emerging as recreational amenities, whose charm lies in their idleness, their ability to slow down the hurly-burly of commuting and allow the world to tootle by one’s vision.
Practicality? That’s not a stop on this line
A 2007 Wall Street Journal article titled “A Streetcar Named Aspire: Lines Aim to Revive Cities” described TECO as a “dud” but noted that the project’s proponents attributed $450 million of development to the route, which at that point ran for 2.4 miles. One skeptical Hillsborough County commissioner quoted in the story said the streetcar “goes from no place to nowhere.” He was not exactly right: The route runs from historic Ybor City to the Florida Aquarium, then Channelside Drive (where cruise ships arrive), then on to the Tampa Convention Center, terminating at the edge of downtown. So it goes places, just not where any resident needs to go.
In fact, according to the Journal’s article, more than half Tampa’s riders are tourists.
On weekdays, TECO does not make its first trip until noon. Is that any way to run a transit system?
Does this make the streetcar system yet another form of cargo-cult economic development? Will it take its place alongside Scranton’s parking garages, New Jersey’s Meadowlands complex, and possibly London’s Olympic Park?
Oh, look, we have created enhancement.
– Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire
I know I fib a good deal
Halfway through this post, that’s what I thought, but on the other hand, if we know the purpose is to entertain by an anachronistic mode of slow-paced transport, then the system’s cost-benefit has to be measured not in the number of riders who take it, but in the number of dollars that flutter out of their wallets while they are riding or stopping.
Nostalgia is the main power source of the streetcar craze.
Melbourne, Australia: cute and useless streetcars
Nostalgia draws tourists; that’s a legitimate purpose most clearly demonstrated by San Francisco’s cable cars, which have long been a tourist attraction made more appealing by San Francisco’s famous and walk-hostile hills.
How else do we explain the use of historical reproductions and expensive old Birney and PCC streetcars in so many systems? Still, these projects roll on a pair of rails called “downtown development” and “tourism.”
Ironically, the streetcar has been revived not because it is fast but because it is slow, and hence it provides a tourist-friendly means of navigating a city’s shopping and recreational amenities, and encouraging tourists both to come to our city in the first place, and then to spend a lot of money when they do.
The urban street cred of Portland notwithstanding, even there the streetcar is not really mass transit. The City of Portland owns the 3.9-mile-loop streetcar, not TriMet, the transit agency that otherwise runs buses and light rail for the Portland area. The Portland Streetcar’s raison d’etre is, like the Tampa TECO line’s, downtown development and tourism, not transportation.
It’s all so shiny
As Mr. Scheib points out, for half a century local governments have been trying to lure people back to downtowns, using any means necessary. Many of those lures began with a false supposition based on observed correlation of the role of cars.
Your limo is here, Dr. Evil
Suburbs flourished and cities declined after World War II, when car usage expanded. Ergo (false syllogism), cars that killed the cities. If we get rid of the cars, the cities will revive.
[Perhaps because I live in Cambridge and work in housing, I know many people who tend reflexively to believe this, tut-tutting about SUVs and carbon emissions and fuming, as it were, about the auto’s inherent culpability. Maybe this is why. – Ed.]
Beginning in the early 1970s, a number of cities closed downtown streets to automobile traffic in an attempt to create vibrant pedestrian malls where people could enjoy the urban space, easily crossing the street to destinations on the other side without fear of being run over by a car. Sheboygan, Wisconsin (Harbor Center, 1972), New London, Connecticut (Captain’s Walk, 1973), Tacoma, Washington (Broadway Plaza, 1974), and Scranton, Pennsylvania (Wyoming Avenue Plaza, 1979) were a few of the many cities that unsuccessfully pioneered this method of luring people downtown.
Though those may have been good ideas, they faced two problems:
- The Seventies were a catastrophic decade for cities: industrial cores were dying and the modern information cities had not yet been born.
- While a walkable downtown might make me spend more money once I got to town, it wouldn’t tip the balance to make me want to visit. (In point of fact, I’ve never been to any of those cities.)
As a result, the walkable downtown simply became a reinforcing amenity for cities that already had walk-friendly populations and walkable attractions.
Not only walkable, served by four subway lines
The pedestrian mall generally did not work out well. The exceptions include Aspen, Boulder, and Denver, Colorado; Boston, Massachusetts; Madison, Wisconsin; Charlottesville, Virginia; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Burlington, Vermont; and San Antonio, Texas. All of these cities had an already strong downtown, a university presence, or both, except for San Antonio, which turned a storm water retention canal into a spectacular, singularly attractive urban water feature (having the Alamo nearby probably didn’t hurt).
San Antonio’s Riverwalk, we should also observe, was explicitly designed to be an open-air water-focused mall, quite some distance from the Alamo (which, by the way, warrants about a one-hour visit and is by itself no reason to spend several days in San Antonio). There is water transport along the Riverwalk, and like the decorative trolleys, its purpose is to facilitate sightseeing.
A great way to see San Antonio’s adult amenities
Proprietors need pedestrians to access their businesses; for them the money for urban circulators would be better spent bringing people to the urban core or improving the streetscape. In emerging large cities—the places now green-lighting light rail—streetcars, because of limited capacity, are not up to the task of delivering human payload. What, then, is an appropriate use for the modern streetcar?
Downtown boosterism has worked best in places like Madison, Charlottesville, Burlington, Boulder, and Morgantown. These are college towns, where young, relatively active people are accustomed to walking around universities that serve as second downtowns.
In essence, the walkable downtown in those places becomes the university’s recreational and spending campus; it’s reverse-engineered itself to be an extension of campus life, rather than the other way around.
College towns are ideal for public transit because they follow the original purpose of moving people from nearby suburbs to the CBD. Students tend to live in clustered housing near the university, their primary destination.
They also tend to have a great many repetitive short trips, which are the meat and potatoes of urban transit.
Ann Arbor: and it’s buses, not streetcars
Of the 30 most transit-efficient cities in the U.S. (defined by the number of passenger trips per mile of transit service provided), 16 are college towns such as Athens, Iowa City, Chapel Hill, and Ann Arbor. The other 14 are mainly large, dense cities with excellent rail transport such as San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. (all of which also have significant student populations, though not the 25% threshold I use to classify college towns).
Finally, Mr. Scheib provides a straightforward and helpful prescription of when urban streetcars work:
The highest and best use for a streetcar system is to connect dense student housing, a university, a functioning downtown, and a regional shopping venue, hospital, or other large attractor in a community of around 100,000 people.
Athens, Gainesville, Norman, and Bloomington are ideal for this type of alignment (as is Lansing, which has opted to build a bus rapid transit system).
Lots of people, a tightly compacted geography, highly repetitive travel, and a population that is unlikely to need the automobile at short notice (so the cars can be dispensed with or garaged long-term) – those are the (limited) initial conditions under which streetcars (or even better, electric buses) operate successfully.
We already have models for how to do this. Three systems in France provide exactly this kind of service: LeMans, Orleans, and Reims carry between 35,000 and 48,000 trips daily on systems that have between 6.9 and 11.2 miles of track.
Tramway d’Orleans map
A typical stop: not easy entrance
These streetcars—called tramways there—not only serve universities and downtowns but also take advantage of the tram’s small footprint by wending between buildings, using rights of way that are useless to larger mass transit vehicles or automobiles.
In any other city situation, streetcars or trams are terrible as urban transport.
Yet the fantasy that people will travel or move to a particular location purely for the pleasure of tootling around in a trolley has consistently failed to materialize. Because the urban circulator is not tailored to the needs of modern city dwellers who use mass transit to get around, there is no natural constituency to ride them. The result: Many communities get stuck with an eternal loop of empty, expensive white elephants.
Boston is actually a botanic garden of the full range of streetcar transport.
Green, Silver, or duck boat?
Boston has the hideous Green Line – surface-based, hostage to traffic, slow and crowded and balky.
The Green Line, crowded as usual
Boston has the Silver Line – dedicated lanes, linked to transport hubs (Logan Airport and South Station respectively), gated like a subway (and in fact overlain on the subway network) – and buses, which use either electricity (underground) or gasoline (surface).
Shifting power sources
Boston has the duck boats, which are the ultimate tourist-travel vehicle – amphibious, open-topped, circulatory rather than point-to-point.
Make way for duck boats!
Streetcars worked as urban transport when they were displacing horses.
When cars arrived, the streetcars were displaced as urban transport and fell out of use.
If they are to be brought it, it must be as urban amenity, aimed not at locals but at tourists.
San Francisco streetcar rusting in Missouri
Why, they told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemetery and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields.
– Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire