Everybody Desires a Streetcar

I grew up in Los Angeles. It had Streetcars and Pacific Electric 'Redcars' all over the place through the 1950's.

GM and the Oil companies colluded with the City and County 'Planners' to rip up the tracks, then replace rail transport with newly purchased buses for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). The MTA became the Rapid Transit District (RTD). Who knows why, except a name change for all the buses and signs and all the stops, etc., involved would have meant more giant government contracts.

Now the corrupt planning worm has turned.♘

Everybody Wants a Streetcar » The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner [full short posting]

Everybody Wants a Streetcar

11th November 2011

Everybody Wants a Streetcar

posted in News commentary, Transportation |

The streetcar craze is just insane. Los Angeles wants one; so does San Antonio. It was bad enough when cities all over the country were building light rail, an expensive, obsolete form of transportation that at least has the virtue of providing slightly better service than the local buses it usually replaced. But streetcars have no redeeming transportation value at all; they are hardly faster than walking, they are far more expensive than buses; and (because, for safety reasons, they cannot operate as close together) their capacity is much lower than a bus line.

Yet at the rate things are going, in a few years more cities will have streetcars than light rail. Cincinnati is further along than most other cities; Sacramento is talking about one; Tucson is building one; and Atlanta apparently hasn’t wasted enough money on its flop of a heavy-rail line, so it is talking about streetcars. Even normally sensible Kansas City is talking about streetcars.

President Obama even gave an award to a Portland company for building streetcars that cost more than the streetcars that Portland was importing from Europe. Now that’s an achievement!

This is all based on the big lie that streetcars promote economic development. They do nothing of the kind; at most, they promote more subsidies to economic development, and that economic development would have taken place anyway, though perhaps not in exactly the same location. It is also being driven by federal dollars: Charlotte, Ft. Worth, St. Louis, along with Cincinnati, Tucson and some of the other cities listed above have all received federal grants for streetcars. Unless you are a rail contractor, all that money will be completely wasted.

Urban planners claim to have integrity, but any planners who go along with streetcar scams are little better than the corrupt elected officials who accept bribes (usually in the form of campaign contributions) from contractors and manufacturers. Maybe the Occupy Portland crowd should try occupying a streetcar.