Death of a Streetcar

I am saddened to hear about the possible death of the H Street Streetcar in Washington DC. The initial plan was for a network of eight lines built over three phases but only a single segment was ever finished. Now it may be replaced with a trolleybus.

Some folks are saying I told you so, but at the time I believed we were trying to solve for what I call the lowest common denominator syndrome. As projects got more expensive, we moved to the next technology. Subways to light rail to BRT and Streetcars. Elected officials wanted solutions but they didn’t want to give up their views for wires or their parking or driving lanes for transit.

They also didn’t want things to cost a lot or disrupt businesses with construction. You see this continue with the move towards tunnel boring machines that avoid the surface pain but increase the overall costs.

Over the years I’ve hardened on my stance of needing dedicated transit lanes and targeted infrastructure like queue jumps and boarding islands. Not just building a new line from scratch but making these incremental improvements. Of course service is important, but urban cores sometimes have too much auto oriented infrastructure that slows down buses and surface trains.

Back to lamenting the death of the DC streetcar, I like to think I played a very tiny part in the creation of the streetcar in DC and shared what I knew to remedy some of the cost problem. At the time I was excited about Portland’s new slab construction methods and the ability to get things done cheaper.

So when H Street was ready for road reconstruction but a transit plan wasn’t on the table yet, then DC planning director Harriet Tregoning called me up and asked whether anyone had put the tracks in early. If they built them in early, the city wouldn’t have to rip up the road again for a future streetcar. I said yes, Charlotte had done it on Elizabeth Avenue (as seen below in a picture I took) and pointed her in that direction.

I also worked on mapping and data collection for some early H Street corridor value capture studies to see if there was something to that investment that might generate money to pay for the line. It would be interesting to see the results now almost 16 years later.

The DC Streetcar didn’t really spark the expansion people thought it might. It was supposed to be a part of a larger network and there of course were bigger dreams. I know others have lots of opinions on what went wrong or why not building more than the initial segment meant it was doomed to failure.

For now I’ll just be happy that we tried some things that didn’t work out. I still think we can learn something from our failures and missteps. We’ll take them with us from now on.

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