If nearly everybody likes a streetcar, fewer want to ride one. Several cities have tried to bring them back as part of the attempt to restore downtown, but the renaissance has rarely been a commercial success. Tourists can ride a reclaimed streetcar to Beale Street in Memphis, and visitors to Little Rock can take a streetcar to the city’s bustling restaurant and entertainment district along the Arkansas River, or within walking distance of the Clinton Presidential Library. In New Orleans, where the streetcar never died, visitors can still ride past the mansions that line St. Charles Avenue, and the cars are back at last on Canal Street. But nowhere has ridership reached the numbers promised. “In a lot of traffic conditions,” says Marc Scribner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “you can walk faster than these streetcars.”
The biggest problem is that the people who you wish wouldn’t ride transit with you are ones who can’t afford to own a private vehicle given their obvious dysfunction and substance abuse issues. And, yes, I’m a big meanie for saying this to any lefties who want to point this out.
Agree…nobody likes drunken Irish or drunken Scots including other Irish & Scots… It’s not the ethnic label..it is the behavior.
Political correctness “can be” (weasel words) delusional.
The little train that runs around Stone Mountain, GA.. is very successful..
OT, but I voted on the poll on the left side.
One of the comments to the poll that talked about MSM was just great.
“Should I watch NBC – the National Barack Channel… where Brian Williams lies for over a decade about coming under attack, not to mention a network who purposely edits 911 tapes to make it appear as if someone is making a racist comment.
How about CBS – the Continuous Barack System…. where Dan Rather takes false documents and puts them out as being factual.
Maybe I should watch ABC – the All Barack Channel. At least they seem to be able to keep their lies convincing enough without a major scandal…yet.
Or MSNBC – the Must Stop Noticing Barack’s Corruption network, where they hire putrid little racist jokes like Al Sharpton.
I guess I could watch CNN – the Clinton News Network…yeah, I know, that’s soooo 90’s, but Hillary is running and we need to get the latest story about her being under sniper fire in Bosnia.”
And mighty purty, too.
Stone Mountain Scenic Railroad
Streetcars are awesome where they have their own protected tracks, which are not open to other traffic. Then they work as advertised. But so do buses. A bus with its own bus lane is a streetcar without the expensive rails.
On the -street- however, street cars are the slowest things on Earth. When I lived in Toronto, I could walk from Dufferin to Avenue Road faster than take the streetcar on a Saturday afternoon. Constantly held up by cars turning left was the reason, I’ve seen them sit through two lights before getting to go on the third green. You do that five times in one pass down the route, it gets slower than walking speed.
That was the 1980’s. I can only shudder to think what its like now. Old lady in a manual wheelchair speed.
The TTC -loooooves- its streetcars though. They have probably a billion bucks tied up in them. All kinds of places for money to kind of slide off to the side for the mice to nibble on…
Portland, Oregon has both streetcars and light rail (and of course, the rails are different gauge…). We just had an audit of the streetcars and now they’re making strenuous efforts to get the fares and ridership up to where they pay 15% of the costs.
They ought to just cut the fantasy and admit that they might as well make the fare $0.
In the mid-90’s when I was a student in Toronto and resigned to streetcar use, it was not uncommon to look out the window and realize we were being outpaced by people on rollerblades on the sidewalk.
What a pity. Mass transit is a good way to et around St. John’s, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. From personal experience. San Francisco, perhaps not so good.
Every public mass transit system in the world operates in the red, and always have done.
That said, I still think there should be user fees to defray the tax cost to the rest of us.
User fees make it so that the poor voters who use public transit have at least some skin in the game and would look unkindly upon any government promising the sun/moon/stars to unionized transit workers.
We have light/nightmare rail in the Seattle area. Big bucks spent on the few who ride it.
One to the dumbest parts of all. We have earth quakes in WA. So why in heavens name would you build light rail tracks 100+ ft in the air?
Elevated train tracks can be built with flexibility to withstand an earthquake.
They’re better than being in a tunnel when an earthquake strikes.
How high is the water table in Seattle anyway and could an earthquake/tsunami drown commuters in a train tunnel? Puget Sound, Salmon Bay, Lake Union, Portage Bay, Union Bay, …seems to be a lot of water around Seattle.
With respect to the mass transit service in Ottawa, I have found it to be less than useful for my needs (~10 years ago). It was far quicker for me to walk or slog the 6 km to work from the “Park and Ride” to the office in the Kanata Research Park than it was to take the bus. For either direction, a leisurely stroll would get me to my destination a full half hour before the most direct bus route I could find (which clearly was not very direct clocking in at 1.5 hours). Biking bought me over an hour’s savings each way compared to the bus.
Perhaps things have changed since then, but I had no further interest in trying to take the bus in Ottawa after that.
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“Constantly held up by cars turning left was the reason”
also, when streetcars break down, the whole line is held up until the car behind is emptied out and used to push the disabled one out of the way.
in brutal winter weather the compressed air systems used for brakes and doors constantly freeze up. as above, a broken down car in the yard holds up everything behind it.
the weight of streetcars degrades the roads very quickly and using sand to help braking wears down rails and wheels.
in fall, in toronto, leaves on the rails make braking problematic. the downhill stretch from main station on the carleton line has made many an operator’s a$$hole slam shut as 30 tonnes of metal slid greasily downhill despite frantic emergency braking.
the cost upfront is many times that of a bus.
i could go on but you get the idea.
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“So why in heavens name would you build light rail tracks 100+ ft in the air?”
Because it looks really Jetsons, is why. These morons don’t think practical, they think sales. 100ft tall train tracks is sizzle, a bus in a closed lane is steak.
And they didn’t think about the 100ft tall STAIRS either, did they? “Oh, we’ll have escalators!” they said. Escalators which are invariably broken at rush hour, because the very first place Lefties cut budgets is maintenance. Because sizzle, not steak.
Streetcars are a century old remnant of early electrification made obsolete by the internal combustion engine. Horse and buggy tech…..
We have a light rail system near me in South Jersey. It begins in the country’s poorest city – Camden – and proceeds northward along Devastated by Democrat run down river towns along the Delaware River until it terminates in another Democrat paradise s-hole Trenton. Cost a billion+ dollars to build and loses 25 mill a year. But it makes liberals feel good so its going nowhere. Kinda like our state.
The only thing everybody agrees about public transportation is that other people should ride on it.
The bus system is being ripped up to lay a light rail. The problem was down-town congestion. The are digging a tunnel right now to alleviate it but unfortunately light-rail is being installed instead of the already working bus transit system.
Actually impossible to justify light rail over dedicated bus lanes over the same route but train nostalgia seems to win out
Streetcars may make sense in those few areas where they are a tourist attraction, e.g. New Orleans. Even if the fares don’t meet costs, the business brought to the city by their presence might offset their cost in the form of taxes netted back to the city. But that’s a hard thing to quantify.
I would go to N.O as a tourist, mainly because of the music heritage, and would undoubtedly ride the streetcars, because, Hey, it’s New Orleans, why wouldn’t you?
But I’m not likely to go to Toronto as a tourist,regardless of nice their transit system is, because, ____in’ Toronto.
The Toronto Transit Commission has contracted for 204 streetcars for $1.2 billion (about $6 million each) plus cost overruns and delays. They seat 70 and are manufactured by Unifor (formerly the Canadian Auto Workers) at Bombardier’s Thunder Bay factory. These streetcars cost $84,000 per seat.
When you drive the car, also we can be drive next to car good or bad guy but we feel not touched by them unless have crash. Driving car sometimes make us tired when you had a long day. I prefer someone drive me taxi is best one. Consider canada weather minus 30 degree in winter my heart goes to children waiting for bus to come. Wainting station in winter need warm or cold airconditioner on roof. If we can make sell each chair for each ticket and chair has glass protection it become like your car safe and some one drive you cheaper than taxi again wait in each stop and wait until bus come make people who use streetcar are people who live close to buss station and move to close to your work place to not faced waste time. If we support local buss local shop local school or church if distance is too far people prefer use car. If distance is too too far via rail or bus can work but why people waste too much time just move next to work place. And do not sell more than seat.
If you put the streetcars in their own lanes, they work like a charm, quiet, no exhaust. Melbourne, Australia is a perfect example.
I lived on Montreal Road in Vanier, and worked at the corner on Bank/Nepean Streets down town. In the summer I road my bike to work, and in the winter I ran. It was too far to walk, it took about an hour to run it. That way at least I didn’t die of hypothermia waiting for a bus to show up.
The streetcars in Memphis have been shut down for a while now. The brakes kept catching on fire and the city is beyond broke…