Streetcar popularity continues to rise

New initiatives announced

Steve Hawley, Dec 09, 09.

The number of cities interested in building streetcar systems has grown considerably this year, according to The Infrastructurist.

The Infrastructurist reports that in May, approximately 20 cities in the US and Canada were seriously considering building new streetcar lines. By early December, by the author’s count, that number had more than doubled to 43. The latest city to propose a streetcar plan is Providence, Rhode Island, which hopes to remake its transit network, according to the Providence Journal. On Tuesday, voters in Oklahoma City approved a one-cent sales tax that would fund, among other projects, a streetcar line.

Streetcar advocates also won mayoral elections in Boise, Cincinnati, and Charlotte last month, and last week, US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced the availability of $130 million in federal funding dedicated to streetcars and urban circulator systems, as well as $150 million in bus funding. The winning streetcar projects, which will be announced next year, will receive up to $25 million per project, meaning that at least six projects will receive federal funding.

The key difference between streetcars and light rail is that streetcars share lanes with cars, making the projects significantly cheaper and faster to build. However, Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic notes that this can cause considerable delays for streetcars if streets are not designed carefully:

[S]treetcars are put in a particular predicament ... because, unlike buses, they can’t change lanes. If systems are designed with major flaws, such as those illustrated below, this means that these trains will operate at significantly lower speeds than equivalent buses; the result: a big investment investment in public transportation could actually mean less mobility.

Freemark says that these problems can largely be avoided if streets are designed to speed all vehicles, not just cars.

Houston, by comparison, has a light rail system that only shares a few turn lanes with cars, enabling higher speeds and shorter travel times but also costing more to build.

(Photo credit: cacophony)