Bringing Streetcars back to DC, part 1

Prologue

Bringing a 50-mile streetcar network to Washington DC is the top priority for the DC Chapter of the Sierra Club. I have been following this issue with the Sierra Club since 2002, and it was recently suggested to me that I write down a brief history of the effort, to provide context for those new to the subject. Current progress on the issue is blogged at streetcars4dc.org. 

The DC Transit Improvements Alternatives Analysis gets underway.

The last time streetcars ran in DC was the early morning of January 28th, 1962, after which all lines were converted to buses. Such was the state of public transit in the District until March 27, 1976, when Metrorail opened. Metrorail, of course, has been a tremendous success, but it does not serve all areas of DC, and was designed primarily to move suburban commuters to their jobs in downtown DC.

The District government has, in principle, been planning to bring streetcars back to DC for some time now. My involvement began in September 2002, when I testified on behalf of the  at a joint oversight hearing of the DC City Council. A relatively small, two-year study had recently been completed (DC Transit Development Study), and then-DDOT director Dan Tangherlini, and then-DDOT Mass Transit Administrator Alex Eckmann went before the council (read their presentation) to ask that a more expansive study be funded. Plans to expand transit in the District stretch back further than that, and are generally said to have begun with the Barry-era DC Vision Study of 1997, itself 2 years in the making. And after more than ten years of talk and study, there are still no streetcars.

DC Vision had proposed four light rail corridors and a new crosstown Metrorail line. The Transit Development Study had looked at nine potential routes, and from that, DDOT proposed what amounts to five corridors for further study. Three were crosstown routes, converging in the east at the Minnesota Avenue Metro and crossing the river together. Two of these followed a northern route, heading west to Union station, from which one would go northwest to Woodley Park and another would head to Georgetown. The third crosstown route headed south to the Navy Yard, and continued to Waterfront. A north-south route followed Georgia Avenue/7th Street from Silver Spring to Waterfront, and an east-of-the-river route that went from Minnesota Avenue, to Anacostia, and finally to National Harbor.

The study that did go forward, formally the DC Transit Improvements Alternatives Analysis, was indeed quite extensive. A joint effort between DDOT and WMATA, most of the actual work of the study was done by transportation engineering firm DMJM+Harris. Numerous public meetings were held, fancy full-color newsletters and brochures were produced, and scores of meetings with community groups were held, including one with the Sierra Club in October 2003. Tangherlini and Eckmann both spoke enthusiastically about the plans for the 2002 Rail-Volution conference, which was held in DC that year. 

Throughout 2003, a series of semi-public meetings were held: nobody would be excluded, but they were advertised primarily to civic leaders. In July I made it to the meeting in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, at which, it turned out, I was the only attendee to show up. From a public outreach standpoint, this is not so good, but for a transit wonk like myself, a detailed, hour-long conversation with the project leaders was something of a treat. In the fall, the project released the first of what would be five project newsletters (Fall 03, Spring 04, Fall 04, Spring 05, Fall 05).

By Spring 2004, the list of routes under consideration had grown, and in addition, the route lines were drawn as narrow lines following actual streets, instead of broad bands indicating a general route. A route up Wisconsin Avenue was added, as was a Brookland-Columbia Heights-Woodley Park crosstown route. Alternate alignments for the southern route from Woodley Park were added: one that headed to New York Avenue and then went south to Eastern Market, and the other going to Union Station and snaking across the Capitol to Eastern Market. By the Fall of 2004, a Foggy Bottom-Waterfront route, hugging the Potomac, had been added, a a spur East of the River was added. The map presented in the Spring of 2005 backed off of showing lines along particular streets to re-work the routes into nine “proposed corridors.”

The newsletters, and other project documents, were available on a well-publicized, but regretfully, now defunct website called dctransitfuture.com (archived on the Internet Wayback Machine), and many of them are now on DDOT’s website. In conjunction with the public meetings and widely distributed newsletters, some substantial analysis analysis of transportation services and demand was being conducted, which culminated in the Needs Assessment, released in June 2004. Not surprisingly, it found a great need for expanded transit in the city. One of the most telling parts (Fig. 6, p. 17) shows a map illustrating the density of households with no car available: this quite clearly shows the need for high-capacity transit along Georgia Avenue and along H Street NE. Nearly all of the corridors from the 2004 newsletters were identified in the Needs Assessment as “recommended priority transit corridors” (Fig. 20, p. 43).

The project team met with the Sierra Club for the second time in June 2004. I recall asking if there was some thing we could focus on that could help move the project forward; the project team demurred, assuring us they had everything under control. The Fall 2004 newsletter announced that the technologies chosen for further study were streetcars and “bus rapid transit.” Through spring 2005, all the route maps presented in every facet of the study treated all the routes equally–they were drawn with the same thickness of lines with no distinguishing features–and no association of routes with technology had been yet indicated. The graphics had emphasized streetcars, modern and historic. Small features in the newsletters highlight the benefits of bringing a streetcar–and not a bus–to a specific neighborhood. 

The point made in Fall 2004 about streetcars was first that they were not considering more Metrorail, but also that it would not be the type of light rail one sees in Sacramento or Dallas or Denver. That is, it would not get dedicated rights-of-way, and would probably not be designed for long, multi-car trains. This makes sense: in these cities, the light rail is the only rail transportation and performs both suburban commuter and urban mobility functions. In DC, the transit is to be overlaid on top of Metrorail, which performs the suburban commuter function quite well.

The Fall 2004 discussion of “bus rapid transit” uses the subtle dishonesty which I’ve found to be typical of bus advocacy: it’s said to “combine the best of rail and bus,” begging the question of whether buses can ever provide service equivalent to rail (to which I answer “no”). Also mentioned is the fact that buses running on dedicated rights-of-way can be much faster than ordinary buses, which is a red herring: it’s already apparent that a dedicated right-of-way, for any sort of vehicle, is not being considered.

At any rate, those following the study at this point had reason to be optimistic.

Part 2 of this series will look at the conclusion of the study, in the second half of 2005. Part 3 summarizes the technical documents produced as part of the study. Further parts will look at the Anacostia Starter line and the issue of overhead wires.