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Cities including Atlanta, Detroit and Kansas City got new streetcars 15 years ago. It was a streetcar revival that has stalled in some places and been successful in others. Steve Harrison from member station WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina, explains the streetcar boom.
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STEVE HARRISON, BYLINE: Charlotte's 4-mile streetcar line has struggled with ridership only a little more than half of what was projected, even though it's free. One reason - it's just not that fast or frequent, says Charlottean, John Villalon. He planned to take the streetcar home after seeing a concert downtown but missed the train and decided to walk.
JOHN VILLALON: It becomes if you don't time it right, that you just do the risk analysis in your head, and you're just like, all right, we'll just walk back at this point, just to get to our car.
HARRISON: Though Charlotte's Gold Line Streetcar through downtown has had a bumpy path, the city is undeterred and plans to spend $850 million building another 6 miles of the line. And so is Atlanta, which has one of the most expensive streetcars in the country, costing the transit authority $28 to move a passenger 1 mile. Now it wants to expand the nearly 3-mile loop to make it more attractive to riders. While Charlotte and Atlanta are pressing forward, Washington, D.C. is giving up. The city's budget calls for scrapping the 9-year-old streetcar that runs from Union Station to the east and replacing it with electric buses that use the overhead wires.
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SHARON KERSHBAUM: The reality of the capital costs involved in maintaining and extending the streetcar are that it is exorbitant.
HARRISON: That's the district's director of transportation, Sharon Kershbaum, speaking to NBC4 in Washington.
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KERSHBAUM: To just replace the streetcars - there are six cars now, and they're past their useful life. It's $11 million per car.
HARRISON: Here's transportation consultant, Jarrett Walker.
JARRETT WALKER: This is the first time that there's been a decision to turn off one of the modern streetcars, so it is a very important moment.
HARRISON: He says cities have found that streetcars don't provide fast enough service because they operate in traffic. And when someone parks their car on the route, the streetcar has to wait for a tow truck to come and clear its path.
WALKER: I think it's fair to say that the exciting plans for citywide streetcar expansion that a lot of cities had in the middle of the Obama years are gathering dust on shelves for the most part.
HARRISON: Portland, Oregon, opened one of the first modern, successful streetcars in 2000. A decade later, the Obama administration made millions of dollars available for cities to build them, in part, to rejuvenate downtowns. Peter Rogoff led the Federal Transit Administration in Obama's first term. He says there are successful streetcars, like Tucson's, which has high ridership. But...
PETER ROGOFF: The black eyes in the streetcar universe really pertain to those that were either poorly planned or were dumbed down.
HARRISON: Kansas City's 2-mile streetcar is one of the successful ones.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Next stop, Metro Center. This is a streetcar to River Market.
HARRISON: It's free, and ridership is higher than projected. The city's streetcar director, Tom Gerend, says one reason the streetcar is popular may be that it's the only train in town and something of a novelty. And Kansas City made the streetcar its premier transit product.
TOM GEREND: We treated it like a high-quality, high-capacity transit operation, and people responded to it because it was reliable and frequent and intuitive and really easy to use.
HARRISON: Now Kansas City is building an extension. For NPR News, I'm Steve Harrison in Charlotte.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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