/n/ — DC Streetcar

>>2068940 (OP)
>So, what went wrong here?
Looks like another "streetcar to nowhere" that goes places no one wants to go

>>2068940 (OP)
Its urbanists only real crime. Its just romanticism about old pictures that makes the fixate on streetcars. Totally irrational compared to buses.

>>2068940 (OP)
> Never extended east or west to properly complement/replace the X2.
> Never built out into a proper network.

Had either of those happened, it would’ve done better.

>>2068940 (OP)
Slower than the buses which went on the exact same route

>>2068944
>Its urbanists only real crime. Its just romanticism about old pictures that makes the fixate on streetcars. Totally irrational compared to buses.

There's another thread on streetcars/trams already, but it's not just romanticism. That being said, I didn't know DC had a streetcar and I don't understand the purpose.

I think streetcars can make sense in midwestern cities and other places in the US that are in the process of revitalizing their downtowns. They can be a piece of the puzzle, and the investment in permanent rail transport is a signal to business and real estate developers that the city is committed to that area for decades to come. This incentivizes those developers to build infill businesses and apartments along the streetcar line, which increases urban density and thus increases overall tax revenue for the city.

As for the DC streetcar. I don't really understand it. They already have a great subway system. They have what I assume is an effective bus system. I guess the streetcar connects parts of the subway system above ground that weren't easily connected before?

I like streetcars, but they really only make sense in certain contexts, and I'm not sure this was a good one

>>2068944
Obama-era American planners basically treated streetcars as a cargo cult and ignored all the best practices implemented by French planners.

>>2069341
?
Street cars have no advantage over regular buses and have massive negatives...

>>2069418
They have two advantages over buses:
>They are technically trains, therefore scratching that particular autistic itch
>They have that old-world soul like New Orleans
But yeah, other than that buses mog streetcars into the dirt.

>>2069418
Installation costs are higher, running costs are lower. You throw a bus on the scrap heap after ten years while the streetcar goes through a mid-life refurbish after thirty. The killer is often about who pays for the asphalt the buses tear up.

>>2069418
Streetcars inspire transit oriented development. The point is that when a city decides to spend millions of dollars installing a new rail line, people with money decide to put more businesses and housing along the line because they know the city will maintain it for decades to come, just ensuring continuous business.

If an area that a bus line run through experiences problems, the city has less incentive to fix it and maintain that area, because they can just make the bus line go through a different area, or just delete the bus route altogether

your mistake is thinking that transportation systems are always about transporting people and that there aren't other reasons why they are installed

Trams are the perfect litmus test for a country being first world. Only first world countries can build and maintain functioning and useful tram systems. While third worlders such as >>2069428 can't even understand the point of trams they just go
>durrrr bus on rails durrr

>>2069418
If I recall correctly when the streetcar first opened the bus route that goes on the same street saw zero decline in ridership which implied that close to 100% of streetcar ridership was new transit ridership in the corridor, even though it was slower and went less places. I agree though that building it is stupid with how expensive it was and how poorly it was executed.

>>2069539
Americans can actually build decent tram systems but they will just call them "light rail".

>>2069555
>the bus route that goes on the same street
Yeah see, that's how brown third worlders with too much money on their hands would build a streetcar.

Sensible people would look at the most heavily used bus line or lines and see to *rellace* it entirely or at least mostly with the tram, thus integrating it seamlessly into the surface transportation network (which itself should complement the heavy rail network).

Alternatively you could look into significant gaps in the subway network that would benefit from a complementary line but where demand may not justify the cost of a full subway and build the streetcar more as part of the subway system.

Both of these options are legit, but you need an average IQ above room temperature in the administration, not the case in the US obv

>>2069610
Local streetcars shouldn't be funded by "the administration". It's local. The funding should be local.

>>2069418
the main advantage is the rails cost less to lay/service and they can be laid in essentially gravel, and trams should get their own "lane" so they arent held up by traffic. they can also be a lot bigger than a bus and are easier to electrify.

but US urbanists are dumb as fuck and just put them in for SOVL over asphalt streets anyway so they jam up traffic and cost MORE per mile than equivalent streets, and if they do bother to electrify it it's still off an unreliable and expensive grid already mostly gas-fired so there arent much cost savings compared to normal fuel

also 99% of these tram lines are typical american style doing it wrong on purpose to "prove" why it wouldn't work, and are mostly short lines that don't go anywhere and are more of an amusement park ride for a "revitalized downtown" than an actual transportation method

these days theyre basically completely obsoleted by subways and elevated rail and only really appropriate for places where you can't dig for cheap and/or nimbys will chimp out about having a couple pillars in the street for an elevated track and really finally only make sense to lay at grade to service suburbs/exurbs, but those people are retards who think public transit will just drop off niggers at their door and even when not the real solution is to turn the suburb/exurb into a functional town that has jobs and services in or near it instead of relying on commuter trains to get into already congested downtown cores

>>2071140
local administration can also be "the administration" you turd.

>>2071143
>and if they do bother to electrify it
>also 99% of these tram lines are typical american style doing it wrong on purpose to "prove" why it wouldn't work
Foreigners have such active imaginations

I lived on this line for years and never boarded. X2 went farther and faster

>>2068940 (OP)
>So, what went wrong here?
You know exactly what went wrong, but if I say it I'll be accused of "_____ derangement syndrome"

>>2071271
Tram derangement syndrome?

>>2069539
>Trams are the perfect litmus test for a country being first world.
Going to the moon is a perfect litmus test for a first world country. Trams are ideal for fare dodgers. Now where's your "first world"?

File: IMG_0678.jpg (195 KB, 812x649)

The original D.C. streetcars used an underground electric conduit power system similar to those in Manhattan and London, with a narrow plow going down in a slot similar to cable car vaults. On lines out to the suburbs they switched to overhead trolley wire. There’s several blocks of old conduit track in Georgetown and some in an old abandoned tunnel.

File: NRHS-L-DC-TRansit-Washington-DC-PCC-Silver-Sightseer-1512-1961-Al-Holtz.jpg (134 KB, 874x555)

>>2071334
It was one of the last (if not *the* last) tram system to use conduit current collection. New York shut down in the late 40s, London in 52.

They also had a sightseeing car which was air conditioned, probably the first PCC ever equipped with AC.

When the streetcar system was closed the PCCs were sold to Barcelona and Sarajevo, and were the only American-built PCCs that ever ran in Europe. In Barcelona they only ran for 8 more years until their tram was also closed in 1971. People there said the PCCs were by far the best tram vehicles they'd ever seen.

Truly a unique system, real shame that it was closed down.

File: IMG_0830.jpg (1.21 MB, 1943x1943)

>>2071344
I love conduit systems and it still amazes me how they even functioned but they were very reliable though expensive to build and maintain.
I read that one reason for the demise of D.C. streetcars was they anticipated a big snowstorm for JFK’s January 1961 inauguration and salted the crap out of the streets. It didn’t snow but did a lot of damage to the conduit, one more excuse to scrap the tracks.

>>2071473
I doubt that story. As in
>if it hadn't been for that they'd have kept the trams
nah. It was the fashion to get rid of streetcars which were seen as old and impractical. One oughtn't underestimate the power of such trends. Add to it the economic factor (trams lost money and were almost all privately operated). No city kept them except maybe the odd line or two in exceptional cases (like San Francisco or Philadelphia, or the lines through the tunnel in Pittsburgh, cases like that), and of course Toronto. You'd have to ask why any city kept them, not why they scrapped them.

In Europe it was somewhat different, but it also varied widely by country. UK, France and Spain scrapped practically all tram systems with the odd exception; in Italy they were left to languish with some holding on, others just partly and others not at all, while germanic Europe kept a lot and mostly just scrapped smaller systems or those that were replaced by subways or pre-metro. You can see how it also went by fashions, it's not even over all countries that some were kept others not, mostly countries either kept most or none, with few in-betweens.

>>2071143
paving a lane of asphalt is going to be much cheaper than laying a rail line
Will last longer with 0 maintenance
And doesn't need anywhere near the precision/grade adjustments/etc
Theres a reason they put roads everywhere

If you need to walk 20 minutes from your bus stop to your house, then like, you are just going to get a car

>>2071493
Thing is that trams didn't get really good until the 90's, so in most places they really were replaced by better means of transportation, not just cars but also buses and in some places including DC the metro.

In Europe cities that kept them around suddenly found themselves with a very valuable asset, lots of kms of tracks ready to use for the actually good low floor articulated trams, but in cities that had to rebuild them from scratch or maybe had only some small surviving pieces of track they tend to work better because they take in account more traffic separation and the size and capacity of the newer vehicles.
Also many of the countries that kept them were in the Eastern bloc, they obviously needed them because they were too broke to afford true mass motorization and it was also a substantial jobs program, they rejoined the free world and became wealthy again just as the tram started being appreciated again in the West. Berlin is a good showcase, in the West they tore down every tram track in favor of building out urban freeways and expanding the U-Bahn, in the East they couldn't afford to do that and so kept the trams around, now they have a nice modern fleet and are expanding the network in the West again while shelving for good the plans to complete the urban highway network.

>>2072026
>trams didn't get really good until the 90's
Nigga what

Trams weren't good or bad, they were trams. Buses weren't better than trams in the 60s-90s, they were just the preferred means for various mostly subjective and political reasons (fashion, less expense, so on), but at the same time transit usage declined everywhere so buses weren't "better" in a sense of attracting more passengers.
It's a chicken-or-egg question, did ridership decline due to bus conversion, or was bus conversion due to declining ridership. Probably both. In any case if transit isn't favored then ridership will decline.
In Switzerland where many cities kept their trams and had comparatively pro-transit policies (I say *comparatively* because all over the world the fashion was cars and not transit) transit ridership held up better but obviously also declined with mass motorization. In the US where public transit was significantly reduced and worsened ridership plummeted much more.
It's not that "trams got good" but transportation policies simply changed around the 90s because cities started realizing that car traffic is an almost unsolvable issue and that cities where public transit was kept in better shape were doing better in this regard.

>>2072026
>In Europe cities that kept them around suddenly found themselves with a very valuable asset, lots of kms of tracks ready to use for the actually good low floor articulated trams,
This is not true at all. The infrastructure need to be modernized for modern trams. They require a lot more power so power supply feed needs to be modernized. If they are heavier they might even need stronger catenary poles and wire. The track need to approved for low floor use but even something like platform can cause issues with the width. In general each type need to get approved for each individual line, it is not as easy as it seems from the outside.

>>2072046
>hey require a lot more power so power supply feed needs to be modernized.
this, we need the electricity for AI Datacenters, we can't spend it on people

>>2072033
>It's a chicken-or-egg question, did ridership decline due to bus conversion, or was bus conversion due to declining ridership.
Neither

Transit companies started moving to buses in 1920s because they were cheaper to run and were more operationally flexible than trolleys. From that decade onward, trolley ridership declined each year except for WW2 because of gas rationing.

>>2072052
Ridership declined even more when trolleys were replaced with by buses

>>2072046
Based retard

>>2072060
The decline was caused by more people buying automobiles and the government feverishly building highways during the same time period. But buses were the beneficiaries of those same improved roadways and maturing diesel technology led to a transit technology that could serve routes the trolleys didn't go and were cheaper than them to operate.

>>2072066
Did you even read my earlier post

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When I lived in Atlanta, my condo was right next to the downtown streetcar and I never used it. Even when it was free, it was of no use to me as I could walk almost anywhere on the route much faster. I used the heavy rail system to get around the city but for getting around downtown, the streetcar was pretty useless.

>>2072167
The Portland streetcar was a huge success (for a streetcar) which made every clueless city think if they dumped a streetcar into their downtown, it would magically become Portland (of twenty years ago).

File: TrolleyProblem.png (101 KB, 1000x536)

>>2068940 (OP)
>So, what went wrong here?
Trolleys cause too many moral dilemmas.

>>2072330
That's why streetcars usually have multiple cars. It can split and kill everyone on both tracks, completely solving the moral dilemma.

>Less than two months since the death of the DC Streetcar
>Proposals popping up this week to make the "Gold Line", a rapid bus connecting Union Station to RFK via the corridor of the former DC Streetcar
Why not just revive the streetcar, charge for it, and actually realize its potential instead of doing this? I don't foresee the "Gold Line" being much different in how it goes except for maybe being unaffected by poorly parked cars.

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>>2072167
>atlanta
Fix'd

>>2073460
Cause there will be no enforcement for blocking the streetcar....

>>2068940 (OP)
>"best transit cities"
Cause of the metro? How are we parsing here? Dc region is the epitome of car hell.

Anyway, you can still take the Marc to Baltimore to use the light rail if you are a fetishist.