OPINION:
The left’s fascination with inefficient modes of transportation has collided with reality. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser acknowledges the city’s decades of indulgence in trolley nostalgia has fallen off the rails. In its place, the District of Columbia intends to field a “next-generation streetcar.”
By that, she means a bus.
Streetcars belong in museums, not on city streets. The District’s trolley service debuted in 1888, and the network of rails eventually stretched 200 miles. By 1962, city leaders realized it was time to retire the streetcars and embrace transportation alternatives optimized for modern needs.
When moving the public from place to place, privately owned automobiles and municipal buses beat rail every time. That’s because a city’s needs change over time. A system that relies on a complicated series of rails and overhead wires along a predetermined path can’t adjust its routes on the fly like a bus can.
Shoving a trolley in the middle of a busy street was always a recipe for accidents and delays. Several times last month, the city issued notices saying, “DC Streetcar service is suspended due to a Fire/Emergency Medical Service (EMS) vehicle blocking streetcar tracks at 14th street.”
No time was given for when service might resume because they didn’t know. Double-parked cars, or even trucks parked a few inches too far from the curb, would stop the trolley in its tracks. It’s impossible to rely on a service foiled by minor obstacles that a bus would have driven around.
The District’s mismanaged streetcar revival ran just 2.2 miles along H Street and Benning Road at a staggering cost to taxpayers. In 2020, the D.C. Office of the Inspector General documented $5.2 million in payments to the prime trolley contractor for services that weren’t rendered. Not that anyone noticed because the streetcar was usually empty.
An average of 2,300 people per day used the line last year, according to city data. That’s not exactly a good return on the $200 million in capital costs invested in this delusion. It would have been a lot cheaper to hand each of these regular riders the keys to a brand-new car.
During the COVID-19 panic, average daily ridership plunged to a pathetic 731 as residents refused to sit in public next to random, potential disease carriers. Despite the lack of riders that year, costs stayed the same, racking up $10 million in operating expenses.
Even in a dense metropolis like the District, just 23% commute to work on public transportation, according to the latest Census Bureau figures. Trolleys make even less sense for the rest of the country, where a mere 3.5% of Americans rely on buses, trolleys and subways to reach the office.
Unfazed by facts, liberals cling to the streetcar fantasy for ideological reasons. Streetcars tickle the liberal fancy because they promise to replace personal mobility with a government program, one that functions with less reliability and punctuality than the Postal Service.
The unstated goal is to make automobile ownership a miserable experience. Trolleys routinely block city streets, as do the bus lanes that city leaders have installed everywhere, even though only 3.5% of the population older than 16 still rides bicycles.
Blame Barack Obama for this mentality. His administration encouraged streetcar proliferation by showering municipalities with federal cash to reward their faith in 19th-century ingenuity. The mayor is right to reverse course.
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