(DC/H Street) Streetcar talk

Streetcar at Union Station, Washington, DC, sometime in the 1950s. Photo from Dave's Railpix.

Having another meeting I wasn't able to get to the H Street Transportation-Streetscape Design Engineering presentation earlier in the week.

Apparently, one of the questions that remains is the routing for the streetcar line, specifically whether to provide a direct link to Union Station, or to continue west on H Street to connect to Massachusetts Avenue around 4th Street N.W.

The Frozen Tropics blog has an online poll about the issue. (Hmm, online polling might be a feature I have to add from time to time. Thanks for the pointer to the service.)

This is what I wrote (since expanded with a couple of illustrations) in a comment to the Froxen Tropics blog entry:

Not linking the streetcar to Union Station merely continues the current problems caused by "lack of articulation" between H Street transit (buses) and Union Station (subway, train, buses) . I will say I have been raising this issue since 2001 and the "Strategic Neighborhood Action Plan."

[The circuitous D buses do connect H Street to Union Station, but the heavily used X bus line does not connect directly. Given the current situation, it almost makes more sense to take the subway to Eastern Market metro and transfer to the 90s buses along 8th Street as a way to get to H Street, than it does to go to Union Station. Similarly, it's faster to get off the red line at Gallery Place and connect to the X bus to travel down to H Street, than it is to walk from Union Station--provided you hit the timing right.)

The Baltimore Light Rail has a spur to Penn Station, and not every LR train goes to Penn Station. Photo from Dave's Railpix. You can see here that like most of the Light Rail line in Baltimore, the connection doesn't appear to be too congenial.


However, I don't think that's a solution. I think the streetcar needs to be routed to/from Union Station for H Street, and then up Massachusetts Avenue to the Convention Center and points downtown.

The stretch of H Street between North Capitol and 4th Street NW can afford to not have the streetcar. But not connecting the streetcar to the #1 visited place in the City of Washington(whether for work, travel, or play) --Union Station has over 22 million visitors per year--would be an incredibly missed opportunity and would merely continue the lack of transit articulation between H Street and the Union Station subway line and other transit services provided there.

Maximum connectivity and cross-linkages should be the goal of adding streetcars as a new (returned) leg of the area's transit system. An under- and dis-connected transit system does no one any favors. The Baltimore lesson should be instructive.

In addition, transit proposals in the NoMA plan propose a third circulator to the waterfront (a north-south routing). This could become a streetcar route, just like the Portland Streetcar route provides service to the Pearl District, an area with a lot of redevelopment similarities (although the PD possesses more extant large historic buildings capable of adaptive reuse).

Depending on the routing, this line could connect the New York Avenue, Union Station, Capitol South, and Navy Yard Metro stations, providing service to the baseball stadium, the U.S. Capitol area, and other places in between.

Capital Transit Company streetcar, Washington, D.C., 1947. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Photo by Theodor Horydczak

If this line were to be routed on First Street NE, perhaps track could be shared between the connection of the line from H Street to Union Station to a NoMA-Waterfront District streetcar line (currently not proposed).

Portland Streetcar in the Pearl District as a model for a ninth streetcar line as part of the streetcar system proposed in the DC Transit Future studies.. From the Hoyt Street Properties website.

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