Changing the paradigm #1

Themail/DCwatch is one of the city's only consistent web and email based advocates for good government in the City of Washington. Mostly, themail is posts from people across the city, including me. The editor, Gary Imhoff, writes an overview/opinion piece/screed in most of the issues. How you term his overview depends on how you feel about the issue...

The latest issue starts off with a "screed" about streetcars, using the theme stated by others similarly opposed, about how streetcars are an obsolete technology, after all they were abandoned in the last century.

My response upends that trope with a different way of thinking...

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Gary, you so don't know much about transportation planning, and why streetcars were overtaken by the automobile, that I wouldn't know where to begin. I could write a response that easily would take up an entire issue, but I won't.

The issue is how should the city plan for the future. Should it focus on optimizing automobility, when a majority of work trips are by transit, walking, and bicycling, when the city's residents own fewer cars than the national and regional average, and when a significant number of nonwork trips are by transit, walking, and bicycling, or should the city focus on strengthening and extending the transit infrastructure to further the city's economic and competitive advantages around transit, reducing dependence on automobility and on oil.

It's great that you focus on streetcars from 50 or 60 years ago. But I don't understand why you and all the other people who make similar arguments refuse to acknowledge how surface rail transit, either streetcars or light rail, function successfully today, in North America as well as Europe. You're making a straw man argument that is almost completely irrelevant to today's mobility needs, not to mention the reality that in a situation where oil supplies are declining and demand is increasing, planning for automobile-centric mobility is dangerous.

Basically, the issue is how the real estate industry wanted to maximize profit from land development and how the automobile industry wanted to sell its product meant that the land use and transportation paradigm had to change. And it did, towards a deconcentrated and spread out development pattern. [And a focus on places, the suburbs, where untouched land was ready for development, rather than the cities, where most of the land was already developed.]

But it is for this reason that streetcars and similar transit technologies ceased to be economic rather than because they were "obsolete." Automobiles were and are subsidized by massive public road building. Taxes and fees by motor vehicle operators pay about 50% of the cost of roads.

Without subsidies, and with a regulatory apparatus that made it difficult to raise rates, privately owned transit systems were unable to compete against the triple whammy of road subsidies to the automobile user, housing policies that favored spread out suburban locations, and the inability to raise rates. This problem was accentuated as workplaces spread out from the central business district or major manufacturing locations.

I will grant you that many people preferred to have individual transportation [an automobile] rather than mass transportation. But transportation that is efficient for the individual isn't necessarily efficient for the mass.

A mass transportation system optimizes the mobility of public transit vehicles (and walking). A personalized transportation system optimizes the mobility of the [individual]/automobile.

The problem is that it is not possible to build an efficient road (transportation) system where every adult conducts 5-8 trips/day by automobile.

Furthermore, center cities in general and Washington in particular were designed to optimize walking and transit (bicycling works well in the same urban form). So optimal mobility in the city in particular is best achieved by focusing on transit.

DC's economic competitive advantage within the Washington metropolitan region is specifically tied to transit, successful and robust transit. In fact, in DC generally, and in the core of the city specifically, more trips are conducted by walking, bicycling, and transit per capita than any other city in the U.S., except for NYC. DC resident commuter times are at about the national average, and are second in the region only to Arlington (which is about 1/3 the size of DC so it is more compact), but are much better than every other county in the region.

Furthermore, DC households own fewer cars than the national average, and more DC households do not own cars compared to other jurisdictions in the region.

So if you ask me, it makes sense to focus on the next generation mass mobility technologies of today--streetcars, light rail, and subways--rather than the obsolete individualized mobility technologies of last century--the automobile.

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Note that I think there are some serious problems with DC's surface rail transit planning as I have written about before. But I don't question the necessity of improving surface based transit, extending the transit network generally, and moving towards fixed rail transit on the city's streets.

Ironically, one of the things that people criticize streetcars for--having a fixed route--rather than being "flexible" like a bus, was seen very differently by people back in the 1940s, such as on H Street NE, by the business leaders.

In their testimony to the DC Public Service Commission in the hearings on the abandonment of the 10/12 line on H Street, they argued that a bus line could move, while a streetcar line would not, so that there would be no guarantee that transit service would continue to serve the corridor and maintain the commercial district.

They were right.

Is it any coincidence (as Ed Tennyson argues) that the massive drop in public transit ridership

coincided with the conversion of fixed rail transit systems to buses?

Sure this drop in ridership also corresponds with the massive increase in personal automobile ownership, so you can't attribute all of the change to the difference in transit technology. But it is worth considering.