Fifth Annual Dick Wolf Lecture Memorial Lecture: Friday, March 29 Dismantling the Streetcar System - What have we learned?

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Capitol Hill Restoration Society

Fifth Annual Dick Wolf Lecture Memorial Lecture: Friday, March 29
Dismantling the Streetcar System - What have we learned?

F Street NW, before 1962. 

On Friday, March 29, 2019 at 7 pm, John Hillegass, winner of the 2019 Dick Wolf Prize, will present a lecture on the decision to dismantle the Washington DC streetcar system in favor of buses. The event will be held at Hill Center, 921 Pennsylvania Ave SE, to be followed by a reception.

Hillegass’s paper is on the planning and historic context behind dismantling the District’s extensive streetcar system and converting all lines to buses, between 1956 and 1962. The goal was to ease traffic and congestion, speed up transit, improve transit reliability, reduce transit costs and thereby keep transit affordable. Hillegass concludes that, by those measures, the replacement transit system today is equal to or worse than the transit system of 1946 and that today’s planners should proceed with caution. Following his lecture, a panel of special guests from the fields of Transportation and Planning will discuss the major points of his lecture:

• Andrew Trueblood, the new Director of DC’s Office of Planning and a resident of Ward 6. Andrew holds a Masters in City Planning from MIT and a B.A. from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
• John DeFerrari, author of the blog Streets Of Washington.John has recently published a book: Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, DC. John is also a trustee of the DC Preservation League.
• Shyam Kannan, METRO’s Managing Director, Planning and Transit Asset Management. On a daily basis, Shyam deals with issues of contemporary transit planning. He holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy and Urban Planning from Harvard University.

John Hillegass is pursuing his Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning at Georgetown University.