Given that this is a blog about living a carless life in Albuquerque, it’s fitting that I started with the most controversial mass transportation issue in perhaps the entire history of the city – the “modern streetcar” system. Since moving here in 2006 (the year it was first proposed), my feelings on the issue have become increasingly mixed and shades of gray have appeared where once there was a glorified image of a shiny trolley running past the Frontier Restaurant.
Full disclaimer: I still love the idea. If it came up for a public vote, I would vote for it, I would use it, and I would love it. It’s still a really cool idea.
But if I had the chance to design a rail system for Albuquerque, this isn’t what I would build.
Let’s go back to how this all started. Back in 2004, the City of Albuquerque produced a short video called “Rail Transit in Albuquerque”, where they promoted the creation of a light rail system in the city and showed off what some nearby cities (Denver and Dallas in particular) had been able to do with their light rail systems. Rapid Ride had just been created and was serving as a test project to see how high-capacity transit could function in the Central Avenue corridor.
A couple of years went by with little word on rail transit, as city officials started to realize that the costs of a light rail system would likely be a hard pill for voters to swallow, even with substantial federal funding. This led to the modern streetcar proposal in 2006, and if you follow what Martin Chavez has said on the issue, it is clear that he’s talking about streetcars as if it was light rail – all of the benefits at a fraction of the cost. As I pointed out in the first post, this is not true; light rail and modern streetcar are two completely different types of transit systems. But in an effort to get a rail system for cheap, the proposal had shrinked and the system had changed.
In 2006, local officials were riding on the first wave of love for the Rail Runner (which has definitely been eclipsed by the second wave which came when it got to Santa Fe) and rail transit seemed to be all the rage in city hall. But when the city came out with the streetcar proposal everything ground to a halt, and a lot of opposition to the project formed. I started getting a bad feeling when I realized it wasn’t just people who were vehemently opposed to the concept of rail, but also folks who loved the idea of rail in Albuquerque but were skeptical of the streetcar as designed. If you couldn’t grab these folks, something was wrong here.
It’s 2009. The streetcar proposal has been used against Martin Chavez as he seeks reelection, since reminders of it (such as Berry’s mention of it) are sure to stir up frustrated feelings in voters who remember the fiasco. There has been city council legislation that attempted to ban any study of rail transit whatsoever. Fortunately, the legislation failed to pass the council and I’m pretty confident that Chavez is going to win reelection. But the tide has changed – public feeling against rail transit feels quite high. What happened? Where did we go so wrong?
This summer, I read a blog called Human Transit, which I highly recommend – it is written by a transit planner who talks about even the smallest (but crucial) details in mass transit systems around the world and whose posts are always thought-provoking and well written. One day I came across a post of his titled “Streetcars: an Inconvenient Truth,” which was perhaps the most fair and balanced viewpoint on modern streetcar systems I had ever seen.
His argument is thus: a modern streetcar system which replaces an existing local bus line (such as the one proposed for Central Avenue) will not make any improvement to overall mobility. “Mobility” here means getting from Point A to Point B in a certain amount of time. And think about it – a ride from UNM to Downtown is not going to be any faster on a modern streetcar than on the 66 bus.
That’s not to say there aren’t any benefits from modern streetcar systems. There’s the obvious economic benefit – rail systems are highly visible and encourage new and higher density development along their route, which is perfect if one of your primary goals is to highlight your city and encourage infill development. There’s also the less obvious environmental benefit over buses – riding capacity, operating life, and the fact that it runs on electricity means there’s less energy consumption per passenger mile than a bus.
These two benefits are fine reasons to support rail transit, but is this really why rail advocates want rail in Albuquerque? When we go to another city and hop on their rail system, are we doing it so that we can see all the nifty new development along the tracks? Are we doing it because the vehicle produces no emissions and has more room than a bus? No, we take it because it is a quick, reliable, and easy way to get to where we need to go. And this is where people are rightfully skeptical of the streetcar proposal.
If want we want is to highlight Albuquerque and have denser development along Central Avenue, then streetcars are right up our alley. But if we’re looking to revolutionize mass transit in the city, where one can get anywhere in the city on mass transit, where it is quick, easy, reliable, and extremely efficient to do so, and where we can encourage denser, transit-friendly development across the city (as Denver is doing so well), streetcars aren’t likely to get us there. Rapid Ride has brought our transit system a long way in a short span of time, but we’ll need light rail to finish the job.
Consider this: Once you actually build a modern streetcar line, the tracks are going to be there pretty much forever. But you can’t really expand a streetcar line very much – the slow speed and frequent spacing of stops means the advantages or riding it (and thus the demand) drops off the further get from the city center. That’s not to say you can’t just build a light rail system in addition to your modern streetcar line later, but here’s something else to consider: There’s only two modern streetcar systems operating in this country at the moment, one in Portland and the other in Seattle (Tacoma has something which might look like a modern streetcar, but it actually acts as a light rail system). Both are in cities that had incredibly well-developed transit systems spanning the whole city when the streetcar line was built; Portland already had an excellent light rail system, and Seattle was just about to open their light rail system. The streetcar was built really as an afterthought – a way to get around the city center once they had established reliable links into the city center.
Like I said at the start; I still love the idea of a streetcar system in Albuquerque. I’m just not sure we’re going about bringing rail transit to the city in the right way.
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1 comments:
John, I very much appreciate both your posts. They have helped enormously in clarifying some of the fuzziness I've had about the differences.
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