Does Dallas Need a Streetcar System?

From: Dallas Morning News Transportation Blog
By: Rodger Jones // July 16, 2009

Interests invested in downtown are pushing for them, and the city is asking Washington for $80 million for them. But I wonder if there is time or interest in questioning the value, in light of the investment needed. I think it's a good debate. That is, would the huge investment in a fixed-rail streetcar system benefit the city more than a system of beefed-up crosstown buses to serve downtown?

If you have an open mind on the subject, it's worth reading a blog posting from one transportation consultant who hails from Portland, the city of the much-ballyhooed streetcar system. He writes in part:

Streetcars that replace bus lines are not a mobility improvement. If you
replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, nobody will be able to get
anywhere any faster than they could before. This makes streetcars quite
different from most of the other transit investments being discussed today.

Where a streetcar is faster or more reliable than the bus route it
replaced, this is because other improvements were made at the same time --
improvements that could just as well have been made for the bus route. These
improvements may have been politically packaged as part of the streetcar
project, but they were logically independent, so their benefits are not really
benefits of the streetcar as compared to the bus.

Streetcars are in vogue, however, and local transportation and city planners can smell the money from Washington. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently went to Portland to admire the streetcar system there and offer encouragement to such undertakings.

MORE