Critics question whether streetcar lines that lack dedicated lanes — like the one on the way for Washington, D.C.’s H Street Northeast — are any better than buses that also must jockey with stop-and-go traffic. POLITICO Pro A streetcar not desired? Efforts to resurrect a classic type of transit have derailed.

The Obama administration has sent more than a half-billion dollars to cities and counties in hopes of reviving the venerable American streetcar. But the renaissance is threatening to run off the tracks — imperiled by cost overruns, lower-than-expected ridership in some places and pockets of local resistance.

Unlike with the administration’s high-profile controversies over Obamacare, Common Core and Dodd-Frank, the GOP isn’t leading the charge against resurrecting a form of rail transit that vanished from most U.S. cities in the mid-20th century. Instead, transit-supporting urbanites have begun questioning the projects’ value, suggesting they’re more about enriching property owners than moving people.


From D.C. to Atlanta, from San Antonio to Salt Lake City, streetcar projects have run into delays, cutbacks and other snags, and some have been scrapped altogether. The most dramatic recent example was November’s demise of a $550 million, state-aided streetcar project in the liberal, traditionally pro-transit D.C. suburb of Arlington County, Va., which had turned politically toxic as its price tag more than doubled. (DOT rejected an application for federal funds for that project, but supporters believed a second attempt would succeed.)

Supporters view streetcars as not just a method of transportation but as a means to fostering urban redevelopment and “livable,” pedestrian-friendly communities, and local officials in cities like Tucson, Ariz., and Dallas credit the projects with revitalizing urban life. Streetcars could become one of the Obama era’s most visible transportation achievements, even though the $521 million the Department of Transportation has awarded to the projects equals only about one-ninetieth of what the federal government spends on highways each year.

But the projects’ setbacks are yet another example of the hurdles facing the administration’s other attempts to reshape the fabric of Americans’ lives — including its efforts to promote high-speed rail as well as proposed rules on for-profit colleges and trans fats in snacks.

“The streetcar reality was not living up to the streetcar promise,” said Arlington streetcar foe John Vihstadt, whose reelection to the county board Nov. 4 prompted the decision to kill the project two weeks later. He said Arlington residents turned against the streetcar because of an “unfolding red flag of horror stories” from other communities.

Besides costs, critics point to other shortcomings in the projects. For example, they question whether streetcar lines that lack dedicated lanes — like the one on the way for Washington, D.C.’s H Street Northeast — are any better than buses that also must jockey with stop-and-go traffic.

“In a lot of traffic conditions, you can walk faster than these streetcars,” said Marc Scribner, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a frequent critic of the streetcar boom. Scribner said streetcars are an example of transit “mission creep,” touted for benefits other than increased mobility.

But former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a major streetcar booster, is defiant. While the Obama administration changed its funding guidelines in 2010 to make more streetcar projects eligible for federal grants, the boom happened “not because President Obama or Ray LaHood wanted, but because these communities wanted them,” he said. “This is what mayors wanted. This is what city councils wanted.”

DOT’s little-noticed change to its funding criteria scrapped a George W. Bush-era rule that had weighed funding decisions most heavily on whether transportation projects were cost-effective and would reduce commuting time — factors in which streetcars fare relatively poorly. Instead, criteria like economic development and environmental benefits now get equal footing.

Before you could say “Blanche DuBois,” the result was a flurry of streetcar projects on a scale that hadn’t been seen in decades, as cities rushed to lay down tracks to replace the ones they had torn up at the start of the automobile era 60 years earlier. Washington, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, St. Louis and Milwaukee were among the cities to receive cash and begin planning lines.

“Today, streetcars are coming back,” LaHood told about 100 business owners and public officials at an October 2010 ribbon-cutting in Salt Lake City. “They’re reviving the same neighborhoods they once helped create. And, because of you, Salt Lake will be at the forefront of America’s streetcar renaissance.”

Other communities seizing on the boom included Tucson, which got a $63 million DOT grant to build a streetcar connecting the University of Arizona with downtown. Since then, the city has seen more than $1.5 billion in development within three blocks of the route, said state Sen. Steve Farley, a Democrat who had spent more than a decade advocating for the project.

“Most of the naysayers are trying to put transportation in a silo, where it’s just about moving people,” Farley said. “It’s not just about moving people. It’s about a community’s soul.”

Dallas is another city where local officials evangelize about the brilliance of streetcars. The city plans on spending $800 million to build a massive network.

But enthusiasm wasn’t enough to get all the projects to the finish line.

In D.C., the H Street line is three years late in opening, marred by missteps like a test run in which the streetcar had to stand still for 15 minutes while an ambulance blocked its path. This fall, the District cut the size of its planned streetcar network from 20 miles to eight miles.

In Atlanta, a streetcar had two crashes in five days during its testing period, though passenger service was finally scheduled to start serving passengers Tuesday. Even in Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx’s hometown of Charlotte, N.C., the mayor pro tem has openly predicted he expects the streetcar to “struggle.” The Salt Lake City line hyped by LaHood is drawing just over 1,000 riders a day on average.

Even Portland, Ore., the site of the streetcar boom’s origin story, has seen its efforts run into trouble.

A POLITICO analysis of DOT data also found that cities are becoming less and less interested in federal money for streetcars.

DOT’s TIGER program, which funds transportation projects of all shapes and sizes, saw 10 requests for streetcar projects in 2009 and 14 requests in 2010. In those two years, seven streetcar projects won a total of $240 million. But the requests have dropped sharply in the past four years, falling to just six or seven streetcar applications per year. In that time, seven projects have won $102 million.

The decline comes alongside repeated Republican-led cuts to the TIGER program and a drop in the total number of applications. Streetcar projects have also gotten money from initiatives like the Federal Transit Administration’s Small Starts program.

The shift was perhaps most striking in Arlington, which has spent big money on mass transit in recent decades, drawing a dense corridor of condo and office building development along Metro’s Orange and Blue lines.

Vihstadt, elected as an independent, became the first non-Democrat to win a four-year term on the county board since 1983, in large part because of his opposition to the streetcar. Opponents said the streetcar project typified other allegedly misguided spending priorities by the county government, including a $1 million bus stop, a proposed aquatic center and a money-losing arts complex in Rosslyn.

Vihstadt says he doesn’t oppose public transportation, and in fact would support providing rapid bus service along the proposed streetcar route.

“I’m not turning my back on transit,” said Vihstadt, who noted he rides the Metro to and from his downtown law firm job each day. “I’m not turning my back on transit-oriented development.”

Vihstadt’s stance — why pay for an expensive, mixed-traffic streetcar when a bus can move residents just as quickly? — has gained steam among some transit advocates. Jarrett Walker, a Portland-based transit consultant who has written extensively about the limits of mixed-traffic streetcars, has been the most prominent proponent of this critique.

“If you want a streetcar because you think it will make your city a better place, then build it for that reason,” Walker wrote in 2009. He added: “But [if] you want a streetcar because it’s intrinsically faster and more reliable than a bus — well, that’s just not true.”

Streetcar advocates say the projects are indeed about community-building, not just helping people move from Point A to Point B. For one thing, they say, spending the money to lay down track shows a commitment to developing an urban corridor — sending a signal to residents and business owners that bus service doesn’t.

In Tucson, “before we even opened for riders, we already had a success,” Farley said.

The Arizona route has also blown away its ridership projections, drawing 5,000 riders a day compared with an expected 3,600. But Farley said the main benefit was creating a sense of community and giving Tucsonites a “spring in their step.”

Farley’s argument originated in Portland, where the streetcar boom had its leading edge in the 2000s. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) played a leading role in persuading LaHood to support streetcars in the early days of the Obama administration, citing their success in revitalizing his hometown.

“Portland was an incredibly powerful example,” Scribner said. “‘Portland, Portland, Portland,’ is all you would hear local officials say.”

But an audit of the Portland streetcar system in December found the city had overestimated ridership by 19 percent and falsely claimed a perfect on-time record. In reality, the streetcar was on time only 82 percent of the time.

Blumenauer’s office wouldn’t make the congressman available for an interview.

Despite the struggles in Portland and elsewhere, LaHood said he expects the streetcar boom to continue.

“I suspect that when communities are looking for an alternative form of transportation, they’ll still be looking at streetcars,” he said.