Tag Archives: save our streetcars

News, Transportation

Waterfront Streetcar Suffers Still From City Leaders’ Malign Neglect

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Ex-Melbourne W2-class tram/streetcar 272 eastbound at the Occidental Park station, on Main Street, on the Waterfront Streetcar line in Seattle (Photo: Peter Van den Bossche/Wikipedia)

Streetcars are all the rage in Seattle these days; the arguments over the Eastlake line or the Ballard line have mainly to do with timelines. The astounding success of the 1.3-mile Seattle Streetcar line, which carried 700,000 riders in 2011, has illustrated what the prestige of rail can do for transit. But of course Seattle knew that. The Waterfront Streetcar line was a hit with passengers as well — 400,000 rode in 2004 — and the city even paid to have its line extended from 1.6 to a total of two miles in the 1990s.

It was never supposed to go away. The old maintenance barn was in the way of SAM’s Olympic Sculpture Park, so the line was closed down “temporarily” in November 2005. Then the planned new maintenance barn got hung up first by the search for a suitable location, then by the recession. At that point, city leaders wandered away from the issue. In Seattle, everyone can be “in favor of” and “strongly support” something, and it can still languish if no one bothers to lead the charge.

This spring, it was not trumpeted in the news that a section of the track was ripped out as part of the deep-bore tunnel’s construction.

Neither did anyone in city leadership press forward with the results of a 2011 study (pdf), paid for by organizations in the stadium district, that found reactivation of the Waterfront Streetcar line could cost as little as $10 to $13 million. (For comparison, new streetcar lines in Seattle are estimated to cost some $48-to-$50-million per mile.)

As Seattle Transit Blog explained, it wasn’t just that the Waterfront Streetcar line could link up with the First Hill Streetcar line under construction currently. The maintenance barn problem could be solved by having them share space in the First Hill Streetcar barn. They even shared the same track gauge, so that with an upgrade to a common electrical system, the Waterfront Streetcars could tool right into the barn on existing tracks. (The major incompatibility between the historic Waterfront streetcars and new versions is that the Waterfront streetcars are high-boarders, rather than street-level — the whole Waterfront line has raised platforms because of this.)

If the city acted now (this was 2011), the study noted, the Waterfront Streetcar line would be operational by 2013, and help to mitigate tunnel construction impacts on traffic and businesses. It is not clear why this crushingly obvious plan was not executed.

The city and James Corner Field Operations are working together on a redesign of the central waterfront, and they trade off on who, exactly, is insisting that any waterfront streetcar line run not down the waterfront but on First Avenue instead. First Avenue is not where the Bell Street Pier is, where some 30 percent of cruise ship traffic departs. Nor is there likely to be any expensive uphill transportation, and the grade to First Avenue is significant.

The reason for proposing to spend four times as much on a new First Avenue configuration may instead be that the deep-bore tunnel construction needs the real estate the old line uses. So the temporary requirements of a construction project may be dictating long-term transit planning. It is not too late to do the reasonable and cost-effective thing. The historic streetcars are still in excellent condition. And with voters overwhelmingly approving funding for the $290-million Elliott Bay Seawall project, the future of the waterfront is still very much a live topic. To sign a petition and stay updated on progress, visit Save Our Streetcar (Again).

UPDATE: A quote from George Benson, the man who pushed from the creation of the Waterfront Streetcar line, seems apropos to a discussion of why a temporary closure has lasted seven years and counting:

Despite Mayor Uhlman’s public support for the Waterfront Streetcar concept, his planning staff decided that the line would be prohibitively expensive and irrelevant to the larger transit schemes then being developed by Metro Transit, and they set about quietly to sabotage “Benson’s Folly.”

News, Politics, Transportation

Op-Ed: Savor Our Waterfront Streetcars, Don’t Sell Them

Ex-Melbourne W2-class tram/streetcar 272 eastbound at the Occidental Park station, on Main Street, on the Waterfront Streetcar line in Seattle (Photo: Peter Van den Bossche/Wikipedia)

Of all the great ideas floating around for the renovation of Seattle’s waterfront, the decision that seems most willfully destructive is the refusal to consider bringing back the waterfront streetcar line. When asked, architect James Corner has said it makes more sense to run a streetcar down First Avenue, but has so far not argued that point persuasively.

Alarmed by the potential sale of the mothballed cars, streetcar supporters are making a new push. The Save Our Streetcar group is asking for public support at a July 12 waterfront design meeting (5:30 p.m. in the Exhibition Hall at the Seattle Center). They also have a petition you can sign.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat has been trying another tack — one near and dear to my heart — of trying set a fire under a local, motivated moneybags: Could the new arena builders get on board?

“I didn’t hear a peep of support from anyone named Schultz, Ballmer or Hansen. Or from a McGinn or a Constantine,” writes Westneat. (I know the feeling, Danny.) How about the owner of Dave’s Appliance Rebuild instead? He wrote in to tell Westneat he’d pay to keep the cars in Seattle, at least.

In a story about the grassroots streetcar movement, a former Metro director told KING TV: “It would be a shame, putting it bluntly, for us to work to produce the kind of waterfront park we’re going to have with the opportunity to use streetcars, only to find that they were gone.”

Not so long ago, the George Benson Waterfront Streetcar was lauded — even extended in the early ’90s. But the construction of the Olympic Sculpture Park “required” the removal of their maintenance barn, and the line was shut down in 2005. Not to worry, residents were told, it’s just temporary, until a new barn can be built.

“The duration of the shutdown is unclear, as details were sketchy yesterday as to when a new barn would be completed in Pioneer Square,” reported the Seattle Times, ominously, in 2005. Then in 2007, the City Council unanimously passed a resolution to put a new streetcar maintenance facility in a new, mixed-use development, but…you remember how the rest of 2007 turned out. That development didn’t happen, the recession dragged on, the streetcars stayed in storage.

Does it feed more than nostalgia to entertain the idea of bringing back these particular waterfront streetcars? Yes. The line was a success for twenty years, and the infrastructure for it remains in place. Though most of the track runs along the waterfront, the .4-mile extension takes riders to the International District, where they can transfer to Central Link Light Rail or King Street Station’s Amtrak trains, or walk to the stadiums.

In short, it’s perfect for tourists — the 90-minute transfer let you hop on and hop off at points of interest. With Seattle’s booming cruise ship industry and waterfront congestion expected for the next several years, it would be canny to provide a very popular transit system to help fill the gaps. That’s without getting into the cultural import of the streetcars — it remains a deep irony that a museum’s sculpture park not only displaced a great way to bring people to the park, but displaced working history as well.