The Cincinnati Beacon
More on the Boondoggle: Streetcars Fizzle in Cleveland
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
A few months ago, Michael Earl Patton published this analysis of the boondoggle called the Cincinnati Streetcar proposal. And this week, Bill Sloat over at The Daily Bellwether posted this piece, highlighting how a similar streetcar line just up the interstate in Cleveland has turned from a creative-class pipe-dream into a “nightmare.”
Sloat introduces his item by getting right to the point:
The 2.2-mile Waterfront Line is a light-rail loop built with state funds in 1996 that connects Cleveland’s downtown to the Flats and Lake Erie waterfront. By 2002, ridership was so sparse that trips were cut. Cleveland’s RTA director called it “a transportation manager’s nightmare.” Now, streetcar boosters in Cincinnati are pushing a $102 million plan for a loop from the Ohio River to Over-the-Rhine. They say: Look at Portland, Oregon. Nothing seems to be mentioned about Cleveland’s experience.
In Patton’s piece on the boondoggle, he indicates why Portland fails on all counts as an adequate model for Cincinnati:
Portland is known for its restrictions on sprawl. Even before the streetcar, Portland was praised for increasing its urban density because of Urban Growth Boundaries, beyond which housing development was tightly restricted. So people built new housing in Portland because there were few other options.
(...)
[T]ens of thousands of people were already coming to Portland, looking for a place to live. They did not come to Portland because of the streetcar—they had been coming for years before the streetcar line was completed in 2001. At best one can claim that they came to the area served by the streetcar line instead of some other area. But they probably would have come to Portland in any event.
Cincinnati is different. It is losing population. More people are leaving than coming. There are plenty of places on the market for newcomers.
In conversations with Patton, he has shared a perfectly reasonable idea that the politicians will probably never have the good sense to try: painted lines on the street.
With a painted line, people can physically see the route—as with a streetcar line. And Metro already has some busses designed to look like trolley-cars. Why not paint a sample route, and run the trolley buses over it for a few months? Would there be substantive ridership? And if not, why bother spending all this money, with the risk of finding ourselves amidst a Cleveland nightmare?
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