Research by Steve Neaving of Motor City Muckraker looks at the performance of nine streetcar lines elsewhere a month before Detroit's QLine starts service.
He writes:
A six-month Motor City Muckraker examination of the nine streetcar lines that opened since 2013 found that the costly, sleek vehicles are slow, unreliable, over-budget, accident-prone and vulnerable to mechanical failures. In all but two cities, ridership has fallen far below expectations, forcing schedule cuts and raising serious questions about the future of streetcars.
“Transit advocates who believe streetcars offer a ‘quality’ alternative to buses are fooling themselves,” Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, wrote in a study entitled, “The Great Streetcar Conspiracy.” “Their low averages speeds, limited number of seats and inflexibility makes streetcars inferior to buses in every respect except in their ability to consume large amounts of taxpayer money.”
While the streetcar revival began in Portland in 2002, it didn’t blossom until the federal government began doling out money for small-scale transit projects meant to revitalize urban areas. Between 2009 and 2014, the U.S. Department of Transportation spent more than $300 million on streetcars, which is more than a quarter of all urban transit spending.
Those streetcars are now operating in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Dallas, Kansas City, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Tucson and Washington D.C., offering the best insight yet of the performance of a throwback technology that all but disappeared in the mid-1900s.
