We're jealous of the Metro Times' feature on the QLine, mainly because "a streetcar named disaster" is such a great headline, even in the sub-headline position. Not to digress.
The MT's (and sometime Deadline contributor) Steve Neavling lays out the grim facts about the two-year-old light rail line:
• Ridership has reached record lows, falling far short of expectations.
• The cost to operate the streetcar has ballooned, and the QLine is recovering less than 10 percent of its expenses from fares.
• The streetcars are often delayed, blocked by illegally parked cars, emergency vehicles, car crashes, snarled traffic, delivery trucks, and roadwork.
And there are five more bullet points.
It boils down to what many predicted from the start: In a rush to get a trendy new streetcar running up and down Woodward, planners missed a chance to make the QLine a far more useful form of mass transit. As it exists now, the QLine is slow, unreliable and not even of much use for downtown workers, for whom it should work best of all.
One rider on a near-empty car said, "I won't ride it if I have someplace to be. I learned my lesson. It has made me late too many times."
One mitigating factor: Detroit is not alone. Across the country, similar light-rail lines are failing to deliver on expectations.
In Dallas, Atlanta, and El Paso, average daily ridership is below 1,000. Cincinnati, Oklahoma City, and Charlotte attract fewer than 2,000 riders a day on average. Cities with ridership between 2,000 and 3,000 are Milwaukee, Tucson, Tampa, and Washington, D.C. Only Seattle and Kansas City average between 5,000 and 6,000 daily riders.
We should have listened to Marge Simpson when we had the chance.
