Courtesy of Mish.
Detroit, fresh out of bankruptcy, wants to waste $137 million on a streetcar project that will cost $45 million per mile to implement.
Detroit is not the only city to recently hop on the nostalgia bandwagon. For example, USA Today reports Atlanta, other cities see a streetcar renaissance.
ATLANTA – Once upon a time this city was crisscrossed by electric streetcars. At the peak of streetcar travel in the mid-1920s, some 800 streetcars covering 200 miles of track carried 97 million passenger trips a year. The story was the same around much of the nation: More than 800 other cities also had streetcars.
By the end of the 1940s, streetcars were virtually gone from Atlanta and before long, from the American landscape.
Now, streetcars are coming back to Peachtree Street — and to many other American streets for that matter.
Tucson’s $196 million Sun Link Streetcar Project, recently named the Public Works Project of the Year by the American Public Works Association, will operate on a 3.9-mile route between downtown and the University of Arizona when it begins service in late July.
In late summer or early fall, Washington, D.C., will open its $135 million, 2.4-mile H Street streetcar line. It’s expected to provide more than a million rides in the first year and help revitalize a once-thriving retail district in the nation’s capital.
Construction began in April 2012 on Seattle’s First Hill Streetcar, a 2.5-mile, $134 million line expected to begin service in the fall. The streetcar will run between Occidental Avenue in Pioneer Square and Denny Way in Capitol Hill, serving 10 stations along South Jackson Street, 14th Avenue South, Yesler Way and Broadway.
Streetcar projects are in various stages of design or development in more than a dozen other cities, including Dallas, which plans to open a line from Union Station downtown to Oak Cliff in early 2015; Salt Lake City, where Mayor Ralph Becker’s administration is pushing a plan for a streetcar in the central business district downtown, and Kansas City, Mo., which announced last month that it had selected a vendor to operate and maintain its planned two-mile downtown streetcar line.
St. Louis Streetcars
Also consider St. Louis is not alone in resurgence of streetcars.
In 2002, the Tampa region opened its TECO Line, on which streetcars cruise a 2.7-mile path — past the Florida Aquarium, cruise terminals and the Tampa Bay Times Forum — between downtown Tampa and historic Ybor City.
St. Louis, waiting to move forward with its own trolley concept, is far from the only city with plans on paper or wheels already on rails.
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