The streetcar has been in the news a lot lately and you likely know that the future of the larger system is in jeopardy. It seems like the idea is to launch the existing H Street line and sort of wait and see how it goes. This Washington Post article does a good job of explaining the current situation.
22 comments:
dc gov't makes me so mad when it comes to this shit. like when they spent all that time tearing down and rebuilding H Street NW near the 395 tunnel, and then tore it all down a few months later for the Capitol Crossing construction. why is there no foresight or accountability? such a waste of time and taxpayer money. makes me so angry. if a private sector company ran the way the dc gov't runs, it would be out of business.
If the community still believes in this we better organize and get the message out now. This sounds a lot like they are testing the waters to see how people would react to cancelling the H/Benning line entirely and to be honest, so far if I were them I would not be shaking in my boots. I haven't seen much in terms of people or businesses fighting for this thing to be done and done right.
Let it die. It's a waste of money, was built with neolithic incompetence, doesn't go anywhere and continuing the line to Georgetown will never happen. Best to scrap it.
Hitting cars and passengers has been the a standard operating procedure for the bus system in DC for years. Why all of a sudden to we think scraping the side of a car that isn't parked right is a reason to hold this up?
Why should the streetcar driver be penalized for hitting the car? Those white lines aren't a suggestion.
waiting for someone to say 'scrap it, busses are just as good', while misspelling the word buses.
i would like this streetcar to be a success. so far, without any passengers on board, the street car has hit multiple parked cars, and a flash fire ignited on one.
let's give them time for DC to do this thing safely. if it opens unsafely, then our neighborhood, city, and others watching our neighborhood will miss out on this thing.
The entire thing has been a boondoggle from the beginning. It was rushed out prior to any planning. Why didn't they put the thing on the inside lanes with a small median? Take a look at the way they've done the bus lanes on Route One near Potomac Yards for how this should have been done.
Scrap the streetcar!
Build a gondola in Georgetown!
More wasted resources coming to a neighborhood not near you.
K Street Transitway is the most important transportation project in DC for the next 10 years. Many studies have been done, let's make it a priority and build it.
A better option would have been a bus shuttle service from Union Station to RFK. X2 frequency is ridiculous. Sometimes bus doesn't show up for 45 minutes and then you see 3 one after another. X2 route is longer so more prone to delays as opposed to a shuttle service where the turnaround is quicker.
Rickshaws put the homeless to work or better yet make them carry honest taxpayers on their backs...half kidding!
The other day I watched the streetcar sit there because a car was not parked properly....it is a bad idea.
People got paid and jobs created. Wasnt it the lure of the street car that helped improve H street NE?...So maybe it wasnt all bad, but we need to move onward!
I love the Gondola Idea!!!!
I've sold streetcars to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook!
Has the streetcar been marginally planned? Yes.
Is the streetcar hopelessly failed and unusable? No.
Maybe they need to limit H ST parking to compact cars only and limit the verticals to SUVs, Vans, Loading.
The BID needs to hire loaders to help businesses offload quickly.
The Streetcar can be vital infrastructure, if it extends east to Benning Rd Station
and west to Georgetown.
There is no H Street BID.
If you look at the plans this is literally going to be the worst part of the line. It's going to have it's own lane going through downtown over to Georgetown and it goes down the middle of the street on Benning, where it crosses the river there will be almost no traffic. H street is just a crowded mess and that's hard for any vehicle to navigate. It's unfortunate that that decided to build the least efficient part of the line first. I hope these issues don't cause people to lose site of the big picture though.
hopefully that report suggests getting rid of at least half the stops
Doug, What is the big picture?
It is 2015 does the last 10 years of the yet to arrive streetcar tell us that there may be a better solution?
The big picture is that it's supposed to be part of a longer line and a larger multi-line system. It's utility is severely limited by only being a short section of track. It would be like building only two metro stations and saying looking how worthless a subway system is. I explained above this was always going to be the slowest running part of the line, it's not a good demonstration of how the rest will function. We need to at least lay some more track and finish this line.
I'm with Doug.
The Streetcar can be vital infrastructure and the
proof of that is DC used to have a large streetcar system. We see remnants in the tracks in Georgetown and the bridges headed to Glen Echo. There is also the streetcar turnaround at Dupont and the carbarns on East Capitol Ave and Georgetown.
When DC was a much smaller town, the primary transit was streetcars. The reality is there is no space for more Highways, and the population is moving closer in, we either have streetcars, subways, or shared rides. We are adding bikes but we need to either get rid of 30% of the population or we need to add a lot more transport.
FWIW: Two pro-streetcar petitions:
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/save-the-dc-streetcar?source=c.em.cp&r_by=12683535
http://www.charlesallenward6.com/dc_streetcar_on_hstreet?utm_campaign=mar13_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_source=charlesallendc
1:31,
Already got something in the pipeline. Should go live tomorrow.
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