Is Chicago dense enough for streetcars?

People look at picturesque images of European cities with families walking together on pedestrian shopping streets, businessmen stepping aboard sleek electric trams, and well-dressed women biking to work in heels. They say, "It's just completely different there. There must be some good reason why we can't have that. We're too spread out, our cities were made for cars. We can't afford great public transit."

What if, in fact, every street in Chicago was originally designed for streetcars and pedestrians? What if it turned out that we had more population, more density and more traffic congestion--more reason to invest in walkable, transit-optimized streets--than they do? What if the every-man-for-himself approach to transportation planning turned out to be the most expensive option on the menu, and we ended up spending more time and money getting where we need to go than everyone else?


Strasbourg has one-tenth our population and less density. In 1994 they fixed their urban congestion problem and boosted their economy by replacing cars and buses on many downtown streets with modern streetcars that also connect commuter suburbs to the core. These light-rail vehicles rocket through the countryside like wind-powered bullet trains, then glide slowly and safely through the city's residential and shopping streets.

Clark Street: a good place to start

Most of the many new streetcar lines being developed in the U.S. are primarily business and property development initiatives rather than transit projects. They go in as catalysts to spark growth in underdeveloped neighborhoods. Revitalizing cities with infill development on vacant urban parcels instead of investing in more suburban sprawl is good. But it’s a long process, and one that takes great vision, political will, and long-term commitment from major stakeholders.

The Clark Street streetcar project is easier.

It’s the low-hanging fruit in the modernization of Chicago’s transportation infrastructure. It’s a good place for a starter line not because it would have the greatest positive impact on the city, but because Clark Street is the easiest place to demonstrate how a great a modern streetcar can be for a neighborhood.

The people are already here, and they’re already taking transit. We’re already spending a lot of money providing them with buses stuck in traffic.

Some neighborhoods in Chicago (like Lincoln Park) deserve streetcars because they already have the density and ridership to motivate upgrading to a more efficient mode than buses stuck in traffic. Other neighborhoods (like the near South Side) are vastly underdeveloped in light of their outstanding locations, and these are ripe for the kind of development seeded by streetcars that we’ve seen in Portland’s Pearl District.

Because of how diverse Chicago is in terms of population density and development potential, we should expect to see streetcars serving different purposes—maybe even along a single line. The Clark Street line might continue south through the Loop, swing past McCormick Center, and along Cottage Grove to Hyde Park. The north half of the line would be primarily a transit efficiency and congestion reduction project, while the south half would be primarily a neighborhood development and revitalization project. 

We might some day see an entirely different third type of streetcar project along Milwaukee Avenue. Instead of building a tremendously expensive express train between the Loop and O’Hare Airport, we could build a modern streetcar line on Milwaukee and convert the Blue Line to express service. That would cost about one-tenth as much as building a new heavy-rail express train. And the Milwaukee Avenue streetcar would provide much better transit service than the Blue Line: travel times would be similar, but the stations would be at street level right in the neighborhood instead of elevated and in the middle of the highway. The new streetcar would boost property values and business all along the line. 

The next generation

The stats
From 2001-2009, among Americans aged 16-34,
Driving is down 23%
Biking is up 24%
Transit use is up 40%
Among those with a household income over $70,000, transit use is up 100% and biking is up 122%.
Source
Article about the report


Recently a friend told me about her son’s trip with some friends to a national park out west. They took the train. I thought that was an indication of their environmental awareness, but no—she said they took the train so they could play the whole way.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but young people today don’t want to do one thing at a time. They don’t want to make separate trips for everything. They don’t want to begin and end their day with an hour of sitting behind the wheel looking at the bumper in front of them. They want to be able to work, relax, or connect with friends on the way to work. They want to be able to shop on the way home. They want to live upstairs from a fun restaurant, down the street from a great bar, and around the corner from a movie theater.

The next generation will take transit not because it’s green but because driving is boring. They’ll live in walkable urban neighborhoods not because it’s fashionable but because being dependent on a car is such a hassle. To these kids, the idea that they would have to work the first two hours of the just to pay for owning, fueling, insuring, maintaining, and parking a car, which they would be stuck sitting in for a further two hours of the day just to get to the office and back, all so they can live in a suburban development where there’s nothing to do, is plainly insane.

What they want is to live in a streetcar neighborhood. The streetcar is a catalyst for economic development—the kind of development based on convenience, efficiency, comfort, and a socially interactive and vibrant urban lifestyle.

Don't wake up in a roadside ditch

Commercial photographers and location scouts know that most things have an established meaning even if we’re not consciously aware of what that meaning is. Their job is to put people and products into scenes that clearly, if subconsciously, convey the values of the brand or the feelings of the person shown.

You can learn a lot about American culture by searching through stock photography websites. I once designed a showroom for a wood flooring manufacturer, and by searching for stock images that had been tagged by their photographers with “wood floor,” I learned that wood flooring means authenticity. When you want to convey that a couple having breakfast together are really in love and not just sleeping together, you show them sprawled out on an old wood floor. If you want people who come to your restaurant to know there’s someone in the kitchen who really cares about them, you need to have a wood floor.

What do trains mean? What does “rail” mean?

There’s a TV commercial that warns people to give up cable and switch to satellite television, because otherwise you’ll get frustrated, hurt yourself, get an eye patch, get chased by thugs, and be left lying in a roadside ditch. What is the appropriate scene for getting chased by thugs? Where would they attack you and leave you in a ditch?

"Don't wake up in a roadside ditch."

It would have to be someplace where there are no people around. An abandoned industrial zone with no apartments, no offices, and no shops. How do we know for sure that no one will be coming by anytime soon? Because of the train, of course.

Trains go where people don’t. No one wants to be where trains are. Trains ruin every place they go, so they have to be segregated out away from where people want to live and work and shop.

Trains have this meaning in America because our experience of them is limited to freight trains, long-distance passenger trains (Amtrak), commuter trains (Metra), and heavy-rail elevated and subway trains (CTA). Until the 1950s, though, Chicago had the largest network of streetcars that has ever existed anywhere: practically every street in the city was designed and developed around the streetcar. When I talk about reintroducing electric streetcars to Chicago, sometimes someone will say, “What—right in the street? Where the people are?”

In many German cities, they never completely abandoned the streetcar lines, and in recent decades they’ve been making a huge comeback all over Europe. Modern streetcars are long, low-floor electric trains that carry something like 288 passengers and run on renewable energy. They run like wind-powered bullet trains connecting suburbs and satellite communities with the urban core. Once downtown they serve as “pedestrian facilitators,” gliding safely and predictably on rails down car-free pedestrian shopping streets. Even in smaller, low-density towns, there’s a “shopping street” with lots of people, outdoor cafes, and a tram running down the middle of it. Like Americans—we love our malls—Europeans prefer to stroll in a car-free environment while shopping and dining.

Streetcars and people go together.

The streetcar goes where the people want to be, and people gather where the streetcar goes.

Here in the States we have a number of examples of streetcars bringing people together, especially tourists in shopping and sightseeing areas, in places like San Francisco and New Orleans. And all over America, cities are investing in new streetcar lines—not as transit initiatives, but as a catalyst for economic development and renewed urban life.

Chicago was born a city of streetcars and pedestrians. We fell asleep for fifty years or so and woke up to find ourselves in a roadside ditch. But at least we’re awake now, and if we’re willing to pick our heads up and look around a little, the way out of that ditch—and back to a city of life—is as clear as day.

Why is the Clark Street corridor still stuck with buses?

The Clark Street corridor runs through a series of north-side neighborhoods between the Red Line elevated train and the lakefront—the area far enough east that transit riders take the bus because it’s too far to walk to the L.

This is the most densely populated area of Chicago, and the four zip codes with the highest transit ridership in the city. Over 70,000 people board buses on an average weekday in the Clark Street corridor—that’s more than on the average elevated train line.

Car commuters are a minority here, and almost all who drive to work are headed for the suburbs or for the Loop via Lake Shore Drive. Clark is too narrow to be a good commuting route for most drivers—it was designed for streetcars and pedestrians, and has become choked with through traffic. There’s too much congestion and not enough parking for Clark Street to be an attractive place to shop by car, so local business depends almost entirely on foot traffic.

Half of the buses in the corridor run down Clark Street itself, crawling through heavy rush-hour traffic at little more than walking pace. The other half avoid that traffic by running along the outside of the neighborhood near the lakefront. There’s less congestion there, but no businesses, so commuters forego the convenience of shopping on the way home and local business loses the benefit of all that foot traffic.

It’s a tough compromise. It would be better for commuters and for local business owners if all the buses went down Clark, through the heart of the neighborhood business district, but there’s just too much car traffic for that.

It seems to me we have four choices.

First, we could do nothing: stick with the bus system we have. As the city grows, increasing congestion will force more drivers onto buses, but those buses will be stuck in traffic too, running slower and slower every year. Our inefficient transit system and worsening traffic congestion are already costing us $7.3 billion annually in wasted time, and have become a powerful barrier to economic growth.

Second, we could make it easier to drive through the neighborhood by removing the bike lanes, parking, and trees and narrowing the sidewalks. We could add another lane to Lake Shore Drive going each direction. That would bring a lot more cars into downtown, and we’d have to figure out what to do with them (maybe build some high-rise parking structures with automated car elevators?). And expanding LSD would be really, really expensive: about $100 million per mile. Unfortunately, adding more capacity to urban highways just encourages more people to drive, so the additional capacity fills up quickly until congestion was as bad as before.

Third, we could build a new heavy-rail elevated train line along the periphery of the neighborhood or a subway beneath Clark Street. Unlike the road infrastructure, the train service would become more frequent and cheaper per trip as more people used it, which would encourage economic growth while alleviating congestion. But at $300 million per mile, elevated trains and subways have become so expensive that almost no one’s building them anymore.

Fourth, and finally, we could consolidate transit service from the periphery to Clark Street, bringing commuters through the heart of the neighborhood business district where they can combine commuting and shopping. We could move car traffic from Clark out to the periphery, where there’s less congestion. That would allow transit to move freely in a dedicated lane rather than being stuck in traffic, which would make the commute much faster and attract many to take transit instead of driving. That would essentially make Clark Street a bus rapid transit (BRT) route.

But we already have over 70,000 daily bus boardings—even if faster service and convenient shopping didn’t attract any new riders, which they surely would. With that kind of transit ridership (more than most elevated train lines), it would be cheaper to invest in upgrading to light rail—a modern electric streetcar running in a dedicated lane down Clark Street. At $30 million per mile, it’s a big investment, but a lot less than building more roads and only about 10% of the cost of an elevated train or subway. And because each driver of the long, articulated modern streetcar can transport two or three times as many passengers as on a bus (288 instead of 84 or 125), and since the drivers account for 75% of the operating cost of a transit system, streetcars would be much cheaper to operate than buses, saving taxpayers money in the long run. The fact that they don’t pollute, are safer to be around because they move predictably on rails, and increase property values (buses don’t) are all added bonuses. In Portland, the new streetcar has sparked enough development along the line to quickly pay for itself in additional tax revenue.

My choice would be to consolidate those buses and upgrade them to a modern electric streetcar line that transforms Clark Street into a world-class environment for commuting and shopping. 

Throng defends streetcars against creepy special interests

REIMS, FRANCE
A ginormous arachnid descended on Reims today in a totally gross attempt to stop the progress of electric streetcars. Thousands of citizens took to the streets in defense of fiscal responsibility, walkable urban neighborhoods, convenience, choice, and their growing clean-energy economy, turning away the joint-legged invertebrate. Many simply cried "Ew!" but Joseph Plombier, a local tradesman, suspected that oil and car companies lurked behind the onslaught of the octopedal arthropod. "I reekognize ziss web of de-sep-see-on," he said in a wacky French accent.