News   GLOBAL  |  Apr 02, 2020
 8.4K     0 
News   GLOBAL  |  Apr 01, 2020
 39K     0 
News   GLOBAL  |  Apr 01, 2020
 4.7K     0 

San Francisco streetcars too popular for their own good

Twenty-five years ago, San Francisco put a fleet of quaint vintage streetcars on the train tracks along Market Street. Today those cars are still running on the F-line, which rolls down Market, past the Ferry Building, and up the Embarcadero to Fisherman's Wharf. They are beautifully restored, eye-catching tourist attractions, and a lot of fun.

Unless you are actually trying to get somewhere.

Click on this link to continue.
 
Hipster and Cbab: there seem to be two kinds of streetcar proponents: Those who think streetcars are better than buses, and those who think streetcars are better than subways. Don't lump us all in with the latter.

Replacing the downtown streetcars with subways is great, but replacing them with buses is a step backward.

I agree completely. Streetcars have their advantages as do subways, buses, trolley buses, etc. The trick is to match the route with the right technology. With a DRL for example as a subway, the Queen streetcar would have two more stations on its route. Coming from the East, for example, one could transfer from the streetcar to the subway much sooner than at Yonge relieving the 501 through the downtown core. I would imagine that building a subway along Queen would be much more disruptive than the St. Clair ROW fiasco and would take a much longer time.

I fear that if the streetcars were abolished completely you would get one new downtown subway with the rest converted to bus routes.

A little OT, but are there any routes where trolley buses might be viable?
 
Uh...the number of streetcar systems in the world seems to be increasing, not decreasing. Other cities envy our foresight not to tear up streetcar tracks and cave into GM (which is falling toward bankruptcy, btw) back when it was trendy.

That being said, we need to market the streetcars more effectively. Lots of people go to San Francisco and ride their streetcars. Not many people know Toronto has an even bigger system before they visit.

I think it's inevitable that trolleybuses will be introduced on the inner city and busier suburban routes. With the price of fuel only bound to go up (and don't be fooled by the recent fall of crude oil, since this seems to come every two years), trolleybuses can be an excellent hedge. They can even have batteries to allow route branching.
 
Thanks for that story, W.K. Lis. From the article:

"But I remember when we opened the line on Market in 1995. Right away we had 50 percent more ridership than the trolley bus it replaced."

That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? Obviously Toronto isn't operating tourist-oriented antique streetcars, but it reinforces the arguement that streetcars are simply more popular with riders than buses, even trolley buses. The Spadina streetcar had a similar experience when it opened from what I've read.

If we can accept that people are more likely to ride streetcars than buses, it's not that much of a leap to argue that all things being equal, people are more likely to live near a streetcar line as well.

Streetcars are also the beneficiaries of some creative accounting. Unlike a few other transit systems, the TTC doesn't hold it's debt on it's books. So when the City or Province dishes out millions in order to repair streetcar tracks or a few billion for new cars, the capital costs are not included on the TTC's fare recovery. As it is, S/C legacy routes have no obvious operating costs savings over buses. Where capital costs included in the cost recovery, this would drop well below bus levels.
First, given the slow speed of the downtown streets that the legacy streetcars run on, it's difficult to have a good cost recovery ratio compared to the faster suburban streets where most buses run. A bus running on Queen St wouldn't have a good fare recovery ratio either.

Second, you get what you pay for. Streetcars have several advantages over buses, including comfort, capacity, reliability, and attractiveness to riders. Similarly, subways and regional rail have several advantages over both.
 
Other cities envy our foresight not to tear up streetcar tracks and cave into GM (which is falling toward bankruptcy, btw) back when it was trendy.
Let's be careful here. An awful lot of this goes to be simply an indication of just how long it takes to change ANYTHING at the TTC. For once the TTC inertia was a good thing.
 
San Francisco does an amazing job with their one "pure" streetcar line - the F Market, because they treat it like an operating transit museum, but also part of the regular transit service. The operators (and those of the cable cars) are ambassadors to the city - friendly, irreverent, and used to tourists. The other lines - the J, K, L, M, N, T routes - are hybrid due to a mix of street and underground running, though the M runs entirely in its own right of way and the T uses a Toronto-style median stop system in a centre reservation.

The number of cities with light rail is increasing, but few of these are "streetcars" except for a few modern streetcars, like the circulator one in Portland (not the MAX), or the handful of tourist and circulator heritage lines like in Kenosha, Memphis, or Tampa.

There are only a few cities that I can think of at the top of my head with fully separate LRT and street railway systems - Portland, San Francisco (somewhat), Philadelphia, Hong Kong (Island tram and modern KCR LRT) and Changchun.
 
It was closer than you may think...

Let's be careful here. An awful lot of this goes to be simply an indication of just how long it takes to change ANYTHING at the TTC. For once the TTC inertia was a good thing.

From:
http://transit.toronto.on.ca/streetcar/4002.shtml

It was always the TTC’s intention, from the 1950s onward, to abandon its streetcar fleet. The opening of the Yonge Subway in 1954 resulted in the abandonment of a large portion of Toronto’s streetcar system. Abandonments continued as more subway extensions opened. This would have continued, the TTC thought, until 1980, when the last streetcar routes would fall concurrent with the opening of the Queen Subway.

Enter the Streetcars For Toronto Committee. This community activist group, disturbed at the prospect of Toronto losing its system of streetcars, lobbied the TTC to rethink its policy. It worked. In 1972, the TTC proclaimed that it had abandoned its streetcar abandonment policy, and was even looking at reinstating lines (the proposal for a Spadina Streetcar was first floated in 1973). Rogers Road would be the last streetcar route to fall under this policy.
 
Just as many of you have said, this is about what technology is right for the right spot. Subways should be built where the density requires it, and streetcars for those spots where necessitated.

I really dislike riding the bus, but they will obviously continue to play a large part in the public transit mix.
 
First, given the slow speed of the downtown streets that the legacy streetcars run on, it's difficult to have a good cost recovery ratio compared to the faster suburban streets where most buses run. A bus running on Queen St wouldn't have a good fare recovery ratio either.

False on both accounts. The 77 Spadina bus was a profitable route. The route's profitability ceased, however, when they inaugurated the streetcar line. Furthermore, an independent study compiled by the Globe and Mail a couple of years ago concluded that the 510 streetcar offered absolutely no time savings for passengers over the bus it replaced*.

* it was actually two minutes slower than the bus.
 
First, given the slow speed of the downtown streets that the legacy streetcars run on, it's difficult to have a good cost recovery ratio compared to the faster suburban streets where most buses run. A bus running on Queen St wouldn't have a good fare recovery ratio either.

Second, you get what you pay for. Streetcars have several advantages over buses, including comfort, capacity, reliability, and attractiveness to riders. Similarly, subways and regional rail have several advantages over both.

Under pure operating conditions, the legacy network operates at between 40-60%, which is inline with most bus routes. The kicker comes when it comes to capital costs though. My point was that if the interest and amortization incurred through maintaining the legacy network, legacy operating costs would likely drop to 30-40%, if not worse.

As for quality, well that is more subjective. I am sure that a modern tram is plenty comfortable. I think there is quite a bit of snobbishness about the matter though. I ride the bus every day to and from work, I find it plenty comfortable. Sure, I don't see mirages of four story walk ups sprouting along the upper middle class tundra of Avenue road any time soon, but it definitely gets me to where I need to go. I don't see any real difference in ride quality between the bus and if I ever take the 509 to the Ex*. All of the problems that apply to buses apply to legacy trams. I just don't understand why we would pay more for the same.

* actually, the big difference is that it seems every time I take the 509 the tracks are under construction, forcing me to transfer to a bus anyways. Thanks Steve!
 
^It's not the same. Read the last few posts, and that San Francisco article. Streetcars attract more riders. You may like buses just as much but you're in the minority. Streetcars are by any measure quieter and smoother. And they have the numerous benefits that have been mentioned, and the new streetcars will have even more benefits. Again, you get what you pay for.

False on both accounts. The 77 Spadina bus was a profitable route. The route's profitability ceased, however, when they inaugurated the streetcar line. Furthermore, an independent study compiled by the Globe and Mail a couple of years ago concluded that the 510 streetcar offered absolutely no time savings for passengers over the bus it replaced*.

* it was actually two minutes slower than the bus.
And ridership went way up too. It's a victim of its own success. That many people filing one at a time past a farebox is not a recipe for efficiency. Or speed. Hopefully the new streetcars will improve things.
 
It turned from a profitable route to an unprofitable route and from a slow route to an even slower route. If that's a victory it's a pyrrhic victory. Ridership also went up because the TTC threw so many of its streetcars on Spadina, compromising other routes in the process. Come to think of it, there might be a parallel between Spadina's ridership increase (from 26,000 to 45,000) and Queen's decline (from 80,000 to 40,000). In the bus world, you can always throw more buses on a route and have the option to buy buses (off the shelf) that might get delivered next year. Not so in the world of streetcars.
 
Yeah, a lot of the streetcar vs bus preference issue is stuff like snobbishness (and largely theoretical/anecdotal, at that)...streetcars: aww, how cute! vs buses: eww, they're for the poor!

There's places where streetcars should replace buses (although the price tag of a billion dollars per arterial route presents an often obscene barrier), but there's places where buses and subways could replace streetcars.
 
It turned from a profitable route to an unprofitable route and from a slow route to an even slower route. If that's a victory it's a pyrrhic victory. Ridership also went up because the TTC threw so many of its streetcars on Spadina, compromising other routes in the process. Come to think of it, there might be a parallel between Spadina's ridership increase (from 26,000 to 45,000) and Queen's decline (from 80,000 to 40,000). In the bus world, you can always throw more buses on a route and have the option to buy buses (off the shelf) that might get delivered next year. Not so in the world of streetcars.

Apparently you've never heard of their recent tender for hundreds of new streetcars which will be all-door boarding. If only the City would switch on the signal priority lights, the streetcars would be much faster on Spadina.
 
Yeah, a lot of the streetcar vs bus preference issue is stuff like snobbishness (and largely theoretical/anecdotal, at that)...streetcars: aww, how cute! vs buses: eww, they're for the poor!

There's places where streetcars should replace buses (although the price tag of a billion dollars per arterial route presents an often obscene barrier), but there's places where buses and subways could replace streetcars.

I'm guilty of the snobbery. I still take the bus, when I need to get where the bus is going, but I much rather the streetcar. Especially if/once we get slick new streetcars, they just look a lot cooler and more modern than buses. Dare I say futuristic even, if we get that wacky proposal from Alstom.
 

Back
Top