Streetcars and Ridership
Expect a Decline After the Thrill is Gone
by Raymundo Eli Rojas
This is Part 2 in a series on streetcars. To read Part I, click HERE.
We can predict that when the streetcar finally opens
to riders, people will flock to ride them.
The City of El Paso and the El Paso Times (well add Secret and her crew) will market this as a success; they will say, “Look
how good we did!”
Then, ridership will decline.
Just last year, several articles were published
regarding the under performance of streetcars.
Laura Bliss says in her article “Enough With the Street Cars Already,” that in Detroit, ridership initially peaked when the new
streetcars came out, but “A few weeks after the city of Detroit began charging
riders a few bucks per ride on its brand-new downtown streetcar, ridership dropped
40 percent, according to the Detroit
Free Press. Sadly,
few
observers were surprised.” (1).
Forty percent decline!
Bliss states, “The streetcar, dubbed the QLine, is
carrying 3,000 riders per day, short of the projected 5,000 to 8,000 per day
required to break even.” (2).
In looking at Atlanta, Georgia, Bliss said after the
city “…saw a 60 percent drop in ridership after its 1.3-mile line, which
opened in 2014, started asking for $1 per go.” (3).
The outlook in other cities is not good.
According to Bliss:
Since it opened in
September 2016, Cincinnati’s Bell Connector line has seen about two-thirds
of the daily ridership consultants predicted. Salt Lake City’s Sugar House line has fared
even worse, with just about one-third of the passengers originally projected. Even Seattle, for all of its other transit
successes, is seeing about the same sorry share of original predictions.
(4).
According to the Cincinnati
Inquirer, as of January 2018, ridership for their streetcar is half of what
it was in 2017. (5).
There are exceptions.
These are Kansas City and Portland. Regarding streetcars, Portland has long been
used as a model for other cities. “Overall,”
says Bliss, “as
critics have often pointed out, the record is pretty poor when
these projects are judged as transit. Which
might be the wrong frame. Actual transit
riders aren’t well served by them, but developers and downtown business
boosters tend to be pleased.” (6).
Therefore, Bliss states that if we look at streetcars
as “transit,” the predictions for success are bleak.
Read Part 3
Read Part 3
- 1. Bliss, Laura,” “Enough with the streetcars already,” CityLab, September 29, 2017. Access, May 6, 2018:2. Id.3. Id.4. Id.5. Brazeal, Casey. “The Cincinnati Streetcar is Failing,” Planetizen, March 11, 2018. Access, May 6, 2018.6. Bliss, Laura.
