El Paso Streetcars Part 2: Streetcars and Ridership: Expect a Decline After the Thrill is Gone

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

1.    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.

  
Also see: "KFOX14 Investigates: Off the tracks, streetcar ridership plummets."

El Paso Streetcars Part 1: The Beauty of Buying Things we Can’t Afford

El Paso Streetcars: 

The Beauty of Buying Things we Can’t Afford

By Raymundo Eli Rojas

Like you, I have been enamored with trolleys and streetcars.  I remember the stories of my parents, about how they use to take the trolley to Downtown El Paso to watch films at the Plaza and other theaters.  I was recently in Kansas City and I took the streetcar from the Union Depot up to the Power and Light District.  It was magical.

So don’t get me wrong, I love these things and I will probably be one of the first in line to ride them when they open here in El Paso.

Then I have to consider my property taxes.  El Paso Speaks posted an article some time ago, “Almost as bad as you can get,” El Paso has the second highest property taxes in the nation when looking at the 50 largest cities in the country.

 It’s nice to do all these things in El Paso that we can’t pay for, to run up the city’s debt, to shift money over to things like Southwest University Ballpark or the trolley, and suck that money out of other areas in our city where those funds are solely needed -- our roads.

There is one thing about streetcars that has come out in the recent academic literature and urban studies articles, streetcars (like Southwest University Ballpark) don’t pay for themselves and ridership declines after the initial opening.

In El Paso, the streetcars will soon be running from Downtown up to UTEP. The Texas Department of Transportation announced a major hurdle recently in that they would be replacing the two of the bridges the El Paso streetcar would go over.  Did the City of El Paso not consider this? Probably not.

We are looking at a new series here and this first article will look at ridership.

Read Part 2

Also see:

"KFOX14 Investigates: Off the tracks, streetcar ridership plummets."