Second Edition Of Street Smart Book Available

The explosion of interest in streetcars stalled only slightly in 2008, with the U.S. economy on the skids and a dawning awareness that streetcars would not win federal funding through the new Small Starts program. The Seattle streetcar opened in December of 2007 with half the $52 million cost paid for by property owners, and predictions that Seattle¹s South Lake Union neighborhood could see even more streetcar-oriented development than Portland¹s Pearl District. The hybrid Savannah streetcar opened in December 2008 for just $1 million, less even than the dirt-cheap $6 million Kenosha streetcar, with no overhead wires, and operating on cooking grease from nearby restaurants.

Meantime, the Portland streetcar continued to illustrate how streetcars were "economic development projects with transportation benefits," as the amount of development along that line climbed to $3.5 billion. Michael Powell, proprietor of the Powell's Books, calculated the economic development benefits this way: The number of pedestrians in the crosswalk in front of his store numbered three an hour before the line opened in 2001, he said. But when he counted again in 2008 there were 938 pedestrians. Four hundred new businesses had opened in the Pearl, he added, and 90 percent were locally owned ­ the vast majority by women and ethnic minorities. In the meantime, his property values had increased more than tenfold.

Reconnecting America conducted four national streetcar workshops based on this book in 2007 and 2008. Charlie Hales of HDR Engineering summed up the state of the streetcar movement at the Los Angeles workshop. The collapse of the "drive-until-you-qualify" suburban real estate paradigm suggested that the volatility of gas prices and Middle East politics as well as concern about the carbon footprint of development may have permanently changed the U.S. real estate market, he said. Meantime, cities were realizing that transportation couldn't just be about line-haul commuting anymore, because if transit was going to be a viable travel option riders also needed local circulators to get them to their destinations. Streetcar cities also understood, he said, that there is a real competition for "quality of place" in the new economy, that urban real estate has to accommodate higher-value uses than wide streets and big parking lots, and that streets have to be used more efficiently than to merely accommodate single-occupancy vehicles.

Financing streetcars remains the biggest challenge. The federal bill that sets priorities and funding for transportation will be reauthorized in 2010, and will likely include funding for streetcars. Until that time, this book is intended to promote a learning network of cities and transit agencies who want to build systems using the resources that exist now. There are advantages: Federalizing a project also means regionalizing that project, since it must be included in long-range transportation plans, which greatly complicates the politics of getting a streetcar built.