Bring Back the Streetcars!
The title of our paper—the fourth
in our series of studies of public transit, considered from a conservative
point of view—is straightforward enough. Short of replacing the propellers
on our beanies with trolley poles, we could not make it plainer. Virtually
all American cities and many towns, even relatively small ones, used to have
streetcars. Someone took them away from us (if you want to know who, ask
Roger Rabbit). And now we want them back. We want to be able to ride a mile
and smile the while, just as our grandparents did, on steel rails under
electric power. What could be more natural for conservatives than wanting
something good we used to have and have lost?
But why, you may ask, do we see an
old-fashioned technology (“old-fashioned” is not a bad word to
conservatives) serving as tomorrow’s urban transportation? To answer that
question, we need to step back a bit and look at more than public transit.
We need to see an important change in the context in which public transit
operates.
The Context:
Restoring Our Cities and Building New Towns
For more than half a century, the
context in which public transportation operated was increasing
suburbanization, sometimes called “sprawl.” Driven in part by government
policies and in part by normal human desires for space, privacy and safety,
more and more people moved out of cities and towns and into suburbs. There,
they lived in single-family homes on lots large enough for children to play
in, which meant relatively low density. They shopped in shopping centers
several miles from their homes. Schools were also often beyond walking
distance. Usually, they worked even farther away. Most Americans live this
way today.
As conservatives, we do not join
the Left in condemning suburbs. We understand why many people want to live
in them. They are good places to have children and raise a family. Most
American families with children will probably continue to live in suburbs.
Government should not try to keep them from doing so.
But over the past several decades,
two important counter trends have developed, trends that provide a new
context for bringing back streetcars. Just like the suburbs, these trends
also reflect what many people want.
The first is the recovery and
restoration of city centers. All over the country, from Portland, Maine to
Portland, Oregon, “downtowns” are making a comeback. Why? Because even when
people live in suburbs, they want a physical “center” to their lives that
offers more than a shopping center can. They want a place not too far from
where they live that offers noble, historic buildings, real architecture
instead of mere construction. They want the major entertainment venues only
a city can support, sports stadiums and concert halls, museums and theaters.
They want restaurant districts with independent restaurants, not chains, and
specialty shops, like good used bookstores, that need a city to survive.
They simply want the old experience of “going down town,” where doing so is
an event in itself, in a way that going to the shopping center can never be.
Cleveland, Ohio, provides a good
example. From the 1890s through the 1930s, Cleveland was America's model
city. Its downtown was a splendid place, full of grand buildings, wonderful
stores, excellent restaurants and one of the best public libraries in the
country. Euclid Avenue—once considered the most beautiful street in
America—bustled with activity, the sidewalks thronged with well-dressed
people shopping at distinguished department stores such as Higbee’s and
Halle’s.
Then, in the 1960s, 70s and 80s,
Cleveland’s downtown faded away. The great stores closed, the good
restaurants followed. The buildings grew shabby. Litter blew through the
streets and bums and beggars took over the parks. It seemed as if the middle
class that had moved to the suburbs had lost all interest in the city
itself. They never came there any more.
Then, in the 1990s, the situation
turned around again. The malls and shopping centers started drying up, and
people began coming down town. The city built a new baseball stadium.
Cleveland Union Terminal was redeveloped. The old industrial area called
“the Flats,” down along the Cuyahoga River, became a major restaurant and
entertainment district. The city swept up the litter and encouraged the bums
to move on. Now, if you visit downtown Cleveland, you will find once again a
vibrant urban center, with lots to do and lots to see (go on a weekday, when
you can visit the interiors of Cleveland’s great banks; they rival anything
you will find in London or Paris). What has happened in Cleveland is
happening elsewhere; city centers are coming back to life. (And if there is
a downtown anywhere that begs for Heritage streetcars, it's Cleveland’s.)
On a somewhat smaller scale,
something similar is occurring where people live. While suburbs are great
places to raise children, more and more Americans don’t have children (a sad
development, we would note). Some are “empty nesters,” whose children have
grown up and moved on. Others are not marrying, or are marrying but not
having children. For many of these people, the spread-out nature of the
suburb (you usually cannot walk to anything) is inconvenient. In response,
some are returning to urban living. Others are rediscovering towns.
How many people have visited a
small, historic town and said to themselves, “Boy, would I like to live in a
place like this!” Well, thanks to an architect named Andres Duany and a
movement called Traditional Neighborhood Design, you can. In the 1980s, Mr.
Duany pioneered a then-radical notion: building new towns, designed just the
way they would have been in the l9th or even 18th century, as alternatives
to suburbs. His towns had all the features towns used to have: grid street
patterns; alleys (to keep parked cars and garages off the streets); a mix of
residences, shops and businesses; even front porches and picket fences. Mr.
Duany’s towns are designed for people, not for cars, and people love them.
If you visit one of his developments, such as Kentlands, Maryland, near
Washington, D.C., you will see why. And, people will pay to live there:
homes in Kentlands sell for a premium of $30,000 to $40,000 over the same
floor space in surrounding suburban developments.
Traditional Neighborhood Design,
as towns such as Mr. Duany’s are called, is spreading, just as the revival
of downtowns spread a decade or so ago. Both provide context for bringing
back the streetcars. It is not merely that streetcars can serve downtowns
and small towns, and serve them well, as we know from history. The fact is,
towns and especially downtowns need streetcars.
Photo: W.S. Lind
Main Street
Kentlands: Streetcars would be a perfect fit.
In a town or downtown setting,
streetcars do many things. Obviously, they provide mobility, without the
automobile and in a way that is friendly to pedestrians. In addition, they
bring development and channel it where it is wanted. They attract tourists.
They let people who use transit to get to town move around in the downtown
(in transit language, the “distributor” function), or, in Traditional
Neighborhood Design residential areas, they pick people up from near their
homes and take them to the commuter rail or Light Rail line (the “collector”
function) to go into the city. They bring new people to transit; as San
Francisco Municipal Railway General Manager Michael T. Burns said, “People
who wouldn’t ride a bus will ride a streetcar.”1 And, perhaps
most important, streetcars say, “This town, this downtown, is here to stay.
It’s not going to go down hill again.” George Sanborn, reference librarian
of the Massachusetts State Transportation Library, put it well. “Every
city’s streetcars were different. When the streetcars went away, so did the
flavor of that city.”2
Bringing back the streetcars puts back the
flavor our cities and towns have lost, and tells the world that it is not
going to go away again.
In their
heyday, (streetcars) were machines that generated affection, combining power
and modesty. They were real trains but without the noise and smoke; they
went over high bridges and quietly down tree-lined streets, across wide
distances, into bustling downtowns—yet for all their modern power and range,
you could catch them on your own street corner. The future of the
trolley…may depend on certain memories, of that swaying and quiet clicking,
the arrival heralded by a familiar bell.3
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