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How D.C. spent $200M over a decade on a streetcar you still can’t ride
- hanniabu 11y agoGovernment at it's finest. You can probably take any random person off the street, put them in as project manager, and complete this for less. The incompetency the government has in handling projects is absurd.
- lintiness 11y agolet's give 'em our healthcare.
- Edmond 11y agoprobably more to do contracting bureaucracy than incompetence. With all of these public works projects there are just too many hands in the bowl to make it efficient. The alternative would be to do it dictatorially, which would not be acceptable either.
- imglorp 11y agoMore likely, bureaucracy AND incompetence. Each begets the other forever.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agobureaucracy AND incompetence You forgot corruption, the third member of the triad.
- jessriedel 11y agoWorth pointing out that everyone's favorite example of decent mass transit in the US, the NYC subways system, was largely constructed by private companies, or constructed by the city and immediately leased to private companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S... The subway wasn't brought under full public control until 1940, after which there was very little expansion.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoCompleting this project isn't necessarily the right solution. In this case, based on the construction costs and operating costs versus prospective usefulness, this project needed someone on board sufficiently early with the awareness and authority to say "this is a bad idea, let's not do it".
- melling 11y agoI thought DC was trying to use a wireless streetcar that was developed in China: http://www.npr.org/2015/10/22/450583840/in-d-c-and-china-two-approaches-to-a-streetcar-unconstrained-by-wires http://www.npr.org/2015/10/22/450583840/in-d-c-and-china-two...
- tosseraccount 11y agoMaybe letting de-regulated private companies run some services will solve the cost problems. A little "uber" or "air bnb" type disruption is what mass ground transportation needs.
- mkaziz 11y agoRight up until they have their first pedestrian incident.
- tosseraccount 11y agoHow so? Shouldn't liability costs be be factored into the financial accounting part of any such operation?
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoThat doesn't sound very disruptive to me.
- cpursley 11y agoPlenty of private industries have incidents. How would this be different? There's already well-established legal and insurance systems in place to handle them. Also, privately run infrastructure has more of incentive to have a safe track (literally) record. Unlike government monopoly, they could loose a lot of money, lose their contract, or both.
- angdis 11y agoPlenty of modern cities with highly functional urban cores do just fine with public mass transit. DC should be able to do the same. It is a matter of fixing the right things rather than giving up and handing it over to private industry. Sadly too many interests in the USA are trigger-happy about throttling any/all public transit.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
- tormeh 11y agoStreetcars suck. It's less flexible buses, basically. Subways, on the other hand...
- chkuendig 11y agoSubways are a lot more expensive than streetcars, while buses are cheaper (not that much once you have a dedicated lane) but slower than streetcars. PS: I live in a city with an extensive streetcar network which is still expanding (Zurich)
- TheCoelacanth 11y agoMore importantly, streetcars also have much higher passenger capacity than buses. This particular bus route in DC is stretched for capacity and already has buses coming every minute or two during rush hour, so they can't just add more buses.
- xemdetia 11y agoI believe the damning thing is that DC already has a fairly reasonable subway network, so I can't see the need for streetcars.
- apendleton 11y agoDC's streetcar and subway systems aren't supposed to address the same need. The metro system, in terms of station placement/spacing, schedules, line routes, etc., is designed to efficiently move people from the suburbs to the core and back again. It's poorly laid out for moving people within the city; the hub and spoke layout means almost everyone needs to transfer and trips are often circuitous. For my commute to my last job, for example, getting to work via metro required walking five blocks, going into downtown, changing lines, coming back out from downtown, and walking an additional four blocks. It took 45 minutes, vs a half hour just to walk to work or ten minutes to bike, and this is typical of getting from place to place within the city by metro. Most people don't bother. The envisioned broader streetcar network would have been explicitly designed to address intra-urban trips, and would have had a very different layout from metro, with stations spaced more closely together, and fewer lines passing through downtown. Lots of cities have different systems to address these needs, since it's difficult or impossible to design a system that does both well.
- cphoover 11y agoIt's the springfield monorail in real life
- andys627 11y agoThis is nothing compared to what we spend on car infrastructure.
- sokoloff 11y agoBut at least my car is usable.
- jimrandomh 11y ago> DDOT, citing confidentiality rules in working with construction contractor Dean- Facchina, declined a public-records request to provide an item-by-item breakdown. Well, there you have it. The money was stolen by shady construction contractors. The construction industry in the United States - and seemingly only in the United States - is incredibly corrupt.
- kps 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charbonneau_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charbonneau_Commission
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoseemingly only in the United States Is this an example of Poe's law? Isn't "the construction industry" "incredibly corrupt" pretty much everywhere?
- mrsuprawsm 11y agoThis would never happen in mainland Europe.
- afiedler 11y agoAs a DC resident, this project is really ridiculous for a few reasons. First of all, it is no faster than a bus because it still does not have a dedicated right-of-way. It also follows the side of the street instead of the center, so it constantly smashes mirrors of parked cars. Sometimes, people parallel park poorly and completely block the tracks, delaying service until the car can be towed. Buses don't have that problem, obviously. Finally, it is forecast to make $450,000 in revenue per year on $5.1 million in operating expenses. I realize most transit systems don't make a profit, but that is crazy. You could literally buy every single streetcar rider rides on UberPool for less money.
- Retric 11y agoPaying for Uber rides does not include paying for new roads. DC traffic is bad enough they need higher density options. If that's busses with dedicated right of way, or street cars with dedicated lanes, or new subway stations they need to do something that people will actually use. PS: I don't live in DC in large part due to traffic issues, but also giving up the right to vote bothers me deeply. So, this is from someone that lives close to, but not in DC.
- natermer 11y agoPaying for rail doesn't do anything to alleviate the need to pay for roads though. The comparison really is paying for trolley vs paying for Uber (or whatever) Rail is only useful in certain situations and it's only useful if done correctly. Neither of these things are happening in this case. And don't worry about your vote. It's really irrelevant. It's really about making you feel like you have a voice then actually you having a voice.
- andys627 11y agoThere are a few reasons it's not ridiculous - will encourage development, it will encourage more people than buses will to switch modes, will make everyone healthier (lower med costs).
- Grue3 11y agoBerlin has spent much more on an airport you still can't fly from.
- dajohnson89 11y agoThere is a lot of frustration with the DC subway system. Check out these two (frequently updated!) twitter accounts for example: https://twitter.com/unsuckdcmetro https://twitter.com/unsuckdcmetro https://twitter.com/dcmetrosucks https://twitter.com/dcmetrosucks One area the streetcar plans to serve is the H Street Corridor. It's currently not really served by the subway system, so supposedly the powers-that-be decided it was a lower-cost solution. At $200m and 10 years though (and counting), I wish a subway system expansion would have been implemented. I would gladly pay more tax dollars for a more extensive (and less sucky) subway network here in DC. Instead, I'm spending that money on Uber, when I find out that the next train comes in 20 minutes. I should add that a monthly pass for the DC metro costs more than twice than NYC's (the 2nd most expensive in the country), and more than triple San Francisco's.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y agoThe DC Metro is an abomination. I regularly spend about 40 minutes waiting for my girlfriend at the end of one of the lines as she gets on a trip that should take 20. Everything from "Single tracking on line between EVERYWHERE due to construction" to train inexplicably stopping on tracks for 10 minutes, to trains simply deciding not to run in that direction with absolutely no warning, no explanation why, and no ETL on the next train. It boggles the mind to think how any work gets done in DC when the public transit system is so terrible. Oh, wait...
- smacktoward 11y agoThe saddest part is that Metro used to be incredible. I first moved to DC in 1993, and back then the trains were on time, the cars were clean, and the fares were low. It was excellent. People routinely pointed to it as the best thing about living in the District. It's taken two decades of neglect and mismanagement to turn it into the horror show it is today.
- epoxyhockey 11y agoIMHO, the turning point several years ago was when Metro went from automated mode to manual mode after having to go from 6 car trains to 8 car trains. Apparently, the automated mode, where the train driver just looks out for anomalies, doesn't have enough precision to handle 8 car trains that consume the entire platform at stations. Under automated mode, you had consistent threshold breaking and acceleration, door opening times, etc. It was a very smooth ride.
- drfritznunkie 11y agoI live a couple of blocks from this boondoggle, but some of the issues aren't strictly the streetcars fault. For instance, this very morning while walking my dogs, a DC tow truck sped past us all code 3. We rounded the corner onto H ST, and saw the tow truck using the wheel lift, fully extended, to push a car out of the way of the streetcar. And it wasn't like this car was just over the line, the driver had left its ass end hanging about a foot and a half out into the traffic lane. Whomever was driving that wrecker was masterful, blocking the entire street for only about 60 seconds while he rammed the car into place. Any improvement in public transit is also going to require improvements in the quality of driving out there. People are selfish idiots when in their cars.
- Someone1234 11y agoI'd argue that's a design problem. A lot of cities have built street cars in the middle of the road, or they place concrete edge between parking and the street car's lane to stop exactly that from happening. Why didn't DC? This seems incredibly dangerous and poorly thought out: http://i.imgur.com/WbWrf9l.jpg http://i.imgur.com/WbWrf9l.jpg I understand that civil engineers are sometimes handcuffed with what they can do. But the city really needs to decide how seriously it is about this project, and either design the city around the streetcars or just eliminate them completely. It just looks like they tried to half-arse it and it blow up in their face. Honestly Salt Lake City is a map of where the US needs to go, not DC. Cycling lanes everywhere and streetcars with dedicated space and priority. It isn't perfect (cycling lanes need more protection, like Copenhagen, actual concrete to stop cars driving or parking in them) but it is darn good by the US's standard.
- distances 11y agoI've lived in two European cities with extensive tram lines. Both of them have trams on the streets, but the other one also has dedicated lanes in places where streets are wide enough. The dedicated ones are very fast and enjoyable to ride, but even the on-the-street lines are way better than buses. Blocking the rails happens very rarely, so I assume it's about everyone getting used to it, plus hefty towing fees.
- funwithjustin 11y agoAt least they didn't go $6.25 billion over budget on a broken bridge: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2015/10/from-250-million-to-65-billion-the-bay-bridge-cost-overrun/410254/ http://www.citylab.com/politics/2015/10/from-250-million-to-...