Right Streetcar- Wrong Waterfront?

It doesn’t take long for talk about the Waterfront Streetcar to hit a big problem- the waterfront has the potential to be a bigger transportation corridor than the historical streetcar stock can service. With high-platform boarding, the historical cars are hard to accommodate in a modern low-platform line.

In an idle moment, however, a solution occurred to me- put the historical cars on the west side of Lake Union, running them under the approach works for the Fremont bridge and out to SPU.

This is a flat level right-of-way the city owns already- in fact, it was all rail at one time! The line would have low ridership, which would be bad for a normal streetcar line, but fits very nicely a historical line serving a predominantly weekend traffic.

Visitors to the south Lake Union Park, and the Center for Wood Boats, a living maritime museum where you can rent rowboats and sailboats, could also take a trolley ride up the western shore of Lake Union and out the Ship Canal. SPU students and their parents could take the trolley to the park, or, with a transfer, on to downtown and the Westlake nexus of transit modes. On this short level ROW the older cars would perform quite nicely.

This is a great time of year to appreciate this idea, with a walk, maybe from the SPU fieldhouse down past the Fremont Bridge to about the 3000 block of Westlake N, or vice versa. Choose some of our clear brisk autumn weather and you’ll be asking yourself why you haven’t taken this walk more often.

Maybe Seattle is too wrapped in insensate bickering to appreciate how nice this all would be. That would be a shame, and a sad comment on the current state of civic affairs.