Category — Uncategorized

It will come as no surprise to learn that restoring the Waterfront Streetcar will involve “agencies”- all of which will claim to have solid technical grounds for their choices. The Urbanophile, in an excellent post offers some information and ways in which to deal with “agencies”.

It’s reasonably short and to the point. Read it. You’ll thank me later.

The community of concern about the future of the central waterfront got a major jolt recently, as Mayor McGinn said he would push for an immediate vote to build a new seawall. All the vague talk about how much he valued community input and good design was exploded by a call for the bulldozers.

If you left the matter up to WSDOT you’d get a freeway on the waterfront. If you left it up to SDOT, you’d get an ‘urban arterial’- that’s a freeway with traffic lights and a speed limit of 35. What will make a difference will be the other stakeholders, ranging from environmental groups to Washington tribes- and beyond.

Bike groups, museum groups, commercial groups, neighborhood groups- many of these will be fighting for better pedestrian and people access and use on the waterfront, and they need all the help they can get. And if that help comes in the form of a person who also favors a streetcar running in the mix, so much the better.

If you’ll excuse a personal note, my biggest mistake in life was not joining and participating in more groups. Believe it, you want to be involved in this process, and will remember with pride having been involved as long as you live.

So join a group and participate. It’s crunch time.

SDOT has posted a survey to see if the public will allow them to discontinue the electric buses. I know, that sounds harsh, but if they were sure they were going to keep them, they wouldn’t post a survey. Nobody asked you or me the last time they bought some buses.

Be sure to fill it out and submit it, and there’s a space you can write in another reason to like electric buses- they don’t depend on foreign oil.

A few comments from a thread to a post by Knute Berger at Crosscut:

“a) We tried the free tourist shuttle from cruise ships to PS and to Pike Market. It bombed. Few cruises have a port-of-call in Seattle (i.e., ship comes in, passengers have X hours to go ashore before the ship leaves again.) For those that do, passengers already have their iteinerary planned before they get off the boat and they won’t board a bus they have never heard of before. And the cruise lines won’t promote a free bus because it doesn’t earn them a commission. (We couldn’t even get brochures on board.) Most Seattle cruise passengers are here the day before, or the day after, their cruise so are not interested in a shuttle that takes them to or from the ship. But…

b) Cruise tourists DID use the Waterfront Trolley. Not to get to/from the ships, but as a fun, unique, and historic adventure. The loss of the Trolley easily cut the number of summer tourists by at least 25%. Ground level retail suffered tremendously when they lost this part of their customer base. The ‘shrink wrap’ Metro bus replacement did not bring back the tourists (though it is popular with workers) and I don’t think a ‘new fangled’ trolley down 1st Ave. will do so either. The level of anger and resentment the retail community feels over the killing of the Trolley is substantial and should somehow be acknowledged. Otherwise it will be that much more difficult to get folks to trust/work with the city or Metro in the future.”

And…

“Two words: BENSON TROLLEY. Before you build another streetcar in this town, make use of the money we already spent to build that line. Before it was pulled, it ran 200,000 folks on average a year. Now you have 211 cruise ships calling at Pier 91 and 66 and almost a MILLION transits… For the love of all things practical, Connect that line NORTH through Myrtle Edwards to Pier 91. Put the barn under the Magnolia Viaduct. Stops at Pier 70, and all the original stops. That line could run another 3 years before we have to interrupt it for Viaduct replacement. We own the right of way after 20 years of work, we already own the cars, and the track to Pioneer Square. We could have been earning revenue all this time we have been jabbering and instead Metro has had to SUBSIDIZE a bus for FREE.”

More good stuff there than I have room for here- go read it!

Calling your attention to the new addition on the blogroll, the Issaquah historical streetcar group. Issaquah actually should be interesting to us because of the challenges the town has faced in keeping itself loveable, and not least because the Boehm chocolate shop used to sell ‘broken’ chocolates for insanely low prices. Usually the ‘broken’ part of the chocolate was the failure of the little swirl on top to achieve perfection.

But I digress. Issaquah- click on the link.

Got to thinking last night about things that could be done to start working to restart the Waterfront Streetcar. In no particular order, I came up with-

Walk the line taking pictures of the condition of the tracks and overhead. In fact, this might be a good time to also take pictures of the businesses adjacent to the line, and make up a sort of directory of neighboring businesses. In working later with political types involved it would be handy to be able to describe the neighborhood of the line, the businesses, and potential ridership and destinations.

Finding a new location for the carbarn. This should be an interesting job! If I were doing it, I would start by looking for property about 100′ x 200′, at street level. As the early restart of the line would later be interrupted by the Viaduct teardown and seawall construction, it’s possible that the interim carbarn does not need to be permanent- IOW, could be built on a vacant lot that somebody is holding for investment purposes. Naturally, that would include most of the daytime parking lots in the area.

Find where the cars are now and talk with anyone currently involved in maintaining them. From this it might be possible to work up the organizational ladder and talk with some of the people who formerly ran the line.

Allied with this would be talking with the people at Snoqualmie, and finding out who, if anybody, out there is doing historical streetcar work, if any of the people who were once involved with the Waterfront Streetcar are out there, and get the word out a little about renewed interest in Seattle in getting the line running again.

“Inventory” the City Council and try to find out what the council members think about streetcars in general and the Waterfront streetcar in particular. The most likely- and in any case an essential- part of getting the streetcar running again will be the City Council voting an appropriation of funding with instructions to SDOT and KCMetro to make it happen.

What I’ve described is a fairly complex process that can only mature with time, so it would make sense to make one pass just hitting the high points (prominent businesses, City Council members, major problems with track) and then a second filling in more detail (inventory more businesses, learn Councilmember staff assistants, photoinventory and map the entire route). If a team of people could just keep working along at this, it would keep the idea alive and visible to people in the neighborhood, on the City Council, and Seattleites who want the trolley back.

Maybe you noticed I haven’t mentioned the incoming Mayor. Taking office, McGinn and his staff will be swamped with problems. As much as they might want to help, and as earnestly as they may promise to do so, this is going to happen when the City Council appropriates money to do it. IMHO this just isn’t a problem that McGinn can be much help with at this point.

So those are a few ideas I’ve had about how to get a start and a handle on this project. Cross-posted at Orphan Road.

This would be an excellent time for the new McGinn administration to bring back the George Benson Streetcar. It would be a valuable transit addition in a neighborhood that keeps growing and a clear signal that McGinn actually intends to put his money where his mouth has been.

What is needed is a streetcar barn, and that could be a temporary structure in a Pioneer Square neighborhood that is, by all accounts, in a mild slump at the present. It’s true that in the future the rebuilding of the seawall will interrupt the present streetcar line, but there’s no sense in just letting the line lay dormant until that distant day.

Certainly some repairs to the track and wire must be needed after several years of idleness, but this cost would be trivial compared with the cost of building a new streetcar line. It would be a bold, much welcomed, and still economical way of McGinn staking claim to the waterfront for the public and making it work for the people who are there already.

If you vote in Seattle, you should approach, not only McGinn, but also City Council members, to remind them that 95% of the line is still there, ready to be used.

In the past, to be sure, I have ruminated on what a line stretching north to Interbay would look like, and whether the waterfront were the best location for the historical streetcar. At the present time, though, it seems very clear that bringing back the George Benson Streetcar before the seawall construction begins is a good choice.

There are times I truly regret the health problems and responsibilities that preclude my visiting Seattle, and what I’m about to say next makes this one of those times. If somebody doesn’t do something, those Waterfront Streetcars are likely to end up out in Snoqualmie.

In previous posts I’ve reviewed the facts that the historical streetcars are high-platform cars and apparently have limited braking capabilities, meaning they are safest on level track.

If there were a group of trolley enthusiasts working to set up a historical line on level land near a shore, there are places that might be done. If a group was pressuring the City of Seattle to restore high-platform service on the central waterfront, and even extend service to Pier 91 or to the south side of the Ship Canal, that could be done. If more cars were needed, it is possible to buy heritage cars that are made new in the old style.

If a group does not exist to pressure the City, the historical cars are as good as gone. If there is a constituency in the City for a waterfront streetcar, building an extended route with modern low-platform cars will almost certainly seem like the way to go.

Ideally, arts and historical groups would support the historical trolley as a stabilizing reminder of our history- a factor that should really be the subject of another post.

This blog is meant to serve as a standard bearer- not the standard bearer- for the waterfront streetcar. One thing that would be helpful now would be if someone who actually is in Seattle could go to the cars and follow leads to the people who ran the cars, maintained them, and were otherwise involved in starting the service or keeping it going. If that involves a trip to Snoqualmie, there may be a lesson somewhere in there.

There is yet another candidate for locating a historical streetcar in Seattle- Seward Park and Rainier Beach- an area currently underserved by transit, and well-deserving of weekend service for people who wish to go to the beach.

Columbia City and Rainier Beach were, in fact, “spawned” by the interurban to Tacoma, which originally ran through those communities. While they haven’t benefited much from the opening of LINK, they have benefited from their own community boosterism which has restored some of their former glory. Unfortunately, very little transit is provided between these communities and Seward Park and the public waterfront stretching north from Seward Park.

Without getting too deep in the weeds here, it seems like we have another area in which a historical streetcar could also provide a very useful service in providing access to public parks that have, to some degree, been neglected in overall planning efforts.

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.