Megan McArdle is one of my favorite writers; I find myself checking her website every afternoon in hopes of finding a new blogpost. But, I regret to say, she is horribly and uncharacteristically wrong on one issue: District of Columbia trolleys. Give her credit: she admits up front, in the lede of her most recent blogpost on the subject, “I have come to love its [D.C.’s] fabled streetcar project.” And she notes, explaining the word “fabled,” that none of the D.C. trolley cars is actually up and operating and that cars in test runs “all too frequently end up in flames,” which would seem to be a reason not to love them, in addition to what she admitted in an August 2014 blogpost is their “huge costs.”
But she goes on to argue that one of the, in my view as I explained in this Washington Examiner blogpost, chief drawbacks of trolley lines, their inflexibility, is actually a feature, not a bug. The fact that trolley lines can’t be easily or inexpensively moved, as bus lines can, means that entrepreneurs will build bars and restaurants on trolley-served streets, which D.C.’s H Street N.E. will be if the proposed trolley line is up and operating.
That’s pretty lame. Trolley lines from nowhere to nowhere (the H Street line would begin at the Anacostia River and end a couple of blocks north of Union Station) are unlikely to bring in huge additional amounts of foot traffic over the numbers that will head to an entertainment zone in private cars, buses, cabs or Uber/Lyft. As I explained in my blogpost, trolley lines like this aren’t really transportation; they’re amenities, adding to the entertainment zone aesthetic. But, like other fixed transportation modes (expressways, railroads, airports), they’re hugely expensive: D.C. has been planning to spend $3 billion on a bunch of proposed trolley lines. Other amenities — I suggested old-fashioned lampposts, but more imaginative readers can surely think of others — are orders of magnitude less expensive and can still help create the aesthetically pleasing atmosphere that encourages entrepreneurs in an entertainment zone. At a much more modest cost.
Yes, I like the look of New Orleans’s antique St. Charles Avenue streetcars and the sleeker look of San Diego’s bright red Tijuana Trolley. I have happy memories of taking the Woodward Avenue streetcar with my grandmother from her house in Highland Park to downtown Detroit (those streetcars were sold to Mexico City in the 1950s, but I haven’t seen any of them in my trips there over the past 20 years). But to Megan, I say, repent. You have nothing to lose but your fixed rails—and, as she notes, some $200 million in sunk costs.
