The Washington, D.C. streetcar – a 2.2.-mile, slower-than-walking form of “transportation” that took nearly a decade and $200 million to complete – is not often heralded as an urban planning success story. Even the partisans of new urbanism – the types who loathe cars and venerate all things rail – have been critical of the project.
But here comes an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post arguing that we’ve got it all wrong: Actually, the “D.C. streetcar deserves a round of applause,” says Nick Antonucci.
Antonucci’s article is based on a number of specious assertions and lazy stereotypes.
Naturally, he claims that “millennials” love streetcars. (Must my generation be blamed for everything?) Granted, steampunk may be a hip aesthetic, but it still beggars belief that the young would be going ga-ga for an antiquated form of transportation that dates to the nineteenth century.
Still, Antonucci writes, “As millennials — those people born between the early to mid-1980s and 2004— come of age, they’re deciding in huge numbers to live, work and play in urban areas . . . and they’re ditching cars and choosing public transit, ride-hailing services, bikes or a good pair of shoes over car ownership.” It’s telling that Antonucci fails to provide a link for his claim that millennials are “ditching cars.” Because that simply isn’t true. And he also sneakily elides the distinction between true public transit, like buses, and costly, ludicrously slow baubles like the streetcar, which do essentially nothing to promote mobility.
Then, Antonucci contends that streetcars “power economic development in ways that buses cannot,” disregarding the inconvenient truth that the H Street corridor, which the D.C. streetcar serves, was booming long before the first streetcar crawled along. And he also claims that “electric-powered streetcars are zero-emission machines,” bizarrely ignoring where electricity comes from. Antonucci’s claim is tantamount to calling 200-inch televisions and central air conditioning “zero emission,” simply because they don’t directly run on gas.
By far the most informative sentence in the piece is the bio-line at the end, which informs us that Nick Antonucci is “is vice president of HNTB, an architecture, engineering, planning and construction-services company.” HNTB, a perusal of its website reveals, is an “infrastructure solutions firm serving public and private owners and contractors.” Recent projects of HNTB’s include the Atlanta streetcar and the train at Dulles airport.
Stop the presses: The vice president of a streetcar building company loves streetcars. The piece may as well have been written by Lyle Lanley.
