The late mayor Marion Barry called the D.C. streetcar project “ill-planned, ill-thought-out, ill-engineered, ill-everything,” a statement with which few would disagree. After a 54-year hiatus, the streetcar is back in action, offering commuters the nostalgia of a sluggish transit service with a hefty price tag to taxpayers.
Running just over two miles along H Street north of Capitol Hill, the streetcar was slated to open in 2012. Four years and $200 million dollars later, it debuted late February, giving Northeast D.C. residents a free ride from Union Station to Benning Road.
On top of the initial $200 million price tag, the streetcar will cost taxpayers another $8 million a year to operate. The streetcar is still in an “introductory period” since opening in late February, meaning passengers won’t pay a penny for their cruise along H Street.
As if that wasn’t enough for D.C. taxpayers, the district’s department of transportation recently launched a $221,000 radio advertisement campaign for the streetcar, the first of many from their $1.7 million marketing budget over the next year. And if that’s still not enough, the taxpayer-funded campaign comes with an awful jingle: “Streetcar, Streetcar, cruising along. Streetcar, Streetcar, singing a song.”
This money pit on wheels has spanned three D.C. mayors and a decade’s worth of bureaucratic delays. But H Street wasn’t the city’s first attempt at a reestablishing streetcar service.
The transportation department planned to begin the project in 2004 with a streetcar running through the city’s Anacostia Corridor. The plan hit a dead end when the city failed to reach a budget with CSX Transportation. The city revisited the plan in 2006, and 0.8 miles of track was built—only to be buried under asphalt four years later. In total, D.C. ended up spending $200 million over nine years for a streetcar that you still can’t ride.
The vast amount of taxpayer dollars that have been dumped into this black hole isn’t the only issue at hand here. The functionality of the streetcar is antiqued, it’s a technology that many cities have either abandoned mid-20th century or transformed into light rail systems. Much like the District did in 1962, when the very first D.C. streetcar ended its 100-year run as the primary transit service to be replaced by buses and the Metrorail system.
Today, the thought of returning to the outdated service seems senseless, as Adam Tuss pointed out last December. Tuss, a reporter at NBC4, challenged the DC streetcar to a footrace and won, walking passed the lagging streetcar while it paused at stoplights and merged into traffic.
Naturally, the city’s response to the struggling project is to make it bigger. Plans are in the works to lengthen the streetcar’s route by five miles, with an end goal to reestablish the out-of-date service District-wide. Because what other way to respond to a nightmare of a government project than to expand it?
After the nostalgia of the streetcar wears off, Washington is left with an over-budget, under-performing and out-of-date transportation service. The city is continuing dump money into a project with high unfavorability when what commuters really want is simply a Metro that doesn’t catch on fire from time to time. Is that really too much to ask?
Lindsey Curnutte is a Fund for American Studies intern at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a junior at Ohio University.
