Commuters will have to wait a while to take a streetcar in the District — and business owners and residents along their routes will have to endure more construction work to get the first trolleys running. The line running down H Street and Benning Road in Northeast D.C. is slated to open in July 2013, said District Department of Transportation spokesman John Lisle. And the Anacostia line that was supposed to have been the first of eight routes to crisscross the city now lacks any exact start date, he said.
It’s been a decade since city officials proposed a streetcar network, heralding the return of trolleys to the city. As recently as May 2010, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty pledged to have both the H Street and Anacostia lines ferrying riders by spring 2012 as the city announced a revised $1.5 billion plan to build a 37-mile streetcar network.
| Want to go? |
| WHAT: Mayor Vincent Gray and city transportation officials are scheduled to give an update on the status of the planned H Street/Benning Road streetcar line and gathering input about how to connect the line’s users to Union Station. |
| WHEN: 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., Tuesday |
| WHERE: Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE |
But the city is now close to finalizing a contract with a firm to design and build the final phases of the H Street Line, Lisle said. Officials need to buy two more streetcars, build a car barn to store them, add three power substations, build turnarounds at each end, plus add poles and new overhead wires. Mayor Vincent Gray plans to outline the work and get public feedback on it Tuesday evening.
The big sticking point is how the line will connect riders to Union Station.
D.C. officials have whittled down seven proposals to two finalists for how to handle the connection to Union Station: run the trolleys over the Hopscotch Bridge that runs over the Amtrak train tracks or route the streetcar line down Third Street and onto Second Street toward the main Union Station entrance. The Third Street option alread has opposition, Lisle said.
The city also is proposing to build a maintenance facility and streetcar barn near Spingarn High School at Benning Road and 26th Street Northeast.
For those along the path, the work means more headaches to reach the promised reward that is helping redevelop H Street. But Lisle said the line’s neighbors won’t face the same trouble they had to endure when the tracks were laid down.
“The impact is going to be much less severe than the construction program,” Lisle said. “It’s not something where we are going to be tearing up a large section of H Street or Benning Road.”
In that phase, he noted, crews redid the entire street, including moving some utility lines, switching out sidewalks and traffic signals.
The city still needs two more trolley cars and is currently working to finalize a contract, he said. It already has three cars, which have been in storage for years.
