Drive Less, Live More: Street Cars Are the Way to Go!

Cincinnati seems to be jumping on the national bandwagon for restoring their street car system. If Dayton's leadership wants to take advantage of the recent trends in attracting the creative class and making Dayton a more liveable and exciting city, could we learn from Portland by expanding our electric trolley system into a modern streetcar design? Mayor McLin, your counterpart in Cincinnati is giving his full backing to this. Where do you stand for Dayton? Imagine a streetcar line down Wayne Avenue connecting South Park with the Oregon and St. Annes Hill, Downtown connecting East with West Third Street across the Peace Bridge, Wright-Dunbar, the Veterans Complex off Gettysburg, Grafton Hill, Dayton View, Old North Dayton, Huffman, McPherson Town. Cmon Folks, give us your thoughts!

Comments

[Phillip Ranly]

Here are my thoughts.

http://gemcity.wordpress.com/2007/05/01/are-you-down-with-downtown/#comments

[etbetb]

(NOTE: I made the same comments in the Interurbans discussion ... it's relevant here, too)

I'm all for electric transit. But let's be practical for just a moment.

For electric or any public transit to be successful, it must solve a problem. The problem 100 years ago was that you could get around on either two or four feet. Everyone wanted to go downtown, because that's where all the jobs and the shopping was. Hence the 20 or so electric corridors which fanned out from downtown Dayton connecting all different parts of the city to downtown. These corridors stayed pretty much the same until the 1960s.

As time marched on thru the 20th Century, as more people obtained cars, the problem took on a different dimension -- how do I get me and the car downtown, and once I get there, where do I park the car?

Today, in Dayton, there are infentisimal problems with getting downtown via car, and the fact that fewer need or want to be downtown, drives the fact that there's really not a problem parking once one gets there. Take a look sometime at how full all those office towers are surrounding Third and Main. The RTA's building (the Reibold) is over half empty. I would suspect that the same is true for many of the other tall buildings.

Public transit in Dayton, except for those who are truly without resources, is just not much of a factor. Hence the stigma I've encountered with people asking, "riding the bus? Who wants to ride a bus -- why don't you just drive?" Almost never cheaper (then again, there's a matter of a quarter percent sales tax charged in Montgomery County to pay for the RTA, a topic for another discussion), but certainly faster.

Take a look sometime at "rush" hours on the GDRTA, and note how many standing passengers you see. Back 40 years ago, base service of the trolleybuses on Third Street was 11 minutes ... and 6 minutes in rush hour. Today -- 20 minutes in rush hour! The only transit lines in Dayton today which could even approach using the capacity potential inherent in a streetcar system would be the Salem Ave and North Main corridors. Compare that to Chicago, New York, Washington DC or Los Angeles. It is unusual to see empty seats on transit vehicles in their respective inner cores at rush hour. Transit in those areas, more or less, is driven by:

1) I want to go downtown

2) The traffic to get anywhere (most notably downtown) at rush hour is crushing. It's too much of a hassle to drive anywhere, let alone downtown

3) Once I get downtown, I prefer not to have to pay $10-20 a day to rent an 8x25 foot space to leave my car.

Only at such point as those three items again become applicable to Dayton will there be an unfulfilled need for transit.

Don't get me wrong, the trolley system is cool, and makes Dayton different from all the rest. You can see more info about the trolleys, including historic schedules here:

http://www.daytontrolleys.net

C'ya
etb