HERE GOES ANOTHER ONE, another week, another streetcar line...

[Ocklawaha]

Most readers know that Salt Lake City built a super fast-funded (called fast-tracks) in government lingo TRAX LIGHT RAIL LINE, for the Olympic Games. Some of you know they then chased Commuter Rail North to Ogden and are expanding it South as I write. Now comes word of a new transit project...and "learning from TAMPA" they are planning this, sorry Tampa, I know you built it, but damn it WAS OUR IDEA!

ANOTHER DAY - ANOTHER STREETCAR LINE

Streetcars may someday return to Sugar House
By Brandon Loomis
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 08/09/2008 07:42:30 PM MDT


A Portland, Ore., city-owned streetcar is similar to cars that would be used on a proposed Sugar House streetcar line. ( Photo courtesy of UTA)The view from a Sugar House front porch is homey: narrow streets, tree-canopied sidewalks, stroller-pushing moms.
    Paint in the kind of slow-moving streetcars that rumbled over urban Utah rails decades ago and you'd think it was the 1950s. It soon will be, in a sense, if a joint study by Salt Lake City, South Salt Lake and the Utah Transit Authority leads where planners hope - to Utah's first modern streetcar line.
    Out back, behind Debbie Czajka's Simpson Street rental home, it's "kinda ghetto," she frowned while sipping a mug and enjoying the sun on her porch one morning. Back there, behind the garage, it's a mass of weeds and cracked asphalt and dumpy apartment Dumpsters along the abandoned rails Busting the suburban boom?

   Streetcars are enjoying an American renaissance because they are proving better at attracting private redevelopment dollars than bus routes, according to conservative Free Congress Foundation founder Paul Weyrich.
    These streetcars have been a pet issue for Weyrich since he traveled the Midwest as a boy hopping the final runs of many old lines. These days, he advocates renewed rail routes as a public investment that spurs private development.
    "When the people get downtown Salt Lake is a place where the downtown is still fairly vibrant they have to get to their place of business," Weyrich said. "A streetcar is a very good way to accomplish that."
    Other cities have partially funded planned streetcars, including routes in:
   
Washington, D.C.'s Anacostia neighborhood, near the Nationals' new baseball stadium.
   
Downtown Birmingham, Ala.
   
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
   
A planned retirement community in Cleveland.

tracks that once whisked freight into the east-side neighborhood's stores are now abandoned.
    All eyesores, perhaps, but ripe for the kind of urban renewal that officials in Portland, Ore., say they successfully built with a downtown streetcar line.
    The Sugar House route stretches for two miles behind dozens of warehouses and tire shops from the Granite Block's south edge around 2200 South to TRAX light rail at 2100 South. The two cities and UTA are splitting the cost of a $300,000 study, and the line ultimately could cost $37 million and serve 2,300 people a day. Construction would come after the three parties find funding.
    Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker has pushed to expedite the link, and
city planners see it as just the start of a web connecting denser neighborhoods with TRAX.
    Czajka lives in one of the capital's most blended of commercial and housing districts. Central Sugar House is a place where people walk to the supermarket, to bookstores, to parks, to swimming pools. That's one of the reasons transit planners decided it was primed for a train that makes more frequent stops than TRAX and caters to a sense of neighborhood.
    "I could ride to the grocery store," Czajka said.
    That's the idea with modern streetcars, the sleek, low-floored cousins of light rail that don't trail extra cars behind and usually don't go faster than 30 mph. On the Sugar House line, trains would leave the Central Pointe TRAX station every 15 minutes, heading south a bit more than a block and then east to stops at State Street, 300 East, 500 East, 700 East, 900 East and "downtown" Sugar House. A bike path would parallel the tracks.
    Planners are modeling the line after Portland's four-mile, city-owned loop, which connects downtown neighborhoods to light rail.
    Portland streetcar director Rick Gustafson said the route has proved a better catalyst for transit-oriented development than light rail, because it operates on a neighborhood scale for people taking short trips. The city built it past many abandoned lots and, over 10 years, it has attracted $3.5 billion in development that includes at least 10,000 housing units.
    "People complain about it going so slow," Gustafson said. "But they ride the heck out of it." More than 12,000 people climb aboard every day.
    Salt Lake City's first streetcar line might move people a little faster because it's on a dedicated rail corridor. Over time, though, planners hope to mix streetcar tracks into automobile traffic where it makes sense. City transportation boss Tim Harpst said the next link that might make sense is from TRAX to the fast-developing condominium areas on the southwestern side of downtown.
    "You're going to see streetcars coming into the core of downtown," Harpst said.
    Utah's capital is the latest in a line of cities coast to coast resurrecting the urban trains. It started with Portland and Kenosha, Wis., a 90,000-resident city that linked its lakefront to the Chicago commuter-rail system with the cars.
    Tampa, Fla., has run historic replica streetcars through the city to its prime retail and entertainment district, Ybor City, since 2002. Two-thirds of the riders are tourists, though locals take it to reach the nightlife on weekends, said Ed Crawford, government-affairs chief for Hillsborough Area Regional Transit.
    The streetcars are especially popular with locals during special events when parking is limited, Crawford said. A comparison for the Utah line might be the July 4 fireworks and symphony show at Sugar House Park.
    "You will get traffic during those things, believe me," he said.
    Early rumblings about a Sugar House transit line worried some in South Salt Lake, such as former City Council member Bill Anderson, who envisioned the longer TRAX trains. The streetcar idea offers more for residents, Anderson said.
    "It serves our community much better than if it just zips up to Sugar House and doesn't really stop in South Salt Lake."

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A FEW KEY STATEMENTS:

Streetcars are enjoying an American renaissance because they are proving better at attracting private redevelopment dollars than bus routes

ripe for the kind of urban renewal that officials in Portland, Ore., say they successfully built with a downtown streetcar line.

Portland streetcar director Rick Gustafson said the route has proved a better catalyst for transit-oriented development than light rail, because it operates on a neighborhood scale for people taking short trips

The city built it past many abandoned lots and, over 10 years, it has attracted $3.5 billion in development that includes at least 10,000 housing units.

"People complain about it going so slow," Gustafson said. "But they ride the heck out of it." More than 12,000 people climb aboard every day.

"You're going to see streetcars coming into the core of downtown,"

Utah's capital is the latest in a line of cities coast to coast resurrecting the urban trains. It started with Portland and Kenosha, Wis.,  (This statement is only partly correct, San Diego started the movement, followed close by Portland, Kenosha is the first city to use the old Jacksonville plan to use historic vehicles at low cost in urban transit... in effect a rolling working museum)

Tampa, Fla., has run historic replica streetcars through the city to its prime retail and entertainment district, Ybor City, since 2002. Two-thirds of the riders are tourists, though locals take it to reach the nightlife on weekends

"You will get traffic during those things, believe me,"

A bike path would parallel the tracks.


OCKLAWAHA