Tunnel Visions: The KC Streetcar

Every once in a while I hop out of Toronto, land in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and look around at different ways of getting around by rail, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.

Cities aren't supposed to be hollow. Cities are meant to be vibrant places, full of people doing popular things - otherwise, what's even the point of the city existing at all? Nevertheless, over the last seventy years, North America has seen many of its cities hollow out. Some managed to hang on; some, like Toronto, ended the 20th century better off than they'd started. Some, like Kansas City, Missouri, are trying to climb back up.

Like other major North American cities, Kansas City operated a substantial streetcar network in the years immediately following the Second World War, at its height running nearly two hundred PCC streetcars on a system comparable in length to Toronto's, today. Also like most other major North American cities, Kansas City dismantled its streetcar system in the 1950s as suburbanization and ubiquitous automobile ownership demolished its foundation. Kansas City was especially vulnerable to this because, hell, look at a map - aside from the rivers that frame downtown, there are no appreciable geographic barriers anywhere around it. Kansas City had room to sprawl, and so it sprawled. Rapid transit was hard-pressed in dense cities; in the midcentury Midwest, it didn't have a chance. Some of KC's streetcars found second lives in cities like Toronto or San Francisco, but plenty of them ended up just being scrapped.

That was how rail transit in Kansas City stood for nearly sixty years, but it's different now. North and south, cities are rebuilding lines that previous generations tore out. As I write this, Kansas City is home to the newest streetcar system in North America - and it'll only be that way for another couple of weeks, until Cincinnati's starts running in early September.

I was in Kansas City to attend the 74th World Science Fiction Convention earlier this month, but I was sure to make time for a brand new streetcar.

System

KC Streetcar #804 pushes north at the edge of the Power & Light District.

The KC Streetcar is, thanks to its newness, a refreshingly uncomplicated system - it's a single line, three and a half kilometers (2.2 miles) long. It spends most of its time on Main Street, crossing over two highways - Kansas City didn't shy away from crashing Interstates through its downtown core - and diverging only to loop through River Market just north of downtown, with each trip beginning and ending outside Union Station. Again, "Tunnel Visions" is a misnomer because at no point does the streetcar's route take it underground; hell, aside from a couple of pedestrian overpasses, it doesn't go under anything. It's a downtown circulator more than anything else, which is understandable. To my eyes, downtown Kansas City is reminiscent of downtown Toronto circa 1975 with more artisanal coffee stores and BBQ restaurants - by which I mean it's full of parking lots where buildings once stood. According to the streetcar's official website, there are more than twelve thousand parking spots within one block of the line - which is one of the major reasons, I think, that the streetcar felt so empty when I used it during the weekdays; there are only twenty-two thousand people living in downtown Kansas City. I mean, this is a place where the downtown CVS closes at 7 PM.

What struck me as immediately unusual about the setup is how the rails were laid. In Toronto, Boston, San Francisco, and other cities I've been in where street-running streetcars have been retained, the rails generally keep to the inner lanes. In Kansas City, it's the reverse; by and large the streetcars run in the outer lanes. This does come with advantages and disadvantages over the usual setup, as where multiple lanes exist, automobiles can navigate around streetcars and passengers don't have to brave a traffic lane to board or alight. From what I'm told, it doesn't make the setup particularly friendly to cyclists, however; I know of at least one point on a bridge near Union Station where there is very low clearance between the streetcar and the pedestrian wall, and there's at least one sign along the route warning cyclists that if the bike's wheel gets caught in the rail, they may be thrown bodily over the handlebars.

Not that they're always on the outer edge; there is some weaving to accommodate turning lanes and on-street parking, and there are places where there's only one lane, so a streetcar taking on passengers can cause traffic to build up behind it. Just like home. But those cars are faster than the streetcar, they'll get where they're going sooner than anyone on foot will anyway, probably.

Once you're on the streetcar, it's very difficult to get lost. You can't stay on it indefinitely, though, since all riders are required to alight at the Union Station terminus - but nothing stops you from getting right back on. Opportunities for connections are limited, but they do exist; the MAX bus rapid transit system - which replicates some of Kansas City's former streetcar lines - has stops near the line, and the 10th & Main Transit Center permits transfers to some of RideKC's regular bus routes. Streetcar service is a bit limited, though, since they don't have many streetcars to go around; on a day like today (Saturday, August 27), when one streetcar is out of service, they can't run service frequencies better than 10-15 minutes.

During my first experiences with the system found it somewhat empty, but that may be because Kansas City isn't yet a public-transit-all-the-time city like Toronto is. I've seen reports that the KC Streetcar is already exceeding its passenger projections, and my experience at 3:40 PM on a Saturday bears that out; from Metro Center to Union Station, it was standing room only all the way, and even more people boarded there for a trip back north. Fortunately, the streetcars have articulated sections much like the ALRVs and Toronto Rockets I'm familiar with, so there was always a good place to stand.

Stations

Library Station on a weekday morning.

My first impression of Kansas City's public transportation system, in the form of an hourly bus that left from an unshaded shelter on a concrete median outside Terminal C of Kansas City International Airport, wasn't exactly the best. Some of the stops the bus passed during its forty-minute trip downtown stuck strongly in my mind, because of how unstoplike they were: just a pole signed "METRO STOP" with a route number, a phone number, and a website. No shelter, no bench, not even a square of sidewalk. If you're talking about Barrie, Ontario circa 1991, that's one thing, but it's pretty thin provender for 2016 Kansas City.

With that in mind, I wasn't expecting much from the streetcar. What I found is that its stations feel like a strange middle ground to me: they're not quite stations, but they're more than just stops. The ones that aren't in their own medians are smoothly integrated into the sidewalk, designed so that they're on the same level as a streetcar to allow step-free access, and built around a central t-shaped shelter. I say "shelter" because there's no better word, but with no walls and a fairly small roof, the shelter that many of them is theoretical at best. While waiting at Kauffman Center during a heavy rainstorm, I had to stand on the far side, off the actual platform, to keep from getting drenched by passing cars.

That's irritating enough, in August - but Kansas City isn't Los Angeles, or Houston, or Miami. For now, at least, it still gets cold in Missouri, and snow does fall. These stations don't have windbreaks. I wouldn't want to be waiting at one during a snowstorm, or even just a cold and windy day. Sure, if service was frequent there might be a tradeoff, but there are plenty of times where you'll be waiting ten minutes or more for a streetcar to roll by.

On the whole, there's not much eye-catching about these stations. Many of them don't even have advertisements. They're each equipped with screens that count down until the next streetcar arrival, and have posted streetcar route maps and hours of operation. There are bits of public art scattered here and there; the one that most caught my eye was a model perched on top of the Union Station shelter, at once a streetcar and automobile and jetliner. One would think the wings would make it a bit difficult to run something like that on the streets.

Equipment

A closer look at the trailing end of streetcar #802.

As you'd expect for a 21st century streetcar system, the KC Streetcar has hit the ground running with modern equipment: it provides service with four (count 'em) CAF Urbos 3 Model 100 streetcars on their first North American appearance, though Cincinnati will use them as well and they're already in service in Edinburgh, Belgrade, and multiple French and Spanish networks. They have that clean, streamlined European design to them, with all the vital equipment hidden away from riders' eyes - it's almost as if they're whispering along on a cushion of air. I do mean whispering, too - these cars are quiet. Coming from Toronto, I'm used for the 1970s-era CLRVs to make my organs rattle whenever I'm sitting in a building next to the line; in Kansas City, it took me a while to realize that streetcars were going by, and I wasn't even noticing.

The streetcars are three-module articulated vehicles, rather like the new Flexity Outlooks running in Toronto, but a bit smaller; they're about 24 meters long, with a rated capacity of 148 when everyone's squeezed in. They're numbered 801 to 804, because this is officially the continuation of Kansas City's previous streetcar system, and the earlier numbers had been used already. It puts the smallness of the KC Streetcar into perspective, though. As I wrote this, at 12:49 on a Saturday morning, there were more than four streetcars running on Toronto's 509 Harbourfront line, and it's the shortest one on the system!

I found the streetcar interiors pretty spartan, and I'm not sure if this is a permanent thing or just an artifact of the system being so new. Except for the external "Sprint Wi-Fi" logo on the cars' middle modules, which also advertises the free wireless access that's been implemented along the line and will eventually be activated aboard the streetcars themselves, there are no ads. There was the Code of Conduct posting there to educate Kansas Citians on how to use their new ride, though: rules like "no smoking or eating" and "please let people off before you board" and "do not bring weapons onto the streetcar," because that is something that actually has to be spelled out where everyone can see it in the United States.

The streetcars have a few tricks I wasn't expecting, either. Digitized bells aren't anything unusual - bells and streetcars have gone together for more than a hundred years - but Kansas Citians haven't needed to look out for streetcars since 1957, so when necessary, the streetcars can sound more like oncoming freight trains. That gets attention: it made me jump the first time I heard it.

Ease of Access and Ease of Use

Looking toward the unoccupied control cab in the trailing end of streetcar #803.

The KC Streetcar is the easiest system I've ever used, for two reasons: physically speaking, the no-step streetcar access makes it a breeze to board, and for all other respects - it's free. Absolutely, 100% no charge to the people who riding it, which is probably a big factor in why it's gone so far beyond its ridership projections already. Admittedly, that's a good way to get people thinking good things in what may be their first experience with fixed-infrastructure transit.

There's plenty of room to move around inside, and there are priority seats and wheelchair-friendly spaces as you'd expect for modern equipment, but it's honestly not that comfortable - not that comfort is that much of a problem, considering how quickly one of these streetcars can do a circuit. Besides, with the articulated sections and the hanging straps, there are plenty of places to stand if you can.

The stop request buttons were a little different than I'm used to, but I can live with that. They're only mounted on poles, which means that every once in a while, they're horizontal. What threw me about them was that it wasn't easy to tell whether or not they worked once I pressed them; I'm used to a stop request button sounding a tone immediately, but the KC Streetcar looks to have gone with waiting until the automated stop announcement has been made for the next station before sounding the request noise. I figure it's the request noise, at least, because I didn't hear it all the time - the only consistent one sounded more like the Sweet Cuppin' Cakes version of Strong Bad.

Since the system is so new, and there aren't that many in the area - St. Louis' MetroLink, clear on the other side of Missouri, is the closest - rider education looks to be one of the agency's big priorities. Still, it was a bit surprising when, before departing Union Station, the streetcar operator spoke to everyone aboard the streetcar, giving a brief overview on how to ride. Even if it made it seem more like a theme park ride than a legitimate piece of public transportation infrastructure, it was a welcome thing.

Conclusion

KC Streetcar #801. Look at all its majesty.

One of the big factors in early 20th century urban development was the streetcar suburb: a neighbourhood opened up by a newly-built or expanded streetcar line feeding into the central city. Hell, a lot of them were built by streetcar companies, to ensure future business. Since they were designed with the expectation that people would be making their way on foot when they weren't riding the rails, these neighbourhoods are human-scaled and many remain prosperous today; hell, in Toronto, most of them still have their streetcars.

What Kansas City is trying to do feels like a 21st century inversion of this - using a streetcar to rebuild a downtown, and why not? It's worked elsewhere. When I talked about hollow cities at the beginning of this piece, I was thinking specifically of Kansas City; a downtown doesn't feel right when it's got so many empty buildings, when it's littered with parking lots, when street life seems confined to a mere strip rather than something that spreads through the whole. It's not that surprising, though - look at a map; downtown KC has the look of a psychological island, surrounded by the river and the highways, and those highways weren't built on empty land. There are big rips in the urban fabric there, but the streetcar might be the thing to sew them together again.

Whether the streetcar's expansion plans reach fruition, or whether it never goes any further than this - that's always the struggle, isn't it?

Previous Tunnel Visions

• The Docklands Light Railway
• The Detroit People Mover
• Seattle's Link Light Rail
• Portland's MAX Light Rail
• The Seattle Center Monorail
• Bay Area Rapid Transit
• San Francisco's Muni Metro
• Phoenix's Metro Light Rail
• The Kenosha Electric Railway
• Vancouver's SkyTrain
• The Toronto Subway and RT
• The Los Angeles County Metro Rail
• The Chicago 'L'
• The Montreal Metro

Photo: An Abundance of Yellow Light

Last weekend, the Toronto Transit Commission held an open house up at its Hillcrest Complex; the Harvey Shops, the main maintenance base for the city's streetcar fleet, was thrown open for a morning and afternoon amid the first significant snowfall of the season for people to come and gawk around at. I didn't notice the brightly yellow cast of the lights while I was there, but the camera lens captured it well enough. Here, you can see five streetcars in various stages of maintenance--they've been running for more than thirty years now, and they've well outlived their warranties.

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Photo: Philadelphia Flyer

Yes, I forgot to post a photo again yesterday. I remembered this when I was halfway to the subway station on my way to work; that's always how it goes. Again, I apologize for the newly unreliable schedule--here I thought I could handle something every other day with no problems. NEVERTHELESS. It has been some time since I've done a transit photo here, and the recent greyness in Toronto puts me in the yen to post up something bright and green. In that idiom, while I was in San Francisco back in 2011, one of the many vehicles I captured was this shot of a restored PCC streetcar on the F Market line, wearing the 1947 colors of the Philadelphia Transportation Company--incidentally, one of the few cities represented in San Francisco's rolling streetcar museum that still runs its own.

They're not as stylish as the PCC, though. Few things can be. I mean, look at that Art Deco trim!

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Photo: Those Old and Rusty Rails

Seattle used to have a waterfront streetcar. Not so long ago, heritage streetcars ground down the rails along the waterfront of Elliott Bay, but for seven years now the rails have been left to the elements. Here at Bell Street, one of the eight surviving stops, the right-of-way remains wide and clear for something that may never roll there again.


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Photo: An Uncommon Rail Palette

Every Portland Streetcar has its own color scheme, but some are more natural than others. One of the first ones I encountered on the road was #008, which at the time had a rather unique yellow and green color scheme with blue trimming. Not the sort of colors that usually go together on transit vehicles, I have to admit. What really struck me about this image when I was going through my archives was the bus ahead of the streetcar; TriMet uses some of the same models as the TTC, and so if I really squint, it's like this scene is taking place in Toronto.

But Mayor Ford would never stand for a streetcar blocking up traffic like that. I mean, just look at it! All blocking and such.


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Photo: It's A Pretty Obscure Angle

Although I picked up plenty of Portland Streetcar photos while gathering the details for a future Tunnel Visions post, most are from very similar perspectives thanks to the limited choices available to me. Not having access to the upper story of a building along the streetcar route where I could camp out and wait for one to come by, I had to take what I could get for alternate views. Fortunately, streetcar #007 was kind enough to head off northbound just as the Aerial Tram was crossing Moody Avenue.

That roof is a real departure from the streetcar's otherwise smooth, streamlined appearance. But all that mechanical stuff has gotta go somewhere.


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Photo: A South Lake Union Streetcar in the Rain

Seattle has something that makes it practically unique in North America - and it's not the Space Needle; every major city has its tourist trap. No, I mean its embryonic streetcar system, which is one of the few modern streetcars on the continent, rather than a heritage trolley or prewar survival like Toronto's system. There's nothing heritage about these. While I was in Seattle, I caught one of its three streetcars about to depart from the Westlake terminus to South Lake Union during a hard, but thankfully brief, downpour.


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Photo: The Frances Street Remnants

Vancouver in the early twentieth century was, like many North American cities, a streetcar town. Also like many other North American cities, after the war Vancouver removed the streetcar infrastructure it did not repurpose for the trolleybus routes, and today there's not much evidence streetcars ever rumbled there - but there still is some.

Frances Street is an ordinary residential street in East Van, unremarkable save for the cobblestones that run through its median west of Commercial Drive. Seventy years ago, Frances Street was part of a British Columbia Electric Railway line that took streetcars into downtown - now, of course, there are no streetcars here anymore. In two years, this is the only remaining piece of the original Vancouver streetcar system that I've encountered. Just cobblestones.


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Photo: Broken Reflection

I thought this one was interesting - I took it in December 2009 while on my way to work, the reflection of TTC streetcar #4137 in the windows of the Sun Life Centre at King West and University. Considering the news that's just started to come out of Toronto, I thought a broken reflection in particular was also appropriate. In 2012, there won't be quite so many opportunities to take this kind of photo as there are now - of course, the lion's share of the TTC service cutbacks, done in the name of Hizzoner da Mayor's demand that all city departments reduce their 2012 budget by 10%, are being extracted from the bus system, rather than the streetcars.

I guess buses that come reasonably often and have enough space to allow all the people aboard them to breathe is just gravy, though. With work soon to start on the Evergreen Line over here, it really throws the difference between the Toronto and Vancouver transit systems into starker and starker contrast; and Toronto isn't the one that comes out looking good.

"I will assure you that services will not be cut... guaranteed."
- Rob Ford, October 8, 2010

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Whither the Vancouver Downtown Streetcar?

Despite appearances, Vancouver is no stranger to streetcars. The tracks of the old interurban line that connected it to New Westminster, paralleled now by the SkyTrain, are still visible here and there in various states of decay, and on Frances Street in East Van there's still a lane of cobblestones where, I'm told, the streetcar once went down. Still, the wave of streetcar abandonment didn't break until after it swept across the Lower Mainland, and while the modern trolley system is a spiritual successor of sorts, the city has grown up without them.

As the Vancouver municipal election heats up, Suzanne Anton's Non-Partisan Association is looking to change that. The last time I passed by the NPA's campaign headquarters in the underground mall leading to Granville Station, I stopped dead in my tracks; stopped because I wanted to make sure that what I was seeing, a proposed map of the first stage of the Vancouver Downtown Streetcar, was actually there. Last Wednesday, Anton announced that one of her goals as Mayor of Vancouver would be to bring the streetcar back to Vancouver, extending the heritage line that now runs between Granville Island and Olympic Village via Chinatown, all the way to Waterfront Station.

Though I imagine they'd use modern cars for the extension.

Not that I actually expect it to happen; the city didn't waste much time throwing cold water on the plan, pointing out that transportation planning is properly TransLink's bailiwick, not the City of Vancouver's - and in that respect it's interesting the NPA would want to spend Vancouver city dollars on something that would be handled by the regional agency, when you consider that the NPA campaign office has a sign in the window counting up the debt - I think - accrued by Mayor Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver. As TransLink has other things to focus its attention on at the moment - the Evergreen Line, the Millennium Line's Broadway extension, the question of more comprehensive rapid transit in Surrey - the Vancouver Downtown Streetcar would likely fall by the wayside anyway.

As much as I'd like to see steps being made toward the reinstallation of a streetcar system in Vancouver, the fact remains that the area that would be served by it already has fairly comprehensive transit that could, for now, likely be addressed by additional buses. I'd much rather see transportation funds going to establish new, reliable transit links in communities that lack them. If serious work is done on a Vancouver downtown streetcar, it should be because the passenger load is too large for the bus system to adequately move, and not because the government thinks that streetcars are keen.

I'll grant that there's something of a streetcar renaissance going on in the United States now, galvanized by the ten-year success of the Portland Streetcar; Cincinnati, Ohio is building a system meant to help revitalize its downtown core, and I heard today that Indianapolis has recently been investigating the prospect itself. Yet the challenges that many American cities face are not the same ones that Vancouver is staring at. If there's an opportunity and a driving reason to lay the tracks in the ground, I say go ahead - but the most important thing should be that some other part of Metro Vancouver does not go without so we can have another set of rails around False Creek.

Photo: Streetcar in the Rain

Living in the Lower Mainland, you get used to the rain. There are plenty of places where it's far more of an occasional visitor - such as San Francisco during the summer, if my reading of the climate table is correct. Still, every once in a while the rain will come down, no matter where you are - even if you're in the Atacama Desert.

During a thankfully short San Francisco downpour, I captured this shot of Peter Witt #1815 making its way west along the Embarcadero, heedless of the storm. Though judging by the windows it looks like it may have been at least somewhat humid inside.

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Streetcars Per Kilometer

I'll make no bones about how I'm a streetcar supporter - but even then, I must admit that over the three and a half years I relied on Toronto's streetcars to get me where I was going from day to day, the word that best describes the system is "erratic." A lot of that description can go directly to the 501 Queen route, possibly the single largest route in the Western Hemisphere and accounting for nearly a third of the entire Toronto streetcar system's trackage by itself - and as it's arguably the flagship route of the streetcar system, problems with it rub off onto the rest of the system.

Some people today are barely joking when they claim that TTC really stands for "Take the Car." I remember well, before I switched to travelling downtown by the infinitely more reliable 504 King, arriving at a 501 Queen stop and having no idea if I'd have to wait thirty seconds or thirty minutes for the next car in the middle of the day; both ended up happening fairly regularly, with seemingly little regard to the actual schedule.

It wasn't always like this, though. Back in the day, streetcars were a Toronto fixture, and the TTC claim was that there was always a streetcar in sight, a claim made possible when Toronto became the beneficiary of so many other North American cities who abandoned their own streetcar systems and sold their used cars at firesale prices.

PCC #4549, one of two Presidents' Conference Committee streetcars presently retained by the TTC. In 1957, the TTC operated seven hundred and sixty-five such streetcars.

So I had to wonder - what could be behind such a shift? While Toronto did go through a streetcar abandonment phase from the 1950s to 1970s, the decline of its system was nowhere near as precipitous as other cities that retained their systems - take New Orleans, for example, which went from operating dozens of lines to only one. Could it be that there was too much system and not enough cars to service it? Even before the post-subway line abandonments, Toronto's system does not seem to have been magnitudes larger back then than it is now.

With that in mind, I decided I would determine the per capita nature of the streetcar system - not in terms of population, but in terms of the number of vehicles operated per kilometer of track. For perspective, I did the same determination in other cities in North America, Europe, and Asia. Here's what I found.

Hiroshima: 19 km of track, 271 vehicles = 14.2 vehicles per km
Kenosha: 3 km of track, 5 vehicles = 1.6 vehicles per km
Melbourne: 245 km of track, 500 vehicles = 2.04 vehicles per km
Portland: 6.3 km of track, 11 vehicles = 1.7 vehicles per km
San Francisco: 9.3 km of track, 26 vehicles = 2.79 vehicles per km*
Seattle: 2.1 km of track, 3 vehicles = 1.4 vehicles per km
Warsaw: 120 km of track, 863 vehicles = 7.19 vehicles per km

Toronto: 75 km of track, 248 vehicles = 3.3 vehicles per km

*San Francisco does possess additional PCC cars, including one painted in Toronto's colors, but they are not currently in service; the number given here is for streetcars listed by the SFMTA as being in service as of May 30, 2011. For this calculation I considered only the trackage of the F Market & Wharves line.

If the numbers I used are accurate, then, Toronto actually looks pretty good in terms of that assumption - better than anywhere else I looked at in North America, even. However, this won't last forever; as the existing CLRV and ALRVs are set to be replaced with two hundred and four new LRVs sometime after 2013, if there is no change in the length of the system once the fleet has been completely renewed, Toronto will be reduced to 2.72 vehicles per kilometer, just behind San Francisco.

Toronto's system isn't like a baggy pair of pants, then. There are enough streetcars to fill it - leaving us with the question of where the real problem lies. Traffic congestion? Poor route management? Poor route design? I'm not sure. But it's a question that should be asked if Toronto's streetcars are going to be responsive to the needs of the people who ride them, if they're going to be an integral part of Toronto's transit mix in years to come.

Photo: Market Street's Railway

Even though the LRVs of the Muni Metro and BART's long white torpedo trains zoom north and south beneath the pavement, on the surface San Francisco's Market Street is well-served by rail as well - specifically, by the heritage streetcars of the F Market & Wharves line. More geared to tourists than any of Toronto's streetcar lines or any of Muni's other lines, the F cars link Fisherman's Wharf with the Castro, using primarily Peter Witt cars purchased from Milan and good old PCCs - many of them painted in the old liveries of Chicago, Birmingham, Kansas City, and other cities which once ran them. There's even a Toronto one, but it's out of service right now. Toronto could have had something like this with the 509 Harbourfront line; hell, it even ran PCCs in the beginning. But I'm pretty sure His Fordness would have fulminate and roar about something that progressive.

Pictured here is Muni's PCC #1076, representing a Washington D.C. streetcar. I'm not sure what cross street this is at.

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Photo: Staring Down a Streetcar

I may have to go and visit Seattle soon, if only because it doesn't feel right for there to be so many roads around here with no rails in them. Not like Toronto, where despite the puff and bluster of hizzoner da mayor, thus far at least they continue rumbling down the lanes just as they have for the last hundred and fifty years. Except they're not pulled by horses anymore, like they were at the beginning.

Here, CLRV 4130 takes on passengers at the intersection of Yonge and King on a westbound 501 King run in July 2010 - the way I got home back when I still lived there.

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The Return of Rob Ford

I couldn't help but think about time last night. I suppose the shadow of 2011 tilted a lot of peoples' thoughts in that direction. In particular, I was thinking how good it is that while it is easier to destroy than to create, in some circumstances it's not the easiest thing in the world to get the destructifying going. What I'm most thankful for, though, is that what's past is done.

Even before I left Toronto the greenscaping improvements along Bloor Street were controversial, and Hizzoner Rob Ford was hardly the only mayoral candidate that fulminated against it. From what I can tell, though, at this point it's all done aside from a few tree plantings scheduled for the spring - and it's a good thing it's all done, because if I've been able to judge Rob Ford's character from his pronouncements, had he had the chance to put an end to it, he certainly would have.

It's a good thing, I thought while wandering through an dark, shuttered New Year's Eve Yorkville, that Ford can't retroactively stop this. Wait a minute...

Back in the 1980s, Larry Niven wrote the short story "The Return of William Proxmire," wherein everyone's favorite anti-space, milk-price-support-supporting Wisconsinite senator got hold of a time machine and used it to go back in time to cure Robert A. Heinlein of tuberculosis - the idea being that with Heinlein remaining in the Navy, he would not become a prominent sf author and would not inspire the scientists and engineers that came after him.

Of course, it didn't work out that way.

So imagine, if you will, "The Return of Rob Ford," in which the mayor gets hold of a time machine. What might he do with it? Realistically there's only one person who can answer that, but what seems believable is that he might use it to go back to the late 1960s and work to prevent the rise of the Streetcars For Toronto Committee. Without a surge of popular support in favor of retaining the streetcar system, the TTC could easily have remained on its original trajectory toward total streetcar abandonment by 1980 - and more importantly for Ford, he would be laying the foundations for a 21st century city in which transit was all shoved underground, out of the cars' way.

Or would he?

I've written before about my opinion that light rail transit is having an unfair shake in Toronto because of the automatic comparison to streetcars; hell, Transit City is frequently referred to _as_ a "streetcar" program by its political opponents. That problem would be significantly lessened in the absence of an active streetcar system - consider cities like Los Angeles, Edmonton, Phoenix, and Cincinnati, which are replacing abandoned streetcar systems with modern light rail systems - and, in Cincinnati's case, a modern streetcar system.

So, instead, imagine a 1980s Toronto where the streetcars have ceased to run. Transit pressures would still exist, and the political issues that precluded meaningful subway expansion after 1978 would likely remain unchanged. Imagine a climate where there was a greater openness to light rail; imagine the beginning of construction of a complementary light rail transit system in 1990, a construction program that would not have to reckon with opinions toward streetcars or the fallout of the St. Clair right-of-way reconstruction.

Sure, of course, that changed timeline would have to deal with the expense of not only tearing up the tracks, but entirely rebuilding them... but it might be worth it.

Photo: Union Loop

It goes without saying that Toronto's Union Station is a busy transportation hub; GO Transit and VIA Rail trains depart from here to destinations as close by as Scarborough and as distant as Vancouver, not to mention the dozens of GO Transit buses that fan out across the Greater Toronto Area. The subway and streetcar systems meet up here, as well - from the subterranean Union Station Loop, you can catch a car up to Spadina or out to the Exhibition.

It was also one of the first places in the system that I was aware of to have a next vehicle screen installed - so at least when you were waiting around you could clearly see that there would be no cars for twelve more minutes, at which point three of them would show up bumper-to-bumper.

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Photo: 4119's Seen Better Days

Yesterday there was an accident at Dundas Street East and River Street in Toronto - a streetcar, CLRV 4119, apparently derailed and was struck by a Greyhound bus, getting its front end thoroughly smashed up but thankfully not causing any serious injuries among the passengers. Things like this don't happen very often - this is only the second streetcar derailment incident I can think of in the last four years, at least, and the last time it only caused traffic snarls.

Back when I was still living in Toronto, one of the goals I had in mind was to take photographs of every streetcar operated by the TTC - so last night I spent some time pawing through the thirty thousand digital photographs in my archive for shots of 4119 in non-smashed up times. As it happens, one has already appeared on this weblog - back in October, accompanying my Municipal Exceptionalism post.

As it turns out, I did have another photo of it. It was the last daylight photograph of a Toronto streetcar I've been able to take - I caught it on Dundas Street East in downtown, the day I left for Vancouver.

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Photo: Streetcar's Turning

I still sometimes have difficulty believing it's real, but I've got to accept it - hizzoner Rob Ford is officially Mayor of Toronto. Predictably enough for a conservative, his first real action has been to deny the freedom of choice to the people he represents by declaring that "Transit City's over." Because, really, only idiots use any form of public transit other than subways, and only total dumbasses spend billions of dollars to build 120 kilometers of light rail lines when they could instead spend those billions to build a few kilometers of subway.

So, in recognition that hizzoner is now at the levers of power, I present a photo of perhaps his greatest nemesis: a streetcar turning left.


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Light Rail's Persistent Albatross

It's easy to poison a group of people against something by delivering a flawed test case of it to their doorsteps. There's no shortage of folk out there who will take a look at something that's presented as "bungled," whether or not the truth is more complicated, and harden their hearts against anything else of its kind. In Toronto, one such albatross I see popping up again and again is light rail - specifically, the manner in which the St. Clair Avenue streetcar right-of-way was built. There's only one problem here: the 512 St. Clair streetcar is not light rail. This is a pernicious, galling assumption that I encounter time and again, and is common enough that TTC communications director Brad Ross had to begin a recent Rocket Talk article on Torontoist by clarifying that it is still part of the legacy streetcar system.

Yet the misinformation stubbornly refuses to go away. It reared its head again yesterday in the Toronto Star, when columnist Royson James described the St. Clair ROW as "Exhibit A in the case against light rail lines." I tend to take issue with this description, because - call me weird - shouldn't Exhibit A be an honest example of what it's _supposed_ to be, and not just what people think it is? Sure, I'll grant that there may be a public perception in Toronto is that the St. Clair streetcar is light rail; but that perception does not make it so. It's always been an issue of branding; for some damn reason the Harbourfront streetcar was branded as LRT when it opened in 1996, running with PCCs that have since gone on to new tracks in Kenosha - it was redesignated a streetcar not long after, and with good cause, because it's not light rail.

If St. Clair has to be tied into the LRT debate, it should be as an LRT precursor and not as an example of what a light rail system would actually look like. This is particularly important, as Torontonians seem to have no bloody idea what light rail is - one of the downsides of consistently operating a streetcar system for the last hundred and fifty years.

A Blue Line light rail train in Los Angeles. Does this look much like a streetcar to you?

It's not surprising, really. There are no well-known examples close by; Buffalo, New York has been running a light rail system since the 1980s, but for the average Torontonian Buffalo has no presence beyond the sprawling outlet malls that beckon drivers off the highways. The only significant light rail systems in Canada are those in Edmonton and Calgary. With no examples close at hand, it's easy for the concept to be framed as "streetcars plus" - but this isn't necessarily the right way to go about it. The rhetoric that came out of hizzoner Rob Ford's campaign is a signal that not everyone is satisfied with being on the rails.

There are plenty of folk out there who would love nothing more to frame the debate so that streetcars and light rail become one and the same in the minds of Torontonians; it would be so much easier, at that point, to stamp out any plans for transit expansion. Otherwise well-meaning articles that reflexively echo these incorrect labels only make the situation worse - something repeated often enough can be held up as the truth, whether or not it's actually so.

Even with St. Clair being used to poison the debate wherever an opportunity exists, I still find it funny - no one ever seems to complain about Spadina or Harbourfront, routes which have been running in their own traffic-separated rights-of-way for more than ten years, as being examples of the problems of light rail. They have just as much in common with light rail as St. Clair does; namely, they run on rails.

To Brand T.O.

Forty years ago, Toronto had a problem. Back then, before the possibility of an independent Quebec sent Canada's captains of business and industry charging down the 401 to the shore of Lake Ontario, it had no pretensions of being a world city but was instead, as Unbuilt Toronto puts it, a "second-order metropolis" - occupying the same niche as, say, St. Louis or Cincinnati. It didn't have much to distinguish itself from its competitors. That's where Buckminster Fuller came in with his ambitious Project Toronto, which included a commercial district enclosed within a glass pyramid, a covered arcade parallelling University Avenue, and entire villages afloat on Lake Ontario.

Ultimately, of course, none of this got built. Politicians in the 1960s were no more willing to take leaps into the future than they are today. But the result is that Toronto has continued to flounder, and today is obsessed with whether or not it's really a "world city." Sure, it's got the CN Tower, but communications towers are not exactly uncommon. Even really tall ones. What Toronto really needs is a wide-spectrum campaign to establish itself.

It won't all have to come out of nowhere. I think Toronto already has the germ of part of such a campaign - its streetcars. Back in 1969, when popular wisdom saw streetcars as obsolete and the official TTC plan was for the last streetcar to have run by 1980, it wouldn't have been a consideration - and not particularly unique either, as at that time there would still be plenty of people who remembered streetcars on the streets of Chicago, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Montreal, London... so on and so on. At that point, it's easy to conclude that they weren't anything special.

CLRV 4118 pushes toward the sun on King Street East

Forty years later, the pendulum has shifted. Now they _are_ something special, if only because they're the only transit streetcars, as opposed to heritage railways, left in all of Canada. Even expanding the view to all of North America, it's still not too common, and even then the exact types of streetcars the TTC uses are in service nowhere else in the world. They're part of Toronto, something it doesn't share with any city anywhere else. Torontoist has it the right way - the four silhouettes that site chose to represent its city were the CN Tower, City Hall, the otherworldly box-on-stilts of OCAD, and... a streetcar.

So it was with a sense of flickering hope that I saw an article on the Toronto Star late last night - "Ford won't ditch streetcars," the headline reads. Granted, none of the content comes from da mayor-elect himself, but from his campaign manager and brother Doug; I'd rather hear this from Rob. Considering that, according to Ford's transit plan, "Streetcars on downtown arterial streets will be replaced with clean buses that provide the same capacity on the same routes," and that much of the system can be considered to run on "downtown arterial" streets, something here is not telling the truth.

Nevertheless, this gives me reason to hope that a Rob Ford mayoralty will not detour wildly into the worst possible outcome. If he's willing to think and reconsider, he may do better in the mayor's chair than his opponents suggest - and if he's willing to really think about the opportunities they provide for Toronto beyond its borders, the streetcars just may come through the next few years unbowed and unbeaten.