Ballston Metro station, Arlington Co. Photo: Point Images/Flickr

The future looked as though it belonged to Fairfax County, and Arlington's decision to target development around its new Metro stations seemed quixotic and anachronistic.

But now, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, Arlington seems to have been extraordinarily foresighted in its decision to grow around Metro. From 2000 to 2008, Arlington's population grew by 10 percent -- all of it infill development, and a remarkable achievement for an inner suburb.

Even more remarkably, this growth has led to a negligible impact on local traffic. Daniel Malouff, author of the BeyondDC blog, reported this week on a meeting with Arlington's Department of Transportation, at which officials recounted some numbers that had emerged from research on the effects of county development choices.

Among the remarkable statistics:

1. Auto traffic counts in the Pentagon City area are level today compared with counts from 1975. Despite all the development that has occurred there in that time frame, including construction of one of the region’s largest and busiest shopping malls, there has been no measurable increase in traffic congestion.

2. [One thousand] units of urban-format TOD housing generates fewer auto trips per day than a single suburban-format McDonalds or 7-11. You can build 1,000,000 square feet of residential TOD and generate less congestion than 2,000 square feet of auto-oriented retail.

Arlington has very nearly maximized the development potential of available land around Metro stations, but it's looking to create new transit access for its communities by building a streetcar line along one of the county's busier thoroughfares (and running along its busiest bus routes). Already, denser, walkable, and mixed-used developments are replacing older strip malls on the planned line.

And of course, Fairfax County has been busily working to reverse its approach to transit and development, its streets and highways having bogged down under the weight of constant congestion.

Back when Metro was originally built, Fairfax did not attempt to lobby for routing through population centers, opting instead for a cheaper alignment along the median of I-66 (for the Orange Line), and along existing rail right of way (for the Blue Line). Stations were almost exclusively surrounding by parking; riders would nearly all arrive by car.

These decisions have proven difficult to reverse engineer, but Fairfax County has been trying. Along the I-66 corridor, the county is encouraging such transit-oriented development as can be accommodated. In Springfield (on the Blue Line), a large, walkable redevelopment plan has been slowly making its way forward despite the difficult economic situation.

But the biggest shift is occuring elsewhere. Fairfax County and the state of Virginia recently won federal funding for a new extension of the Metrorail system, to be run through the densest portion of the county at Tysons Corner.

The Silver Line will be used as a framework around which to completely remake Tysons into a dense, walkable downtown. The area may ultimately be home to over 100,000 people, and an employment center to rival downtown Washington.

The rest of the country will be watching. Tysons represents one of the most ambitious attempts to reengineer a suburban employment and retail center into a pedestrian friendly mini-city, fit for residents as well as workers.

Of course, the opportunities to make these kinds of changes are extremely limited. Very few heavy rail systems have been built in the past half century. Commuter rail and light rail systems are increasingly common in growing cities, but federal funding has simply not been made available for new lines on the necessary scale, and the federal government has not made transit-oriented development a priority in choosing where and how to allocate transportation dollars.

This is an inexcusable missed opportunity given transit-oriented development's record of accommodating population growth without contributing to new congestion. Hopefully it is one Congress will address when it gets around to crafting a new transportation bill.

Photo: Don Maxwell/Flickr

Shaken but apparently not badly hurt, the rider, a young woman in a light blouse and wearing a helmet, stood up to be greeted by the streetcar conductor, who offered not sympathy but angry hectoring. Didn’t she know that cyclists were not supposed to cycle in the streetcar lane?

Standing by and watching all this while preparing to board the streetcar in Seattle, I could only shake my head in sadness. We have such a hard time doing mass transit right in this country, particularly outside New York City. Seattle's shiny new streetcar “system” was essentially brand new, but its flaws were already readily apparent.

Let’s start with the tracks. Isn’t there some system possible that does not leave what looked like a three or four inch gap between the track and the street it is imbedded in? I’m sure loyal Streetblog readers will supply me with the make and model of something. I remember seeing that old footage from Barcelona that showed all those cyclists swerving this way and that in front of the streetcar, with apparently no fear of getting caught in the track gap. Can’t we do that today? It certainly doesn’t make sense to exclude cyclists from a whole lane of a street, one that could actually double as a bike lane if built correctly.

Then there are the other problems.

The streetcar line itself is only a little more than a mile long. (The website says the line is 2.6 miles, but I think they are counting both directions.) And it’s pretty expensive -- two dollars for what can be a very short ride. I boarded for what turned out to be only half a mile or so, in part because I’m still on a cane from my scooter accident. Otherwise I would have walked. No sooner had I boarded and paid my two dollars than we were there. I felt cheated. Minimal payment (or even no fare) would be better, which of course would require better government funding.

I feel guilty complaining about something that obviously took a lot of effort. The streetcars themselves are quite nice. I’m sure the organization is trying to do things well.

The central problem, as an official with a California transit agency recently told me, is that American cities and states tend to pursue transit in a fragmented and uncoordinated fashion. Different agencies representing different cities or states build different lines that often connect to each other badly, if at all. Imagine if highways were built as incoherently as rail systems. Somehow, the federal, state and local highway agencies manage to work with each other at least enough to have their projects connect.

Seattle has battled and warred over its transit systems. The city often supports transit in general but not in the particulars. Voters have approved a monorail system several times, only to see the transit establishment and political establishment help kill it. The city is nearing completion of an extensive light rail system, but it is one of the most expensive in the world. Downtown has this enormous bus tunnel -- the product of one compromise between various interests. And now there’s the tiny new streetcar system, which, to be fair, may expand and become much more comprehensive. You have to start somewhere. Maybe they will figure out a way to make it more compatible with biking, which certainly should be the friend and not the enemy.

This film, as featured on YouTube via Infrastructurist, shows the streets of Barcelona a century ago, taken from the front window of a tram going down the street. It's an amazing film. The central avenues of this Catalan city are so vital, so alive, a mix of every activity. Then the film compares the old streets to the same streets today. Quite a comparison.

The streets a century ago illustrate the principal of “tout a la rue,” meaning everything into the street. Cyclists, cars, pedestrians, streetcars, kids. And of course horses. Seems to work.

Interesting how bold the cyclists are in 1907. I wonder why they don’t seem to fear being tipped over by the streetcar tracks? They ride right across them, often at only a slight angle, and don’t get channeled into them. Were tracks built somehow with less of a gap between track and street? Were the tires of the bicycles fatter?

The views of the same streets today are distressing. I love Barcelona. It's one of my favorite cities. But the streets of today seem lifeless and sterile. Could they really be that barren today? Maybe the films from today were shot in the early morning, when few people were around. The streets certainly seemed very alive when I was there in 1994. Still, it's no doubt true that even the most active streets today are less so than those of a century ago. It's mostly the fault of the car, which we have given our streets over to so completely.

The 1907 scenes from Barcelona capture an era where so many transportation modes were either beginning, ending or right in their heyday, and mixing all together. Modern cycling as we know it developed in the 1880s and was really at its height in 1907. Streetcars, electric ones, were relatively new then but completely dominant. Cars were just beginning. There were still many, many horse-drawn wagons, and would be for another half century. Walking was there as well of course.

Could we get back to some modern version of that, an amazing lively mix of different ways of getting around, all in busy public streets? I'd like to think so.

One thing that comes to mind watching this old film are these incredibly expensive contemporary light rail systems, now built from San Diego to Charlotte to New Jersey. I tend to support their construction, but I can't help noticing how little subtlety they display in relation to their surroundings. They are typically grade separated and their presence is like a big stream of concrete squeezed out into the middle of a street. Even modern streetcar systems usually do not blend so seamlessly as this Barcelona one did. Why is this? Can we change it?

Seattle's South Lake Union Streetcar is a 1.3-mile line that opened in December 2007, the first leg in the city's commitment to new transit and light rail. It passed the half million passenger milestone in its first year, surpassing ridership projections.

The streetcar features many top-of-the-line tech amenities, including real time arrival message boards, solar-powered ticket vending machines, and human-activated doors to save energy while the train is in layover mode. If you go to the Seattle Streetcar web site, you can find out the next arrival time and actually watch the streetcars moving via GPS trackers.

As you'll see in the film, development is booming along the South Lake Union corridor. "If you build it, they will come" certainly seems to apply here.

In August, I had the pleasure of spending a little more than two weeks in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne is the country's second-largest city, with 3.8 million residents in the metropolitan area. Despite its size, from a walking and transportation standpoint (to say nothing of a coffee-drinking perspective), Melbourne almost defines the term "livable city."

Trams

Melbourne boasts the world's most extensive tram network, with 152 miles of track, 28 routes and more than 1,800 tram stops. A total of 156.4 million passenger trips were recorded on Melbourne’s trams in 2007.  Melbournians love their tram system, which was begun in 1885, and they fiercely fought efforts to cut the system about 30 years ago. Since then, service has been upgraded and lines added or extended. Trams are so much the norm that drivers making rights at major intersections are required to execute the Melbourne "hook turn" so as not to block oncoming trams.

Cycling

The City of Melbourne is serious about improving cycling conditions and has been working hard to add bike lanes and other infrastructure, including a new "Copenhagen-style" protected bike lane on a one-kilometer stretch in the CBD (not pictured here). "The city aims to be one of the best cycling cities in the world," according to its impressive annual report on cycling conditions [download it].

The city's efforts have been paying off in increased bike commuting. Cyclists accounted for almost eight percent of all morning peak vehicles on the road in 2007, up from four percent in 2006. Today, there are about 12,000 cycle trips into and out of Melbourne's CBD each weekday, according to the advocacy group Bicycle Victoria.

Bicycle Victoria has 40,000 members, covering the entire state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital. Cycling crash insurance is included in the Aus$95 (US$77) cost of membership.

I was impressed by how well equipped the local cyclists are. This is in part because helmets and lights are mandatory. But a large percentage of cyclists were also outfitted with accessories like day-glo rain jackets and panniers. Both cyclists and pedestrians generally obey traffic signals, although tram tracks are an ever-present hazard for riders. I saw one woman snare her front wheel in a track and fall, and I witnessed other cyclists blithely crossing tracks at angles I considered perilous.

Still, cycling is eminently safe compared to New York City. Melbourne reports that in 2006 there were just 146 crashes resulting in injury. Nevertheless, Melbourne considers this figure too high and is trying to whittle the numbers down further. Among the city's upcoming projects is a Web site for cyclists to report issues and hazards.

Lovely off-road bike paths wind through sections of the city.  I followed one along the Yarra River for many miles, and it was often hard to believe I was still in Melbourne.  On trips out of town, I was amazed to see that outside of urban areas bicyclists are permitted to ride on the shoulders of freeways, with signage advising them how to safely traverse on-ramps.

Laneways and other pedestrian amenities

Melbourne is filled with hidden "laneways" that cut between major streets downtown. The city has been steadily reclaiming these hidden treasures from traffic and disuse, and the laneways have become renowned for their charm, with al fresco eateries, boutique shops and bars. A number of inviting pedestrian arcades, reminiscent of those in Paris, can be found as well.

Sidewalk build-outs for traffic calming are plentiful around town and are put to varied uses, including café seating and bike parking.  

As he has been doing in New York City, Danish architect Jan Gehl has been working with the City of Melbourne to improve the quality of its public realm.

All in all, Melbourne is a wonderful place to explore on foot, by tram or by bike -- after you spend half an eternity getting there!

Photos: Ken Coughlin

 
On Tuesday, voters in Portland, Oregon elected Sam Adams as their next mayor. A former Congressional staffer and current Portland city commissioner, Adams -- who is a cyclist -- ran on a platform that emphasized environmental and progressive growth initiatives, including, in the words of the Oregonian, "use [of] the Portland Streetcar and better planning to spur urban renewal." Adams received strong support from the livable streets community, which helped earn him a 52-34 percent margin of victory.

There is speculation that the Adams camp got a last-minute boost from Barack Obama, who came to town ahead of Tuesday's primary and drew a crowd of some 75,000 -- with an estimated 8,000+ arriving on bicycles. As quoted on BikePortland.org, Obama responded with some fairly breathtaking comments on transportation policy.

“If we are going to solve our energy problems we’ve got to think long term. It’s time for us to be serious about investing in alternative energy. It’s time for us to get serious about raising fuel efficiency standards on cars.  It’s time that the entire country learn from what’s happening right here in Portland with mass transit and bicycle lanes and funding alternative means of transportation.

That’s the kind of solution that we need for America. That’s the kind of truth-telling that we are going to do in this campaign and when I am President of the United States of America.”

How remarkable is it that a presidential candidate -- or virtually any politician in higher office -- would talk about transit and bike lanes without making fun of them? Still, as BikePortland Editor Jonathan Maus notes:

These are all good signs; but what happens on the campaign trail is not the same as real change. It will take the work of voters, local leaders, and advocates to seize this moment in history and work together to push the pendulum toward more sustainable, human powered cities.

At the very least, it looks like Obama may be willing to get this conversation started on a national level.

The World Carfree Network will hold its eighth annual international "Towards Carfree Cities" conference in Portland, Oregon, from June 16th to the 20th. This year's event, entitled "Rethinking Mobility, Rediscovering Proximity," marks the first time the conference has come to North America. Registration is now underway at CarfreePortland.org, with a discount for those who sign up by the end of February.

The Towards Carfree Cities conference series brings together people from around the world who work to promote practical alternatives to car dependence. The conference attracts professionals, advocates, and community leaders who focus on the creation of sustainable transportation systems and on the transformation of cities, towns, and villages into human-scaled environments rich in public space and community life. The fundamental role of the conference is to share knowledge and assist the practical work of conference participants, whether it be organizing community events, promoting urban cycling, or building the carfree cities of the future. 

The conference is scheduled to coincide with Pedalpalooza, Portland's annual three-week celebration of bicycling. And for those who can stick around through the weekend, the city will hold its first-ever ciclovia on Sunday, June 22.

Towards Carfree Cities VIII is co-hosted by Shift, CarFree City USA, and Portland State University, and is sponsored by BikePortland.org.

If you're thinking about going, maybe Clarence Eckerson's Portland odyssey will tip the scales.

Photo of Portland streetcar by Fußgänger/Flickr

Devotees of the Red Hook, Brooklyn Fairway grocery store can have the pleasure, after loading up on gourmet salt and other essentials, of sipping coffee on their back veranda over looking the river. It's a wonderful view. On your right is the Statue of Liberty, flame aloft, and to your left, about ten feet away, a decrepit old green streetcar.

This old trolley, which adds a rough urban charm to the spot, is about all that remains of an admirable effort that ended a few years ago by Bob Diamond and cohorts to bring streetcars back to Brooklyn.

Diamond, renowned for his discovery of the old Atlantic Avenue tunnel -- one of the oldest rail tunnels in the world - may have simply been peaking too soon, for streetcars are coming back. While they aren't back in Brooklyn yet, they are in many cities. Dozens of cities have built, or are building, new streetcar lines. They include Portland, Kenosha, Charlotte, Little Rock, Lowell, Memphis, Tampa, San Diego and Charlotte. Some of them are installing vintage or antique cars; some are installing brand new ones. They join cities like New Orleans, Toronto, Melbourne and San Francisco that kept or revived existing lines.

Paris, France launched a sleek, modern streetcar system last year. More Paris photos below...

This trend is a good one, for streetcars can be one more way to give people alternative to driving, and thus enabling more walkable, bikeable streets. Perhaps most important, streetcar lines are the most urban of transit systems, at least those that run above ground. Unlike their competitor, the so-called "light rail line," streetcars mesh almost seamlessly into a street without bulky grade-separating apparatus and stations that can end up making a street less walkable. Streetcars are also less polluting, more energy-efficient and cheaper to maintain than their other big competitor, freewheeling buses.

Before World War II and the complete domination of the private car, streetcars used to run on virtually every major street New York City and indeed, every major street in every city in the United States. These old lines, although long gone, have left their mark on streets in big and small ways.

For example, most local shopping streets tend to be where the old trolley lines ran, like 5th Avenue or 7th Avenue in Brooklyn. That's because commerce tends to congregate around transportation lines. Those shopping streets are still there, even though the streetcar lines are not. Most of New York City's current bus lines run along the same routes as the old trolleys.

Another marker is in names, which, as in shopping streets, tend to persist. The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, formerly of Brooklyn, derives its name from the hundreds of streetcars that used to roll down the streets of this New York City borough, and the "trolley dodgers" who had to jump out of their way. The name was apt, for the number of streetcar lines that once were in Brooklyn is truly astonishing. It is indeed a subject for an entire field of research.

Could Brooklyn or other boroughs ever have anything like the dozens of different lines they once had? I don't want to rule it out, even though it's clearly a dream. What's not just a dream is that streetcars are coming back, perhaps even in this region. Stamford solicited proposals just last week to examine the potential for a new four-mile line that would connect major nodes within the city. Whether this would qualify as a streetcar or a light rail line might be a matter of semantics.

I could see streetcars playing a substantial role within many cities in the region, even Manhattan. The Regional Plan Association's (where I'm a Senior Fellow) Third Regional Plan recommended a Midtown light rail loop, which is essentially just a streetcar loop. Vision42 has been pushing for years for a Midtown light rail loop part of its plan to pedestrianize 42nd Street. Vision42 argues that light rail loop could be built at far less cost than the proposed #7 subway line extension while providing many of the same benefits in helping to improve mobility and galvanizing development on Midtown Manhattan's far west side.

As a "mode," to use a planneresque word, streetcars have a lot to offer. They are better than buses, which are the usual lower cost alternative, because they provide a smoother ride, even while traveling at higher speeds, and being more beloved by customers. One study showed that streetcars travel faster than buses, because drivers tend to defer to a train-like vehicle and get out of their way. As significant, they tend to attract more private development because rails in the street have a permanence that inspires confidence in commercial and residential developers.

The usual competitor to streetcars is light rail lines. Interestingly, there is no clear distinction between a light rail line and a streetcar line, although there are general ones. Light rail lines tend to have dedicated and separate right of way, tend to travel out of town rather than within town, tend to have longer trains, and tend to have fewer stops. And most significantly, tend to cost a lot, lot more to build, often three times as much per mile.

A good place to start looking at the possibilities of streetcar revival is Street Smart: Streetcars and Cities in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Gloria Ohland and Shelley Poticha of Reconnecting America. In a series of separately authored articles, it provides a range of both broad overview and technical analysis of the options involved. They look at vintage cars, new lines, even things like the "rapid streetcar," that blends the best of both the streetcar and light rail styles.

Some combination of the above could clearly work in Brooklyn, to name my own favorite borough and dwelling one. If that were to happen, then the lonely streetcar in Red Hook could be a reminder of what is to come, rather than just of what was.

Photos: Aaron Naparstek, Paris, France, March 21, 2007

San Francisco

Like Clarence Eckerson, I recently returned from a visit to San Francisco. I left with a feeling that San Francisco has the best urban surface transportation in the country: emissions-free buses drawing power from overhead wires, regular buses, cable cars moving up and down steep hills, many cyclists despite those hills, partially buried lightrail and a regional subway. But the most heartwarming thing to see was the streetcars. What a joyous and democratic mode of transportation, the streetcar.

Sure, we have light rail over in Jersey City, and it's great to have that. But there is nothing like an honest-to-God fully functioning streetcar system like the one San Franciscans have managed to preserve restored on Market Street and the Embarcadero (the F Line). Think they're just for tourists? Maybe the cable cars, but the streetcars I saw were standing-room-only, with a mix of visitors and natives. There are probably other models visible in museums, but these old cars and the ones New Orleans still only partially restored after Hurricane Katrina are the last in the country still doing the heavy lifting. At least for now.

Now that the corpse of the ill-fated attempt to bring streetcars to Red Hook (pictured above) is cold, we can begin to think about the new efforts to bring streetcars back to Brooklyn. 'Frisco proves that it is possible.

(Top two photos by Futurebird.)