 |
Photo By Jymi Bolden
|
David Fritze, a trustee of Cincinnati Street Railway
Inc., points out a remnant of the city’s streetcar
system near Eastern Avenue.
|
Sixty years ago, many Cincinnatians could open their front doors, walk a few blocks and reach most of Greater Cincinnati via a streetcar network with hundreds of miles of track.
In downtown Cincinnati, streetcars mixed with autos and pedestrians but often had their own paths to neighborhoods and suburbs as far away as Lockland, Milford and Harrison.
But after World War II, Cincinnati and most other cities phased out streetcars in favor of buses and highways, following the lead of the federal government. In 1951, the Cincinnati Street Railway Corporation -- a precursor to the Metro bus system -- closed its last route and sold nearly all of the city's streetcars to Toronto.
Now, almost 50 years later, the popularity of the two-year-old Southbank Shuttle -- the bus loop linking the centers of downtown Cincinnati, Newport and Covington -- has led to a one-year, $625,000 study of what public transportation should be used to move people around the urban core surrounding the riverfront. Maybe it's a new bus line, an extended version of the shuttle or the untested Personal Rapid Transit -- a monorail-based system of three-passenger cars.
Or maybe it's time for streetcars to return to Cincinnati.
If You Move Them, They Will Spend
Since the Southbank Shuttle debuted in May 1998, its short, blue buses have carried more than 462,000 passengers on a 40-minute loop for 25 cents a trip, courtesy of the Transportation Authority of Northern Kentucky (TANK). Although TANK doesn't have a ridership breakdown, Communications Manager Gina Douthat said the shuttle is popular with tourists and with commuters headed to work from both sides of the river.
Tourists, however, were the original target market when Southbank Partners -- a Newport-based economic development group -- backed the creation of the shuttle, which reaches Covington Landing, Mainstrasse Village, Newport on the Levee, Riverboat Row, Cincinnati's major hotels, the Aronoff Center and the Albert B. Sabin Convention Center.
A quarter barely begins to cover the cost of running the shuttle; each passenger trip costs TANK $2.50. That's more than $1.15 million since the shuttle began, paid for indirectly by Campbell, Kenton and Boone counties, the sources of TANK's budget.
So are people riding the shuttle because it's so cheap or because it's convenient?
"I think it's a combination," Douthat said. "(The cheap fare) gets them in in the first place. ... People feel they aren't going to lose anything by trying it."
Douthat doesn't expect the existing shuttle route to be expanded. But she wouldn't be surprised if the three cities collaborated on a circular route that also stopped at Union Terminal, Music Hall and other Cincinnati destinations the Southbank Shuttle doesn't.
"That's certainly a possibility," Douthat said.
And that's the issue to be addressed by the Central Area Loop Study, paid for via a $500,000 federal transportation grant and a $125,000 local match provided by Southbank Partners. A 41-person committee of various civic leaders, chaired by Southbank Partners President Wally Pagan, is overseeing the study, which is just getting started.
If It Wasn't Broke...
For 13 years, a relatively small but devoted group of people have been quietly advocating the return of streetcars to Cincinnati.
Quietly, that is, until David Fritze joined the new Cincinnati Street Railway Inc. (CSR) a few years ago. Now Fritze is one of three trustees for the non-profit group, which was granted its name by Metro. CSR and two other local streetcar-related groups have about 200 unique members.
Fritze, an information technology consultant, has spent a lot of his spare time researching the history of streetcars in Cincinnati and writing proposals for a new system to the city and later the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments (OKI).
Driven mostly by his own convictions and a love of streetcars, Fritze studied existing streetcar and trolley lines all over the country. Using numbers from that research, more than a year ago he proposed to the city of Cincinnati a 12-mile, 43-stop streetcar loop to connect many of the points served by the Southbank Shuttle but also reach west to Union Terminal and north to Over-the-Rhine.
He estimated the line and the 12 streetcars needed for it would cost $51 million to build, with $33 million of that paying for track and overhead wire construction. Some of that money could come from state and federal transportation grants, Fritze believes, although he doesn't expect the line to pay for itself for at least 10 years, even with a beginning fare of $1.
But Fritze is confident a streetcar line could be more popular than the shuttle because people are more attracted to streetcars.
"Buses are what people ride because they have to," he said. "People don't like buses."
Fritze's proposal said the line would benefit Cincinnati, Covington and Newport by:
· Concentrating parking on cheaper land nearer the edge of the cities, freeing prime land for other uses;
· Slightly reducing traffic congestion and pollution;
· And encouraging development along the line.
Unlike bus lines, Fritze said, building a rail line implies that the city is committed to serving that part of town and its residents.
"It's a marriage," he said. "It's not like living together."
Reaction from area civic and government leaders has been lukewarm, he said. Many don't take the idea seriously. Others like it but don't see it as feasible. And a minority believe streetcars make sense.
"People just believe it would be very, very difficult to pull off," Fritze said, adding that local government already has its hands full with riverfront development, among many other issues.
The city of Cincinnati didn't totally reject the concept and instead asked Fritze to turn in a second, scaled-down proposal. So, a few months later, he proposed a 2.5-mile, 16-stop, $11.7 million Main Street route connecting the new Bengals and Reds stadiums to the Over-the-Rhine entertainment district.
Meanwhile, members of Forward Quest, a Northern Kentucky economic development group, have been backing their own successor to the Southbank Shuttle: the Jetsons-like PRT system. The idea, yet to be used anywhere in the country, would move people around the riverfront via three-passenger pods traveling on a monorail, stopping only where riders want it to.
Downtown Cincinnati Inc. (DCI), an economic development group, held two question-and-answer sessions with PRT backers last fall. The group decided not to support the proposal, said Rick Greiwe, CEO of DCI, because of concerns that the technology has never been used and because it was unclear how the monorail would fit on existing streets.
Getting on Board?
Cincinnati wouldn't be the first city in recent history to add a new streetcar line. New Orleans -- site of the country's oldest continuously operating streetcar line, founded in 1835 -- is adding a third line in 2002. Memphis is adding a second line, mostly for residents, to connect to the tourist-focused, two-mile streetcar line that opened downtown in 1993. And Kenosha, Wisc., a town of 88,000 located between Milwaukee and Chicago, is adding a two-mile loop to connect a new development with 400 units of housing to its downtown.
But do streetcars make sense in Cincinnati?
Mass transit is a different animal from city to city, said Amy Coggin, communications director for the American Public Transportation Association, an advocacy group of public transit providers and manufacturers.
In general, she said, "there is certainly a lot of evidence that property values go way up next to rail development," which for her includes streetcars and light rail. The average increase is about 10 percent, she said, but has ranged from 35 percent in Dallas to 4 percent in other cities.
The key is integration, Coggin said. People have to be able to get to a variety of places they want to go.
"(Streetcars) could be one really useful way to get around" if that happens, said John Deatrick, director of Cincinnati's Transportation and Engineering Department.
Fritze said it's possible for modern streetcars to share track with regional light rail lines, such as the one being studied by OKI for the I-71 corridor.
County Commissioner John Dowlin has been a critic of the proposed light rail system, in no small part because of its projected $1 billion cost. Although Dowlin hasn't given much thought to streetcars, he cautioned against rushing into building them.
"Does it make sense to go back?" he asked. "(We) should ask, 'Why did we ever leave?' "
Part of the reason the city removed streetcars was because they blocked traffic, he said. Streetcars used to stop at islands in the middle of streets.
"It was not only a physical hazard, but it took away a whole lane of street," said J.A. Bischof, a Cincinnati expressway engineer for nearly 40 years, who retired in 1985. Plus, he said, buses were seen as more economical because they didn't require tracks or overhead wires.
The cost of creating a major new streetcar network would be prohibitive, Bischof said. But he was more optimistic that some sort of line serving the urban centers around the river would work.
Fritze has his own theory about the demise of streetcars. During World War II, rubber and gasoline were conserved for the war effort, and as a result so was bus use. That meant streetcars were the backbone of public transportation. During the war, streetcar systems weren't well-maintained, which later left them in dire need of maintenance. Instead, cities sold the cars, removed the poles and overhead wires and paved over the track, he said.
Fritze believes re-instituting streetcars wouldn't be too hard if the city cooperated. The city already controls the streets, and modern technology has reduced the amount of maintenance streetcar lines need. If they won't work in the middle of streets, he said, they could stop at curbs.
Fritze doesn't expect his proposals to be adopted word-for-word. He's hoping only to start a conversation. His bottom-line goal is to make downtown Cincinnati, Covington and Newport better places to live.
Streetcars, he believes, could return some of the pedestrian activity many downtowns, including Cincinnati's, lost, he said.
"Downtowns don't have that sense of warmth, that sense of community they had at an earlier time," Fritze said. "To me, they're sterile places." ©
