Cincinnati’s first streetcar system in more than 65 years launched with great fanfare back in September. But now, after five months of the Cincinnati Bell Connector gliding around its 3.6-mile loop, the long-awaited and much-derided transit project’s ride has gotten rougher.
Ridership numbers have been lower than expected, wait times to board the cars have exceeded the city’s 15-minute goal and maintenance issues have sidelined the cars at times. The ongoing struggles have reignited debate after the project’s fast start: Are the hiccups inevitable kinks to be worked out, or vindication for opponents fond of calling the streetcar a “boondoggle?”
For the first two months, ridership numbers were strong, buoyed by the fare-free first three days when the streetcar carried more than 50,000 riders. By the end of October, ridership had reached around 215,000. Even excluding its big debut, the streetcar averaged 3,700 riders a day, far surpassing its goal of 3,000 fares a day.
But early hints at ridership troubles hid in those numbers. The Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority, which contracts with private company Transdev to run the cars, expected ridership would be strongest on weekdays based on predictions from city-contracted consultants HDR. That proved not to be the case, with weekends far outpacing workdays in terms of riders. More than 22,000 piled onto the streetcar Saturday, Sept. 17 and Sunday Sept. 18, for example, but only 1,625 rode the streetcar the following Monday, and ridership didn’t hit 3,000 a day again until the following Thursday.
Ridership slid in November, when low weekday numbers and declining weekend rides dragged the streetcar’s average daily ridership well below 3,000 a day. In November, fewer than 50,000 people took rides on the streetcar — almost half the 95,000 who rode it the month before — and average daily ridership fell to 1,664 riders a day.
Officials have blamed short-term snags for the drop in ridership, including malfunctioning ticket kiosks at stops, inaccurate streetcar arrival times listed on digital displays at stops and traffic signal timing problems that have kept the cars from running on time. Those problems create uncertainty about when the cars will arrive, discouraging potential riders, streetcar boosters say.
“We’re discouraging people from riding the streetcar, and that is an issue for me,” Cincinnati City Councilman Wendell Young, a streetcar supporter, said in early December.
More snags came last month when cars began experiencing difficulties because of winter weather. Four cars broke down on Dec. 16 due to the cold, leaving just one operating vehicle on the streets. Four vehicles were operational by the next day as manufacturer CAF USA sent maintenance teams to work on compressor issues that sidelined the cars.
The city is seeking money back from streetcar manufacturer CAF for the outages caused by what a spokesperson called “manufacturing defects.”
SORTA spokesperson Brandy Jones pointed out that CAF cars in Kansas City experienced similar problems. That city’s system is the only other one in the country to use the same model vehicle as Cincinnati’s.
Things have gone more smoothly there, however. While Cincinnati’s November ridership numbers plummeted, Kansas City’s soared: Riders took more than 6,000 trips on the cars that month. In December, the city hired consultants to explore an expansion of the transit project there, a political impossibility in Cincinnati at the moment.
Response from critics both local and national to the streetcar’s difficulties has been quick and harsh. Just days after the streetcar opened, libertarian publication Reason called the streetcar a “spectacular shitshow” in the headline of a blog post detailing early snags with the system’s kiosks and other small problems.
In early December, The Atlantic’s urban policy blog CityLab published a post with the headline “Cincinnati Has a Streetcar Problem,” detailing the early difficulties and the author’s long wait to catch a car. The post goes into more detail about the streetcar’s stumbles, concluding that traffic patterns are playing a big role in delays, in turn suppressing ridership.
The city has an answer for that in the form of a $300,000 traffic study that could lead to re-timing traffic lights downtown and in Over-the-Rhine to make the streetcar’s passage through those areas easier, either via dedicated lanes on Walnut and Main streets or by keeping lights green as the streetcar approaches them. The complex study hasn’t been undertaken in those neighborhoods since the 1990s, before Over-the-Rhine’s dramatic redevelopment, when traffic patterns were much different.
There are other measures coming. On Dec. 16, SORTA threatened to fire streetcar operator Transdev, which works under a contract with the transit authority, in 90 days if it does not improve the streetcar’s performance. SORTA claims that problems with streetcar service amount to breaches of contract on the part of the operator. Transdev, however, disagrees, saying that data about streetcar run times is unreliable and that there’s no evidence the company isn’t meeting its obligations. Still, it pledged to work with the city to improve performance.
“We understand, share and endorse SORTA’s concerns for the success of the Cincinnati Bell Connector and streetcar service to the traveling public,” Transdev Rail President Ken Westbrook said in a December letter to SORTA.
Boosting ridership will be vital for the continued financial health of the streetcar, since some $675,000 in operating costs are expected to be paid for with fares from ridership in 2017. Fares in October exceeded expectations, SORTA says, but that was before the ridership downturn.
Despite the high stakes, supporters of the project have encouraged Cincinnatians to look beyond a couple down months and focus on the bigger picture.
“For those keeping track of such things, ridership so far for the @CB_Connector is 53% above projections,” Cincinnati City Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld tweeted last month after November’s numbers were released. However, December’s numbers, which had yet to be released at press time, will tell a fuller story about the scale of the problems facing Cincinnati’s newest transit system. ©
This article appears in Jan 4-11, 2017.