Washington DC

What Was Wrong with the Washington DC Streetcar

Posted on May 28, 2025 in General, Streetcars (Trams), Symbolic Transit, Technophilia, Washington DC 0

Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser has announced that the DC Streetcar, a single line of mixed-traffic streetcar along a portion of H Street, will be replaced by a “next generation streetcar.” The Washington Post headline cuts through the spin:

If I could have edited that headline, I might just have said “DC Streetcar to be Replaced by Useful Transit”.

What was wrong with the DC Streetcar? Apart from all the problems of putting transit in mixed traffic while denying it the ability to move around obstacles, the problem was this:

That orange line in the middle of the image, extending from (near) Union Station along H Street to just short of the Anacostia River, is the DC Streetcar. Note that a frequent bus line X2 runs right on top of it but extends further east and west. That’s because the X2, as a bus, is able to operate a complete corridor linking to logical endpoints, and functioning as part of a high-frequency grid. High-frequency grids, which maximize access to opportunity in a dense city, are made of lines that keep going all the way across the grid, so that they intersect as many other lines as possible. One thing an effective grid bus line would never do is end just short of a major connection point, as the streetcar does by not crossing the Anacostia River to at least reach Minnesota Avenue station.

This is one of the key things wrong with most of the mixed-traffic streetcars developed in the US in the 2000-2015 period, and especially those heavily promoted by the Obama Administration. The excitement generated by the development industry, combined with the eagerness to get something started at low cost, led to starter lines that were very short, so they were unable to function well inside of larger grids. The duplication of the X2 and the streetcar is just wasted precious driver time, but the X2 can’t get out of the way of the streetcar because it’s doing important work in a longer corridor, while the streetcar just duplicates part of it. Because the resulting streetcar service was so useless, it never saw the surge of ridership that would form the basis for political support to expand the network.

Across the country now, we’re going to see a divergence in the fates of these little modern streetcars. At this stage, I’m aware of two modern streetcars that I’m really confident will endure: the westside line in Portland and the line in Kansas City, both of which are being extended. Portland’s is, and Kansas City’s will be, long enough to usefully serve a complete corridor rather than just a fragment of it. There are a few other niche streetcars that have strong enough markets. Tucson’s, for example, doesn’t extend across the city’s vast grid but it does link downtown and the University through several walkable neighborhoods, so it makes some sense.

Over time, too, the streetcars that endure are going to be those that gradually transform themselves into something more like light rail, by reducing car traffic’s ability to disrupt the service and widening the spacing of stops. Portland, where the modern streetcar movement was hatched, spent years sending urbanists out across the country saying that “rail is special because it’s permanent.” But fortunately the Portland Streetcar stations weren’t permanent! They were way too close together, and wisely, some have now been removed in the campaign to get the service a bit above its original average speed of 6 miles per hour.

I must admit that when I saw this story, my first reaction on social media was less than magnanimous:

If you weren’t there, trust me. At the major urbanist conferences between 2000 and 2010, few people were saying the obvious things I was saying, namely:

The permanence of a service lies not in rails in the street, but in the permanent justification of the operating subsidy. That depends (in part) on ridership, which depends on the land use that actually develops around the line, not just what the boosters fantasize. Many US cities facing budget crises now have streetcar operations on their books that compete directly with other city priorities, and if the streetcar wasn’t designed to succeed, they may not win those battles every year.
Streetcar lines that are too short, and serve only parts of corridors that really need to be served continuously, are net barriers to transit access, reducing access to opportunity. They either require us to take apart corridors that serve more people if they’re continuous, or they require a bus and streetcar to duplicate each other, wasting the precious staff time that is the primary limit on the total quantity of transit service.

This, one of my first really viral pieces from 2009, captures how I was talking back then. I also got into a notorious 2010 fight with Vancouver urbanist Patrick Condon about his vision of covering Vancouver with slow streetcars instead of fast, driverless, high frequency rapid transit. But as always, having been right in the end is never much consolation. Mostly I’m sad that so much well-intentioned energy went into so many projects that weren’t scaled to succeed, and that weren’t sufficiently focused on being useful.

Let’s plan public transit with the goal of being maximally useful to human beings, expanding their access to opportunity. That means designing the right lines first and then picking the technology, not falling in love with a technology and then designing a line around its limitations.

Alexandria, Virginia: A New Network Plan

Posted on November 11, 2019 in Network Redesign, Washington DC

At about 15 square miles, the City of Alexandria is relatively small, but it is firmly within the core of the Washington metropolitan region with key job centers like the large Department of Defense facility at Mark Center, a historic Old Town that draws many tourists, burgeoning employment centers like Eisenhower East, and many leafy suburban neighborhoods. It grew and changed dramatically, along with the rest of Washington region, in the latter half of the 20^th Century, much of it in an auto-oriented design. And like many of the inner suburban areas of the Washington region, Alexandria is trying to find its way to a more transit-focused future, because in the nations 6^th largest metro area, there’s just not room for everyone to get around by car.

When looking at Alexandria in the context of the ridership recipe, a key feature is that most of the density is around the edges of the city, along the Metrorail lines to the east and south, and along I-395 to the north. But not all of that density is equally suited to high transit ridership. In the western parts of the city, much of the development is auto-oriented, with less connected streets and poor walkability. In the middle of the city is a large area of primarily low density residential that is not dense or walkable. This doughnut pattern makes the transit network design and planning work particularly interesting and challenging for Alexandria.

Old Town Alexandria (Photo: Ken Lund https://flic.kr/p/o5Pgtc)

Skyscrapers_on_King_Street West End Alexandria Virginia (Photo: Ser Amantio di Nicolao via Wikimedia.org)

In that context, we’ve been working with the City, its local transit agency (DASH), and the regional transit agency (WMATA), on the Alexandria Transit Vision since 2018. The City recently released the Draft Recommended Networks that we helped design.

The networks are designed around the policy direction from the DASH Board that, by 2030, 85% of resources should go toward high ridership service. The plan includes a short-term network that could be implemented as soon as 2022, with no new service hours. It also includes an option to improve evening and weekend service in the short-term with new investment. Plus, the plan includes the ambitious Vision Network, a 2030 plan to expand the frequent network and evening and weekend service to substantially increase access across the city, seven days a week.

A major focus of the plan is building up a frequent network from what is mostly a low frequency system with lots of one-seat rides today. That means some trips that a person can make today on one bus might require two buses in the future, but the frequency of service means that total wait time is the same, or less, than today.

The slices of the network maps below show the western part of the city, where today many overlapping routes provide low frequency service to many destinations, but you can’t get anywhere soon with such long waits. The 2022 and 2030 networks dramatically simplify service and increase frequency to expand liberty and access through connections to other frequent routes.

Existing Network

2022 Network

2030 Network

Outcomes

The 2022 Recommended Network would increase the number of jobs that the average person could reach in 45 minutes at midday on weekdays by 13%. That is with a network with zero increase in service hours, just reallocating existing DASH and WMATA services in the city.

An 8% increase in service in the short-term (2022) could improve evening and weekend service so more people could get more places all week long. Specifically, it would increase the percent of residents near frequent service on Saturdays from 36% to 65% and on Sundays from 15% to 59%.

The longer-term Vision Network for 2030 would increase job access even more, helping the average resident reach 18% more jobs in 45 minutes at noon on weekdays. Plus, it would increase evening and weekend service, brining frequent service to 79% of residents on Saturdays and 74% on Sundays.

The vast majority of people and places in Alexandria see substantial improvements in overall access and freedom via transit with these networks, but like any change there are some trade-offs. Some parts of the city, particularly in the lower density center, see a decrease in service and also a decrease in access by transit.

These trade-offs were part of the concepts phase where we helped the public, stakeholders, and city leadership think through what goals they wanted to prioritize for transit in Alexandria. The outcome of that phase was the Board policy direction telling us to put 85% of resources toward Ridership Goals and 15% toward Coverage goals.

Your Liberty

We’ve also put together an interactive webmap that you can use to explore the networks and see how they affect your liberty and access to opportunities: http://alexandriatransitvision.com/. The tool compares travel time isochrones for each concept and shows you the change in jobs reachable in 30 or 45 minutes.

In these maps, blue areas are newly reachable with the network concept, purple areas are reachable with both the existing network and the concept, and red areas are where you can travel with the existing network that is no longer reachable with the concept. You can also click the “View Routes” button to explore the network structure.

Here’s a quick comparison for the Landmark Mall vicinity showing the area that would be reachable in 45 minutes with the 2030 Recommended Network:

Screen Shot Landmark Mall Isochrone

The City is working with developers to remake this area of the City, adding new housing and commercial development. With the 2030 network, someone living here would be able to reach 76,800 more jobs than with the existing network. Of course, those jobs aren’t just places you could work, they also represent the shopping, education, recreation, and other opportunities you could reach in a reasonable amount of time.

More Information

There’s much more detail in the Draft Recommended Network Report and at the city’s website, including individual neighborhood details.

If you live, work, or visit Alexandria, you should consider these changes and take the survey about them here. At this stage there is no decision about whether to implement a plan such as this one. Any final plan will be revised based on public comment that comes in over the next couple of weeks. That means that if you like the plan, it’s important to comment to that effect, as well.

How do I find a hotel near good transit?

Posted on February 26, 2015 in Atlanta, Legibility, Washington DC

Here's news you can use, or at least news I can use as an absurdly frequent flyer.

All of the standard travel shopping sites make it very hard to assess the transit options from a hotel's location. At most they have distances and sometimes car travel times. So I often spend too long doing research, and pay too much for a hotel close to my destination when I might easily have stayed further away more cheaply if I knew good transit was there.

This, therefore, is a really good tool. In the case of Washington DC, it helps you see all the hotels that are close (objectively close, not hotel-marketing-close) to a subway station. It's the work of Jeff Howard, and he's also done one for Atlanta's MARTA subway.

You can get hints of similar output from Google, very crudely, by pointing Google Maps at a city and then specifying, say, "hotels near a DC Metro station," but Google is easily confused by excessively clear requests, and to Google, "near" means car-near, not transit-near. Someday, maybe Google will understand "hotel within 400m of a frequent transit stop," or even "hotel within 30 min frequent transit travel time from ___". But that's clearly a way off, and Google often seems more interested in interpreting vague search requests than replying to clearly stated ones.

In any case, even a competent search engine wouldn't produce Jeff Howard's very useful feedback about hotels. Click on a station and there's a writeup about each station area, including a map showing the hotel's exact relationship to the station, and links to the hotels themselves, including a reservation widget. Nice work, Jeff!

Are streetcars-in-traffic skeptics sacrificing goodness for perfection?

Posted on October 1, 2014 in Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams), Washington DC

That's David Alpert's frame in a piece in the Atlantic Citylab today (links added):

Jaffe, Walker, Yglesias, and Capps have no duty to support Team Transit [sic!] no matter what. They should speak their minds. And anyone who supports mass transit expansion should want it to be as close to perfect as possible.
I worry about streetcar criticism that states that a streetcar without every desirable feature is worse than nothing.
But streetcars also have another set of opponents: Those who simply don’t want to fund any transit at all, regardless of its specifics. They seize on any flaw to stop projects that might change their street or interfere with their driving.
So I worry about the effects of this latest trend in streetcar criticism. While streetcar projects can and should be better, many of these articles go further and either imply or outright state that a streetcar without every desirable feature is worse than nothing.
That’s not right. Perfect transit is absolutely a goal, but the perfect must not be the enemy of the good. There are plenty of reasons why a streetcar might be worth supporting, even if it isn't as long, frequent, or speedy as we might like.

I have spent my whole career helping people value what's really good-but-not-perfect in transit choices. Our difference is that in Alpert's framing of the question, the fundamental good to be defended at all costs is the streetcar technology, while to me the fundamental good is the liberty of large numbers of human beings, and their access to both happiness and economic opportunity.

Let us take Alpert's perfect-vs-good frame and deploy it differently. Many earnest American leaders visit places like Bordeaux and Strasbourg and agree their cities should look just like that. This looks perfect to them, but they realize they'll have to start with something that's good-but-not-perfect, an imperfect good.

Well, which "good" element should we start with? In Bordeaux and Strasbourg, the streetcar (never mixed with traffic) is a result rather than a cause of a whole bunch of other things: policies that limit car access, for example, so that transit of any mode can run reliably and so that it delivers people into a rich pedestrian space. The Bordeaux and Strasbourg streetcars also began with the "imperfect good" of bus services, which were used to build robust lines with actual existing markets that would support the future rail service.

Why should the "imperfect good that we start with" be the streetcar instead of a really liberating transit system run, for now, by buses? Why must we start with a hunk of decontextualized technology rather than our liberty and opportunity to go where we want to go?

Alpert goes on to make other points about why "imperfect but good" streetcars are worth supporting:

Imperfect transit can still be good for cities.
Millennials, empty nesters, and others want walkable, livable urban places. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of those in the United States, which is why they’re increasingly expensive.
There are plenty of places on the edges of cities that could become more walkable, more urban, and have more of a sense of place. To do that, they need better transit, more amenities, and more residents—which generally means more density. When such a place achieves greater walkability and urbanization, the factors making it so strengthen over time. … It’s a momentum game, and even an expensive, sub-optimal transit solution—such as a less-frequent streetcar with no dedicated lane —can push the cycle in the right direction.

The sheer abundance of places that need to be made more walkable is actually the strongest argument against the streetcars-in-traffic campaign. In transit, if it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter. Streetcars-in-traffic have helped enrich a few superdense districts, but they are far too slow, unreliable, and expensive to scale to the size of our urban mobility problem — at least not as long as they remain stuck in traffic. (Once they get out of traffic, they are essentially light rail.) Nor are streetcars remotely necessary for the development of walkable, urban places.

If you want to see how a city massively expands the usefulness of transit, and thus the potential for transit-oriented lives, look to what is happening in Houston. Massive, scalable, high-frequency bus grids that are useful for getting all over the city, and that can be created now.

An imperfect streetcar might be all your city can afford—for now. … Your city can make it better later, and may even plan to.

The frame here is: "The streetcar technology is the essential good, and people's ability to access their entire city is a nice-to-have that we hope to add in the future."

But even if you accept that frame, what's the track record of claims that modern streetcars-in-traffic, first built in compromized ways, have led to later efforts to improve them? Perhaps you should study Portland, which has been living with this product for longer than any other US city.

The streetcar has been extended up to the limits of usefulness for such a slow-by-design service (about 3.5 miles). But there are no serious proposals for taking cars out of its lanes for enough distance to matter, nor is there much energy behind extensions. Why?

In Portland, support for streetcar spending has collapsed. A recent Bureau of Transportation poll found that only 38% of Portland residents would assign a more-than-neutral priority to further expansions of the streetcar. The same number for more frequent bus service is 67%. (Light rail, in exclusive lanes by definition, is at 59%)

The Portland Streetcar has taught Portland residents a lot about what's really matters as you define an "imperfect good." Listen to what they've learned: Frequent, useful, reliable transit — using tools that scale to the scale of the whole city — is the "imperfect good" that matters.

should transit maps be geographical or abstract?

Posted on November 7, 2013 in Frequent Networks, Maps, San Francisco, Washington DC

In some agencies, it goes without saying that transit maps should be geographically accurate. Many agencies follow San Francisco Muni in superimposing transit lines on a detailed map of the city:

But research out of MIT suggests that we really need to see network structure, and that requires a degree of abstraction:

By putting alternate versions of the New York and Boston subway maps through the computer model, the researchers showed that abstract versions of the maps (as opposed to geographically accurate versions) were more likely to be easily understood in a single, passing glance.

Here's their example:

Geographical accuracy obscures network structure. Purely geographic maps show where service is but not how it works.

This is why a number of best practice agencies publish both kinds of maps, sometimes even presenting them side by side. The geographic map helps you locate yourself and points of interest in the city, but you need the structure map to understand how the system works.

All this is even more urgently true for bus network maps, where complexity can be crushing to the user. When we streamline maps to highlight key distinctions of usefulness such as frequency, we often have to compromise on geographic detail. Obviously the best maps fuse elements of the two, but you can always find the tradeoff in action. The new Washington DC transit maps, for example, highlight frequency (and show all operators' services together) but there's a limit to the number of points of interst you can highlight when keeping the structure clear:

frequent network maps: the challenge of one-way pairs

Posted on October 13, 2013 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Washington DC

One-way splits — where the two directions of travel are on different streets — are often the scourge of transit: on the map, for example, they appear to cover more area than two way service, but actually serve less. And they certainly make transit maps confusing:

Still, they're frequently mandated by one-way traffic couplets. Those, in turn, are usually mandated by the goal of flushing traffic through a city, though there are cases, notably Portland, where one-way couplets are perfect for creating an intimate and walkable downtown.

Transit agencies may not be able to avoid one-way couplets, but they can control how they describe them and think about them. WMATA (and its map designer, CHK America, have made a major step in their new network map. We covered the development of this mpa previously. Here's what it looks like today:

Red represents the most frequent bus lines, blue the infrequent ones, and black the DC Metro system. Other colors are used to depict services of other transit agencies. This basic, clear symbolization quickly communicates the relative importance and usefulness of each type of service.

Marc Szarkowski, who contributed his own frequent network map of Baltimore to the blog last week, asks: how do we show a single route that runs as a two-way couplet on separate streets, without introducing too much clutter or confusion?

Marc writes:

I think they can work if presented effectively, but overall I often find them confusing, especially if I'm taking an unfamiliar route to an unfamiliar area (all the more you have to remember, particularly if you take multiple such routes). For example, whenever I ride a bus to an unfamiliar area, I tend to assume that the stop I get off at in one direction is just as good for boarding in the other direction. It's frustrating to return to the stop just to discover that you have to walk a block over (or sometimes more: see the 10 in West Baltimore!) to catch the same route in the other direction.

WMATA's map uses one line to show both branches of route, and labels either side with the couplet streets. This effectively reduces the amount of clutter on the map, but also excludes which direction the bus travels on each street. This information is less crucial in the case of the B2 shown left, where no other routes travel on the same pair of streets, but where multiple routes use the same streets, in different patters towards different destinations, combining paired one-way streets can become very confusing. Marc's map does not employ this method of simplification for the same reason:

In Baltimore's case multiple overlapping routes were sometimes offset across a series of three or more one-way streets; i.e. Route 1 up on street A and down on B, Route 2 down on B and up on C, Route 3 up on C and down on D, and so on

Ultimately, desiging this type of a map is about balancing information density and comprehensibility. The user needs to know that line B2 runs on both 14th and 15th streets, but for a map at citywide scale, it may be more important to communicate that B2 is a frequent line serving a long, straight corridor on the eastern side of the city. The map already distorts direction and the exact shape of the streets in favor of a simpler visual effect. WMATA's map uses the same approach to one-way street pairs, downplaying accuracy in favor of ease of use.

a leading bureaucrat on the need to take more risks

Posted on February 1, 2013 in Meditations, Philosophy, Washington DC

Here's a very worthwhile three minutes of Washington DC Planning Director Harriet Tregoning on risk-taking and failure. Her discussion of Capital Bikeshare, which failed in its first incarnation and succeeded in its second, is an incisive challenge to the bureaucratic mind, and it's directly related to transit improvements.

Whenever we try to improve transit systems, we often find — especially in network redesign — that a whole lot of big changes have to be made at once. What's more, they're irreversible. Network redesigns are so big and impactful that you can't just "try" them and undo them if they don't work. By the time you've done them, the previous status quo is irrecoverable.

So they're big risks. And most people — especially most groups of people working together such as Boards and committees — don't like to take risks. The deliberation process in government often seems designed to shrink every initiative, so that all strong transformative moves shrivel into hesitant "demonstration projects," if they survive at all.

Tregoning's story here is basically that the first bikeshare system failed because it was too small, too hesitant, while the second one succeeded because it was far bigger, bolder, riskier. Many of the government cultures I've known would have decided, based on the first round, never to try bikeshare again. It took courage to say that maybe the lesson was that some things just can't be done as tiny demonstration projects. You have to build the courage to actually do them, at the natural scale at which they start to work.

Transit network redesign is exactly like that. It's hard to do in hesitant, reversible phases, because it's all so interconnected, and because a network doesn't start to work until it's all there.

Thanks to Melanie Starkey of the esteemed Urban Land Institute for pointing me to this!

washington dc: new network maps, with frequency!

Posted on September 19, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Washington DC

The Washington DC transit agency WMATA has now released drafts of its new network map, which highlight the frequent network very dramatically with wide red lines:

Finally, it's possible to quickly see where the next bus is coming soon, rather than getting lost in a confusing tangle in which all routes look equally important. The map is by the excellent firm CHK America. Get the full story, with many more samples, at Greater Greater Washington, and remember, if you like these, don't take it for granted. Transit agencies need to hear positive feedback where it's deserved.

washington, dc: a subway-style frequent bus map

Posted on August 14, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Washington DC

Dan Malouff at Greater Greater Washington has sketched a schematic (not geographic) Frequent Bus Network map for the city, and separate maps for each suburban county. See the original to enlarge and sharpen.

Obviously I recommend Frequent Network maps that show all the modes that run frequently, in some legible way. In this case that would include the subway. Otherwise, you seem to imply that there is a huge audience of bus people who want to travel only by bus. Of course, such a map would need to be at a much larger scale and would have required a lot more work (and tough design choices) to draw. This bus network is obviously discontinuous because the missing links are in the rail system.

ever wanted to be that sexy voice on the train?

Posted on May 14, 2012 in Amusing, Washington DC

I certainly did, maybe still do. Last week, the Washington Post's "Dr Gridlock" asked readers to call in to record their rendering of the following sentence:

“Next station L’Enfant Plaza. Transfer to the Orange and Blue lines. Doors open on the right.”

An odd choice for an audition text, since it raises all these American anxieties about Frenchness, manifested in the endless question of how frenchly to pronounce French names …

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