Your analysis is spot-on. As with so many decisions in our great city after Katrina, this one reflects the disconnect between the needs of our neighborhoods and the priorities of our elected and appointed officials.

Without demonizing the effors of the RTA and our Regional Planning Commission, they are simply focused on getting a ‘people-mover’ trolley that circulates tourists from Canal Street to the Convention Center along an alignment that unequivocally is a duplication of existing service and which reflects astoundingly bad transportation planning and priorities. The current study is largely a horse and pony show: from the beginning, it has been a foregone conclusion that the RTA wanted another tourist trolley line to serve visitors rather than promote community economic development and reinvestment in our neighborhoods. So while I commend the RTA on their efforts to invest in fixed-guideway transit in the Crescent City, I cannot say the same of their inability to invest in modern light rail technology that actually promotes the revitalization of our neighborhoods.

Transport for NOLA (TfNOLA) has had some success in pushing back on the RTA (and its consultant, HDR) and the RPC: we have already gotten the RTA to expand the study area to Press Street, which is about 70% of the previously proposed Desire alignment, and are encouraging them to support one of the other alignments in their study area that will make the connection to Lee Circle, which creates excellent network effects and introduces important origins and destinations to the Desire alignment (including the Union Passenger Terminal, which one day could be a high speed rail hub, as well as the Superdome, a proposed linear jazz historical district, and the upper Warehouse and highrise districts). The RTA is reticent to extend the Desire line all the way to Poland Avenue or into the 9th Ward because Southern Railways is such an obstructionist in crossing Press Street (despite that fact that Tennessee Williams’ Desire streetcar ran many times a day past the Press Street railroad crossing!) We also need to do a lot more work in terms of breaking the RTA’s resignation to only use high-floor, single car streetcars, and we need to make sure that the Lee Circle to Press Street alignment is their locally-preferred alignment (LPA).

We’ve had some good press, and will hopefully get some more in the coming weeks.

I’d also like to note that you are spot on about the manner in which an investment in fixed guideway transit would dramatically support reinvestment in neighborhoods. Part of the reason why time savings and supplanting buses were an issue in the original Desire line study is because–part and parcel of the ‘tourist trolley’ mentality–there were stops every two blocks! It is so indicative of the level of analysis, policy, and leadership in New Orleans that we submitted such junk to the FTA the first time around, and have such low expectations now.

Lastly, you’ve hit on the major chord that we’d like to keep striking: New Orleans needs to be thinking bigger. In New Orleans, 95% of any potential light rail alignment is already in the public domain because of our neutral grounds (what we call medians) and our Public Belt Railroad. Moreover, we are still an incredibly dense city below I-10/Florida Avenue; case-in-point: the density along the Lee Circle to Press Street alignment is over 13,000 people per square mile, with a large transit-dependent population and an extremely pedestrian-friendly built environment. There simply is no reason that we shouldn’t expect to have state-of-the-art light rail invested here and on similar corridors all over the city.

I do have one question that maybe you could help shed some light on. I’ve spoken a number of times with the head of the local consulting team, and she insists that they are going to recommend all of the proposed alignments. Is it possible to submit not one LPA to the FTA but several? It seems to me that even if this were acceptable (it’s not to me, at the very least, and hopefully to the FTA; the Convention Center Loop should never be built), there would still be some prioritization of financing and timing of construction. Is this common practice of submitting LPAs to the FTA for funding, or is this another example of New Orleans undermining itself?

Thanks again, Yonah!

Best,
Jeff

In other words, the new streetcars would lack the modern features of the Euro-style trams, especially low floors and wide doors. There would be no easy boarding for handicapped and obese users (and there are plenty of those in the Big Easy!) or for those encumbered by strollers, shopping carts, suitcases, etc. No wonder the fed study found no gain in speed over the old buses!

I love the old streetcars on the St. Charles line, and I have ridden the line end to end half a dozen times. But recreating the old-style cars for new lines is almost phony, and surely unnecessary.

Putting new Euro-style trams to work on new tracks in this city would help to educate visitors about how well streetcars could work back in their home towns. But fake old trolleys are just another amusement park ride, better left to Disney.

I think this is part of the discourse that is missing. I think speed is important but sometimes speed blinds us to the movement that is possible with streetcars and the development they bring when its(zoning etc) planned and executed correctly.

On a different note, I’ve heard that a deal had been struck with the feds to build the desire line behind closed doors but then the Hurricane hit and it was thrown out the window.

Yonah you might want to go back into the New Starts archives. Always good information in there. Here’s the desire line federal documents from 2005.

http://www.fta.dot.gov/documents/NO2AA.doc