And 14th Street and 7th Street should both have streetcars.

Anyway, agreed with everyone:

Diesel buses attract fewer riders than electric streetcars due to rider preference (up to 20% more)

– but a bus with full bus lane enforcement is better than a streetcar in a shared lane, because reliable not-delayed-by-traffic service attracts more riders than delayed-by-traffic service, and from what I’ve read that difference can be *more than* 20%.

Probably providing exclusive streetcar lanes everywhere is the way to go in DC, with its superwide boulevards. Failure to provide exclusive lanes is just political laziness, as Jarrett points out.

And they will need longer-than-one-car trains.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rllayman/2439398690/

@Fritz, you choose the Metro over the bus when they are both going to the place you need to go. This makes total sense and won’t change. It seems to me that people will use this streetcar system to go places the Metro doesn’t go or will use the streetcar to transfer to/from the Metro. In that sense, I think the routes of the system are more important than the speed.

The SLUT is a disaster in Seattle – has come to a crashing halt many times due to running in a shared lane. And, Alon, Houston’s ridership figures blow them out of the water – not even close, and a much larger chunk of Houston’s light rail riders are ‘new’, i.e., not just bus riders put on a new vehicle.

But this jumped out at me from Yonah’s piece:

Streetcars will operate in mostly mixed traffic … That’s not a recipe for success, but it certainly will allow the city to build more miles for less money.

Surely you mean: it will allow the city to build more miles without the political costs of reducting private vehicle capacity.

Paint is cheap.

However, all things being equal, I believe that more choice riders would rather ride on the rails than a bus. These two modalities are not the same and many people do not see them as equally pleasant (or unpleasant) and there is just no getting around that.

If you compare slow buses to slightly less slow streetcars, rail bias increases streetcar ridership by about 20%. Electric buses are about halfway between diesel buses and streetcars. However, those numbers have never been tested for more advanced service, with signal priority, off-board fare collection, and dedicated lanes.

Electric buses have the advantage that they eliminate the economic justice issues of diesel buses such as endemic asthma near bus depots. So for the same amount of money, it should work better to electrify the major bus lines and depots rather than construct streetcars from scratch. The Portland model of segregating services by technology has failed to improve transportation for people who don’t live near streetcars; on the contrary, bus riders there complain about being treated as second-class transit users, and bus ridership has kept dwindling since the light rail lines opened.