New York City has $300,000 to Look into Brooklyn Streetcars

I sympathize with your goal of putting streetcars back in Brooklyn, but I don’t see it as particularly cost-effective. The B46 runs limited and local buses. If you replaced the limited B46 bus with a streetcar, you might save time, as much as 15 minutes on the 47-minute bus trip between Kings Plaza and Eastern Parkway, where a commuter could connect with the no. 4 express to Manhattan.

The issue I see is that the no. 4 express already takes 28 minutes to get to Grand Central (sample midtown destination station I’ve chosen). That 15 minutes of time saved on the rails is 32% savings vs. the bus trip, but only 19% vs. the total trip, including the subway ride. Kings Plaza commuters, however, can already take the B2 bus to the Kings Highway Station on the B/Q subway and get to Bryant Park in less than an hour, so the streetcar on Utica doesn’t really save any time for the midtown-bound commuter.

This same issue is going to come up with any kind of multimodal trip: you need service improvements on all legs in order to make substantial improvements in the overall commute. The coming uptown-6 to IND transfer at Broadway-Lafayette will have probably just as great an effect on Brooklyn commuters as these new streetcar lines, because it will allow more commuters to take the faster BMT into Manhattan and transfer mid-trip to the more conveniently located IRT stations. (Same thing for the 2nd Ave subway connection at Grand St, whenever that gets built.)

The transportation-equity point is a different kettle of fish, however, and you are right on when it comes to that. A greater mix of transit options can widen the horizons of nondrivers like teens, the disabled, and the elderly.

Jonathan,
Thoughtful and informative comment, with solid detail. And thanks for making me feel good about the coming uptown connection at Broadway-Lafayette. I cling to the hope that our subway system continues to improve. No, really.

But I think you miss the main point of streetcars in this city. It’s not to speed up long-distance commutes. It is to improve the short-and-medium-distance rides.

And Brooklyn has plenty of those, to employment sites and schools, along with a large number of ‘sometimes’ destinations like retail strips, entertainment venues, cultural institutions, medical facilities, etc.

Many of the commutes within the borough, and many of the occasional trips too, are made by bus today, and many more drivers would shift to streetcars if they were available.

When you follow the link in Yonah’s Streetcar post to his TriboroRX study, it shows huge numbers of potential outer-borough commuters along that proposed line, which would not even go into Manhattan. (And iirc, these estimates did not include students going to a distant school, which is a large number in the NYC system.)

That count gets us back to the standard comparisons between bus and rail. And of course, rail wins. Studies in Europe show trams usually attracting 30 to 40% of their riders from former drivers, while buses rarely seduce drivers out of their cars.

In Brooklyn, sleek Euro-style streetcars with their contemporary and upscale image can run in grassy trackways and narrower right-of-ways, while buses always require wide paved lanes. Low-floor streetcars allow passengers to load and unload quickly and comfortably. The electric power gives quicker acceleration and yet a smoother (and pothole-free) ride.

Electric-powered streetcars remove pollution from the streets. Of course, trams are more energy efficient overall, and cheaper to operate over time, than buses.

That’s why there’s a worldwide renaissance of trams/streetcars, in Adelaide, Barcelona, Bern, Bilbao, Blackpool, Bordeaux, Brussels, Cologne, Dublin, Edinburg, Florence, Grenoble, The Hague, Zurich, and others. It would be great to add Brooklyn to that list.

I don’t favor wasting any money or effort on Bus Repackaged Transit.
The Bush Administration is out of office, so there is no financial reason to try to ride ride that dead horse. I took Ms. Sadik-Kahn’s outspokenness about streetcars as her reading of which way the wind now blows.

Anyway, whether you hear politicians talking about getting drivers out of their cars or not, the actions of our Transport Commish makes me think she wants to do that. And the fact is, replacing buses with streetcars draws motorists out of their cars. And nothing either/or. You misrepresent my position, which is and/both. Some riders will be lured by slightly faster travel times, while others like the smoother ride and the quality image, and most riders will like both.

Your post only talked about the possible impact of streetcars on commuting into Manhattan. I’m ignoring Manhattan and talking about getting to jobs at Kings County Hospital or classes at Brooklyn College or going shopping at the Fulton Street transit mall downtown. Streetcars will get people there. Let’s go for it.

Jonathan, You got me this time. I was talking streetcars and then put in the mention of running in attractively grassy corridors — a light rail trait.

Well, I think most non-experts have a good bit of trouble separating street-running streetcars from grade-separated light rail. It’s so easy for a system to be part street-running and part grade-separated that the distinction seems mostly marketing, as if repacking the things as “light rail” would get away from the dowdy old “streetcar” image. Dare I say “trams” like those damn European Socialists?

I think trams would work in Brooklyn by running in the streets where necessary, and in dedicated lanes where possible.

In most cases I’d hope the necessary lane could be taken out of the parking spaces (conceding the problem of commercial deliveries along the best routes). Removing parking spaces to make way for trams would impinge on some drivers, but would not directly affect driving time.

There are also some very wide roadways in Brooklyn. And I’m thinking that a tram line from the last subway stop at Brooklyn College out Flushing Avenue and over the bridge to Riis Beach and the Rockaways would be worth looking at. Much of that line could run on its own right of way, if it didn’t take a Constitutional Amendment to shave a few feet off that federal parkland around the old Floyd Bennett Field.

Actually, the on-going reworking of Broadway in Midtown is removing parking lanes from 59th to 34th St. I’m sure there’s been some ruckus but not enough to stop the project. Likewise the protected bike lane going in on 8th Ave from 14th to 23rd St.

With streetcars, some merchants would win for sure, those located near the tram stops. Assuming a minimum 10% increase in passengers, which I do and you don’t, the merchants near the stops would see more sidewalk traffic, more than enough to make up for a few missing parking places.

On other stretches, there is no parking, or no merchants. I suggested a line from Brooklyn college to Riis Beach; half of that length would be through park land, not parking land. Someone else wants a route from Williamsburg passing the old Navy Yard to Dumbo and perhaps connecting with a line to Red Hook. Depending on the alignment, much of that line would be on streets with little or no commercial frontage.

We need one tram line on this side of the Atlantic, and this side of the Continent (Portland and Tacoma are too far off the path for New Yorkers), to show how well it works. Once we have a popular streetcar running in this city, it will be easier to get approval to add more of them. Houston’s “light rail” that runs on its own ROW down the middle of Main Street is very popular, and the city is now pushing ahead with two or three more lines to add to it.

One plausible argument for streetcars is that they can be very effective in a corridor that has too much ridership for bus, but not enough for subway. There’s a lower limit on bus headway, somewhere around 5 minutes, where if you try to go below that, you’ll get bunching and an ineffective service. With a streetcar, you can use a modular vehicle, or couple several together to make a train, and have a 120 foot train running instead of a pair of leapfrogging buses. Plus streetcars, being electric, are faster and quieter than buses. One other potential advantage is that streetcars can run in tunnels very effectively, whether to bypass a particularly troublesome intersection or to provide a more seamless transfer to the subway.