Last weekend a friend of mine sent me an article from The Economist talking about why trams, streetcars, and light rail are a waste of money. The argument is basically that steetcars are expensive, less efficient, and that – despite North America’s renewed interest in them – we should instead be spending our scarce public dollars on more buses.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

…but cash spent on streetcars displaces spending on other, more cost-effective forms of public transport like buses, which offer cheaper and more-efficient service but are considerably less sexy. The capital cost per mile of a streetcar is between $30m and $75m, while a rapid bus service costs anywhere between $3m and $30m, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

Now, there’s no question that buse routes are initially cheaper to implement. You don’t have track to build. But I don’t agree that the cost structure is quite that simple if you consider the number of people you need to move in your city. I struggle to see buses as a more efficient service.

The big difference between modern light rail and buses is capacity. Toronto’s new streetcars will move about 3 times as many people as your typical bus. So you’d need to triple the number of buses and triple the number of drivers – adding to your labor costs – if you want to have a chance at moving the same number of people. 

Streetcars are also electric, which means they run on a renewable energy source. We’re in the process of making this switch with private transport, so why go backwards when it comes to public transport? You can certainly run electric buses as well, but then you’re building overhead power lines and bringing up your initial costs.

I think the challenge is that when people think of light rail, they think of slow lumbering streetcars. I agree that many of these lines are inefficient and I’ve written about it. But there are a number of ways to implement light rail. And when done well it can efficiently move a lot of people for costs that are far less than a subway.

Image: Aecom

Tonight I saw one of Toronto’s new streetcars cruising down King Street. They’re still in test mode and the first batch won’t go into operation until this August, but every now and then you’ll see one circulating around the city. This was the first one I’d seen in person.

If you’re a transit geek or urbanist, you’re probably excited about the arrival of these new streetcars. But I know that there are a lot of people who aren’t. They hate streetcars and they think of them as basically rolling stop signs on our congested downtown streets. And since these new streetcars are even longer than our existing ones, they’re worried they’ll just make the situation worse.

Personally, I think that streetcars mixed into traffic is generally pretty inefficient. But I know that surface light rail has the potential, when executed properly, to be a cost-effective and sustainable way of efficiently moving lots of people around a city. When I lived in Dublin I took the Luas every day. It was great.

So I’m curious to hear from you. What do you think of Toronto’s new streetcars? Let me know in the comment section below.

With Toronto preparing to deploy the first batch of its new streetcars this summer, there’s been a lot of talk about streetcars in general. Rob Ford has said he wants to get rid of them all together and I hear a lot of other people expressing similar frustrations: Streetcars are rolling stop signs. Streetcars block 2 lanes of traffic. Why don’t we just use more buses? Streetcars cause traffic. And so on.

So what should we do?

First, let me start by saying that buses suck. I’m a huge proponent of public transportation in cities, but there’s nothing quite like a rush hour bus ride to have you question your economic status in life. Bus routes have also been shown to have little economic development value, where as fixed rail lines (such as streetcar, LRT and subway) generally increase surrounding property values and spur investment.

Second, my view is that streetcars themselves as a transportation technology aren’t the problem. It’s our execution. I’ve touched on this topic before on ATC, but I’d like to reiterate a few points here. 

The value of light rail is that it’s a relatively inexpensive way (compared to subway) of efficiently moving a lot of people. But in order to do that, you need deploy it in a sensible way. In my mind, that primarily involves 3 things: giving streetcars their own dedicated lanes (grade separation), having a reasonable number of required stops, and streamlining the onboarding and off boarding process. Today, we don’t do a great job at most of these things (