Streetcar Resurgence in the United States: Transit Strategy, Growth Machine Tactic, or Some of Both?

Abstract

Streetcars have returned to many cities in the United States, and dozens of cities are contemplating making their own streetcar investments. Yet most streetcars carry relatively few riders per unit of service at a relatively high cost per ride. The streetcar’s poor transportation performance thus raises questions about the purpose of these investments. From a case study of five cities, the authors seek to better understand the streetcar’s appeal in the face of the mode’s poor transportation performance. The authors draw on interviews with developers, business leaders, local officials, transit planners, streetcar advocates, and other key respondents, as well as on documentary sources, and find that private actors with business and development interests in downtown and nearby areas are the main drivers behind the streetcar resurgence. These actors operate within growth-oriented public–private coalitions (growth machines) and typically regard streetcars as economic development, image-making, and tourism promotion tools rather than transportation investments. Rent-seeking behavior underlies growth machine dynamics, and thus streetcar projects remain appealing to these actors, despite the streetcar’s weak transportation performance. The focus on nontransportation goals as primary streetcar objectives affects local decision making and likely leads to the streetcar’s underperformance as a mode of transit.

Impact of Transit Quality on Anchor-Mediated Knowledge Economies Across Large U.S. Cities

“…As interest in anchor-based urban revitalization and innovation-friendly urban development thrives, it is critical to consider possible disadvantages, particularly those identified by growth machine and urban regime theories (18)(19)(20)(21). These theories have identified unequal outcomes and unfair distribution of the benefits and costs of growthoriented public-private coalitions typically led by private actors and anchor-based proponents (19,22).…”

Streetcar Development in China: The Motivations Behind

“…Especially in developed countries, streetcar projects have been found to bring various beneficial changes, in terms of increasing land and property prices [18][19][20][21][22], producing local employment and wider economic growth [18,[23][24][25][26], achieving local transit-oriented development (TOD) [27][28][29], etc. Creative city development is then regarded as an underlying but key factor that drives streetcar project developments [30][31][32]. Within and through neoliberal urbanization, the local governments have been paying more attention and spending more resources on particular civic projects to attract inward investments.…”

Colorblind transit planning: Modern streetcars in Washington, DC, and New Orleans

“…Culver's (2017) critique of modern streetcars argues that such efforts, by attracting capital and the creative class, rebrand cities as "vibrant" (Brown, 2013), diverse (Brown-Saracino, 2010;Zukin, 1998) and "livable" (Smith, 2010;Taylor & Morris, 2015). In advocating for streetcars, typical growth machine backers cite economic benefits, including real estate development, property value increases (King & Fischer, 2016;Ramos-Santiago et al, 2016) and their believed capacity to spur private investment, obscuring how complementary policies, such as land use regulations, support these shifts (King & Fischer, 2016;Taylor & Morris, 2015). Thus, modern streetcar projects reflect neoliberal norms of state-action for private accumulation and assumptions that public investment should "enhance private land values" (King & Fischer, 2016, p. 384…”