RezoneOKC

We throw around trendy cities like Seattle and Portland when discussing streetcar, but a very successful system is right next door in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 2004, Little Rock opened its River Rail service, a heritage trolley line. Functionally, heritage trolleys are the same as the modern streetcar we will be getting, but I think their vintage design seems to appeal more to the tourist crowd. No doubt the River Rail is used by residents as well.

Little Rock has 3.4 miles of streetcar, connecting hotels, tourist attractions, historic neighborhoods, a convention center, an arena, and the office district. The original 2.5 miles were built in 2004 for only $8 million per mile, which is cheap since $10-20 million per mile is a generally acceptable estimate. It has been doubling ridership expectations, with about 3,000 per day. They only charge $2 for a day pass on River Rail, so this low price may be a reason for the high ridership.

The layout of the track is basically two small loops connected by a single-track bridge over the Arkansas River, with an extension to the Clinton Library. Looks like the schedule generally offers 15-minute service.

Now that we know we are getting streetcar in Oklahoma City, about 6 miles of it, I wanted to start looking at other modern streetcar networks in North America to get an idea of how these systems work, what types of routes they take, and what the future expansion plans are. I am getting particularly interested in the debate between loops and spokes, and single-track two-way versus double-track alignments.

Portland is the go-to city for streetcar discussion, and has been discussed a lot, so I decided instead to start in Seattle, which just opened the South Lake Union Streetcar line exactly 2 years ago on December 12, 2007. Originally known as “South Lake Union Trolley – S.L.U.T.,” the streetcar is just 2.6 miles long and runs through an area of new development north of downtown Seattle. It cost close to $50 million, with half paid by various government sources and half by local businesses in a Business Improvement District type situation. It connects to bus lines, monorail lines, and light rail lines.

Seattle has gone with the double-track method, meaning that there are two tracks with two directions of traffic. That means they are able to run three streetcars on the line at once, at fifteen-minute intervals, without worrying about passing lanes. Note that sometimes the tracks are traveling opposite directions on the same street, and sometimes they are separated by one block.

Also note that this is a linear plan rather than a loop. It is part of Seattle’s ambitions for a future multi-linear streetcar network. In the map below, the orange line is the completed SLU Streetcar line, and other colors show future linear expansion areas.

This map of the future expansions shows the benefits of a network of streetcar lines over a loop- you can reach out to multiple neighborhoods and connect them directly to the central focus point- downtown- without looping through or around other outlying areas.

I will be interested to see more professional discussions of the argument between running bi-directional traffic on a single track, and using passing lanes, or keeping bi-directional traffic to two separate tracks. We will get more distance out of using single-track, but I don’t know how single-track might affect the flow of the streetcars and the wait times.

Most importantly, as we lay out our streetcar plan, we must also consider where we will run future streetcar alignments, so that what we put in today is compatible with future expansion.