Metro Pulse/Insights/A Desire Named Streetcar

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What:
Portland Streetcar presentation

When:
Monday, Jan. 12, 7 p.m.

Where:
Convention Center Lecture Hall, Cumberland Avenue entrance

by Barry Henderson

Call them what you will. They're known variously as trolleys, streetcars, or trams. They once graced the streets of Knoxville and most American cities, carrying passengers to and from work and shopping and play. They never disappeared entirely from European cities, or from San Francisco, and they've made a modest comeback across the United States in recent years.

In such varied climes as Seattle, Tacoma, Kenosha, Wis., New Orleans, Charlotte, and Memphis, they serve as part of urban mass transit systems. They aren't just gimmicky throwbacks; they work in many of those settings to help ameliorate environmental, traffic and parking woes that plague the urban landscape.

Knoxville has such woes, in spades, but would trolley lines do anything here to improve the air and the traffic congestion and the parking rage that we experience daily?

Maybe. It would depend on where they were established, how they were operated, whom they were intended to serve, and who took advantage of their service.

Knoxville's City Council is going to get the "Portland Streetcar" pitch Monday evening, courtesy of Councilman Joe Hultquist, the chairman of the Nine Counties One Vision Mass Transit Rail-Bus Task Force. Hultquist attracted the sponsorship of the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership and Knoxville Area Transit in arranging the presentation, which will outline the Portland, Ore., system in an open, informal Council session in the Knoxville Convention Center.

The presenters, Roger Millar, a planner and engineer with offices in Virginia, and Tom Furmaniak, an engineering services company executive from Atlanta, will portray the Portland experience. As consultants, they participated in the team approach that put Portland's streetcar in place, humming along 2.4 miles of that city's streets, in July of 2001.

The Portland project was conducted with almost no federal participation, using taxation through a local improvement district, to pay down the bulk of the $57 million ($11.8 million per mile) cost. It's doing well, serving as an adjunct to Portland's slick light rail system that also runs through its already revitalized downtown. Portland claims ridership of about 5,600 on weekdays and almost that many on Saturdays. Early last year the city counted $1 billion worth of development in the improvement district in the first year and a half of the streetcar's existence.

One of its leading advocates has been Powell's City of Books, the mammoth independent bookstore that occupies a city block along the streetcar line. I used the streetcar to get to and from the bookstore last fall, spending a few days in Portland without a car, getting used to using the light rail/bus/streetcar grid that provides the pedestrian with access to practically everything of general interest or personal utility there. I was impressed. My earlier misgivings about Portland's lifestyle being overrestricted by planning nazis vanished. Portland's downtown is exceedingly vital, despite factors that have staggered the overall economy of the city in the past several years.

Knoxville is different. It has no light rail component. Portland's connects the airport with a major shopping mall, the city center and close-in suburban neighborhoods on the opposite side of town. That line is crossed by the streetcar downtown, connecting Portland State University with the rapidly gentrifying Pearl District—Portland's Old City, if you will—and the effect is a city where a car is optional, useful mainly in reaching outlying nooks or in extra-urban travel. It's a good thing, as parking downtown is limited and expensive to an extent well beyond what we contend with in Knoxville.

Here, we have the advantage of a more compact downtown area, and Hultquist, a lifelong rail buff, envisions a streetcar line or lines that would serve the whole shebang, less malls and suburbs. He is thinking in terms of a Gay Street line, linking the riverfront with the Old City, plus a Clinch Avenue line from Gay through the World's Fair Park to some point in Fort Sanders, cutting south through the UT campus. The track mileage in such a package might not differ significantly from that laid down in Portland.

Why rail and not rubber-tired trolleys such as those in use here today? Hultquist points to basic advantages of streetcars that include capacity (longer units can be employed), and appeal and comfort (buses, he says, aren't that appealing or easy to use). He may be right. It certainly hasn't been the KAT experience that buses are the wave of the present, much less the future.

Buses here have been used, by and large, by those with no clear transportation choices. Of course, the schedules affect that usage as much as anything else. Planners of mass transportation systems have said for 50 years that people with cars at their disposal will not opt for any bus—or rail—transit opportunity that causes them to wait more than 10 or 12 minutes, regardless of all but the most objectionable traffic or parking considerations, for their urban travel needs.

Would an interlocking streetcar grid with cheap parking at its outer reaches cause downtown workers to park and ride here? Who knows? Streetcars would, to be sure, be aesthetically pleasing to us and our guests. Those little, red, rubber-tired trolleys that circulate through the downtown and university area are cute as can be and comfortable, but their ridership is consistently low, despite short delays in the daytime and cheap monthly parking at the Coliseum Garage.

The city fathers, all of whom are new or relatively new to their jobs in city government, are going to have to figure that one out before they commit to a streetcar system and its expense. Just because I would like it and would use it doesn't mean that much. How about you?