In July of 2007, Michael Cudahy took Mayor Tom Barrett, County Executive Scott Walker and Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce President Tim Sheehy on his private jet to Portland, Ore., to behold the future of mass transit.
Portland is the dream city for rail-lovers, with a $3 billion system that includes 52.4 miles of light rail, 14.7 miles of heavy rail, a mile-long aerial tram and an 8-mile trolley loop. Barrett loved it.
“I believe we can replicate the great success [of] Portland here in Milwaukee,” the mayor declared.
In fact, Barrett is starting with a streetcar that runs just two miles, from the Intermodal Station at 433 W. St. Paul Ave. to Burns Square just north of Juneau Park, planned for completion by 2015. It will be powered by overhead wires and run on tracks, just like the good old days. Its one major advance? These modern, low-floor streetcars make it easy to board with wheelchairs, baby strollers and bicycles.
It will cost about $64 million to build – using largely federal dollars – and require some $2 million of local taxes for annual operating costs to supplement the estimated $650,000 per year earned in fares.
That’s a lot of bucks for very little bang. A 15-minute streetcar ride will be a lot slower than the six-minute car trip to cover the same route. But also slower than a 10-minute bike ride. For that matter, you could take the No. 30 bus from Farwell and Ogden to Fourth and Wisconsin in 11 minutes, walk three blocks to St. Paul and still beat the trolley.
Yet much of Milwaukee’s leadership hails the streetcar as a boon to the city. “It will ensure Milwaukee’s position as world-class city,” Cudahy insists. It will be “a catalyst for economic development of Downtown,” declares Bill Bertha, president of US Bank in Wisconsin.
“There isn’t a major American city that isn’t developing streetcars,” says Patrick Curley, Barrett’s chief of staff. “Once you start, people will want it.”
If you build it, they will come. That’s the theory. The facts are another matter.
For all the transit Portland built in the last 20 years, the number of people driving to work has barely changed. The 2 to 3 percent increase in people taking mass transit to work was nearly matched by a decline in carpooling. With 76 miles of rail, Portlanders still drive about the same number of miles per capita as we do in Milwaukee, with no rail.
Nationally, things look even worse. From 1980 to 2005, one study noted, spending by governments on rail transit rose slightly (in real dollars) from $6 billion to $15 billion. Yet the number of Americans taking rail transit to work plummeted, from 2 million to 1 million.
These stats are from the liberal Brookings Institution. You needn’t look to conservatives for a sobering analysis on rail transit.
Rail champions prefer to not talk about its impact on driving, instead arguing it encourages development (and new transit riders) along the rail line. To test this, The Oregonian sent reporters to interview people living close to the Orenco MAX light rail station, an award-winning New Urbanist project 15 miles outside Portland. Hardly anyone took the train to work. This was confirmed by Lewis & Clark College professor Bruce Podobnik, who found that commuters from towns served by Orenco’s station fell as a percentage of all Portland rail transit between 2002 and 2007.
As the Brookings report concluded, “Studies have yet to show that after their construction transit systems have had a significant effect on employment or land use close to stations … [or] greatly exceed the benefits from commercial development that would have occurred elsewhere in the absence of rail construction.”
Another liberal, Peter Rogoff, head of the Federal Transit Administration and an appointee of President Obama, offered a brutal assessment: “Supporters of public transit must be willing to share some simple truths that folks don’t want to hear. … Paint is cheap, rails systems are extremely expensive. … You can entice even die-hard rail riders onto a bus, if you call it a ‘special’ bus and just paint it a different color. … [Then] paint a designated bus lane on the street. … Throw in signal pre-emption, and you can move a lot of people at very little cost compared to rail.”
This is a country that always innovated its way to the future. Yet city after city has been embracing a 19th-century technology, adding some form of transit. The electric trolley was perfected in Richmond, Va., in 1887 and started declining after 1920, when only 40 percent of households had cars.
The future will not be about fixed rail but about electric cars, micro-cars, stackable cars and other innovations that will reduce the auto’s carbon and physical footprint. The only good news about Milwaukee’s streetcar is that it has come so late, leaving this city’s landscape uniquely rail-free for when the real revolution comes.
