Streetcars and the Myth of the Easy Trip

Every American transit agency keeps two sets of books. The first is the book of headline trips — the airport runs, the football-game shuttles, the rare event the local paper writes a feature about. The second is the book of thirty-minute trips, which is to say the daily, dull, ten-thousand-times-repeated movements of an actual city. The first set of books is what gets photographed. The second set of books is what decides whether anyone takes the bus.

I have lived in cities with brand-new light rail that nobody rides, and I have lived in cities with thirty-year-old buses that move a quarter-million people a day. The variable is almost never the vehicle. The variable is whether the thirty-minute trip works.

A boring definition

A "thirty-minute trip" is what a planner means when they say "isochrone." Pick a point in a city — say, a particular intersection in West Oakland. Now draw a polygon around every place a person could reach from that point in thirty minutes, using only the transit system and their own two feet. The size and shape of that polygon, more than anything else, is the answer to the question of whether transit is useful in that part of the city.

The polygon for a person at 14th and Mandela, in West Oakland, in 2024, is about eleven square miles — enough to reach downtown, Emeryville, a sliver of Berkeley, and most of the lower flatlands. The polygon for the same intersection in 1948, before the freeway came through and before the streetcar lines were torn up, was almost certainly larger. We have a lot of data about a lot of things. We do not have a lot of data about that.

The vehicle is almost never the variable. The variable is whether the thirty-minute trip works.

What the streetcar got right

I am not, for the record, one of those people who thinks the streetcar was killed by a General Motors conspiracy. The streetcar was killed, mostly, by the car — by the fact that the car was, for forty years, a genuinely better technology for a wealthy American household than the streetcar was. You can lament that and still concede it. The streetcar lost on the merits, for a particular kind of buyer, in a particular era.

But what the streetcar got right — and what the modern American bus system, with a few honorable exceptions, has spent eighty years getting wrong — was frequency. A streetcar line in 1925 Pittsburgh ran every four to six minutes from before dawn until after midnight.¹ You did not consult a schedule. You walked to the corner. If transit is going to compete with the car for anything but the airport run, that is the bar. Every six minutes. From dawn until late.

The best transit systems on the continent today — Vancouver’s SkyTrain feeder buses, Toronto’s 504 King streetcar, the better routes in Mexico City — are good for exactly this reason. The bad ones, which is most of them, are bad for exactly the opposite reason. A thirty-minute headway is a polite way of telling people not to ride.

Three cities to watch

I am watching three American cities very closely on this. Minneapolis, which has quietly built the best mid-sized bus network in the country, mostly by taking frequency seriously and refusing to build any new rail until ridership justified it. Indianapolis, which surprised everyone by passing a referendum on a real bus-rapid-transit network and then — the harder part — actually building it on time. And Cincinnati, whose downtown streetcar is an honest cautionary tale about what happens when you fund the vehicle and not the operations.

The Cincinnati streetcar opened in 2016 with no dedicated lane, no transit-signal priority, and a headway that started at twelve minutes and drifted, over the next few years, to twenty. It is a charming object that almost nobody uses for an actual trip. That is what happens when the photograph is the point.

The cities that win the next decade are not going to be the ones with the most photogenic transit. They are going to be the ones that quietly, unglamorously, get the thirty-minute polygon to grow. That is the work. The streetcar is a beautiful object. The polygon is the city.