Tampa Streetcar: The fare to go nowhere?

The Tampa TECO streetcar is in trouble.  A recent story in the Tampa Tribune describes a touristy, toy streetcar in a ridership death spiral.  HART, which operates the TECO Trolley, expects ridership to drop by 80,000 passengers for a fiscal 2013 total of just 330,000.  If those numbers bear out, that is a 50% drop from 2010.  From Ted Jackovics’ story we learn: Possible reasons ridership is...

A Tale of Two Cities’ Streetcars

Philadelphia and San Francisco are rarely compared to one another.  One is America’s founding city, the other America’s European city.  One is east, the other west.  The city by the bay is known for its mild winters and cold summers and the City of Brotherly Love isn’t.  But there are some interesting similarities, and unfortunate differences, in the streetcar lines both cities operate the...

The measure of the scale

The book Transit Maps of the World by Mark Ovenden gives a splendid overview of how metro/subway maps evolved to chuck the twists and turns of roads and rivers and instead just show a schematic of how stations relate to one another.  The straight lines and 45-degree angles of transit maps have become standard in metros from Moscow, to London, to Atlanta, and even some bus system maps (here).  Not-to-scale...

The High Cost of “Major Service Change”

The headline on Phillip Matier’s and Andrew Ross’s story just sounded bad:  “BART spending $800K to define three words.”  It is easy to imagine the public saying “That’s more than 250,000 per word,” or “I’d have done it for half that.”  In fact, commenters on the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle story had lots of other three-word proposals like “Clean the Trains,”...

A Distinction Subtle and Broad

A SEPTA maintenance streetcar is followed by a passenger streetcar in west Philadelphia. Photo by Bill Mohnahan of Friends of the Philadelphia Trolleys. It is one of the great ironies of American life that suburban sprawl—a low-density pattern of development that is difficult to serve with public transit—was created by public transit.  Frank J. Sprague created the first successful electric...