A very familiar streetcar story in Seattle
The South Lake Union Streetcar in a publicity shot from the City of Seattle.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
On a recent weekday I rode around on the South Lake Union Streetcar, hoping to catch the vibe as city leaders debate whether to expand the now 16-year-old trolley system through downtown.
When I got on near Fred Hutch, there was no vibe to be caught. I was the only one on the train besides the driver.
Incredibly this solitude lasted the entire ambling run, 1.3 miles along Lake Union and then south through what has been one of America’s hottest neighborhoods, the land of Amazon.
I kept riding, to see if anything would happen. After turning around and heading back north, the train picked up a man taking cellphone footage of his trip. He said he was visiting from Sri Lanka. We enjoyed our circuit back through Amazon’s campus, past the Cricket building with the famed Banana Stand, and down again to the lake.
The setting is nearly 3,000 miles from Atlanta. But what’s going on with Seattle’s South Lake Union Streetcar seems uncannily similar to the story of the Atlanta Streetcar. Not only is the Lake Union line perennially empty (despite riding through one of Seattle’s densest districts), but some city officials want to double-down on their folly by adding a 1.3-mile extension at a cost of $410 million.
Earlier this year, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat did the Bill Torpy-esque thing of simply riding the South Lake Union Streetcar for an absurdity check.
South Lake Union Streetcar ridership peaked in 2013, at about 2,000 riders a day. It dropped by a third prior to the pandemic, then cratered and hasn’t much recovered. It’s now averaging about 500 riders a day — less in winter and more in summer — on trains running 15 hours per day.
The streetcar costs $12,000 per day on average to operate and maintain — more than $20 per rider at the current pace.
One could argue that the Atlanta Streetcar is an even worse folly. MARTA reported in 2022 that the Atlanta Streetcar operates at a jaw-dropping $48.60 per rider. And unlike Atlanta’s planned 2.4-mile Streetcar East Extension (which will bring the Atlanta Streetcar onto the Beltline), the Seattle extension has actually qualified for federal funds.
Politics for the Seattle project have gotten rough though. Apparently with the backing of large property owners, the city’s mayor and its transportation director still talk up the extension. But other elected officials — and even transit advocates — are expressing doubts about keeping the original segment open.
In October, Ross Bleakley of the respected Seattle Transit Blog argued for a creative solution: Pull up the rails and replace them with bike lanes.
If the streetcar is removed, the tracks can be removed or paved over. That way the two-way bike lanes can continue around the southern part of the lake and connect to the bike lanes on Westlake. Thus riders of all ages would have a safe and straightforward way around the lake.
There’s a case to be made, in both Atlanta and Seattle, that doubling-down on a streetcar that most locals view as a boondoggle undermines support for real transit solutions. Seattle voters overwhelmingly approved a $1.55 billion property tax hike for transportation improvements. But that referendum specifically excluded the streetcar extension, and political leaders rejected calls for a larger increase, which would have included more money for transit.
Less than a tenth of the levy is earmarked for “transit corridors and connections” – none of it for new projects. That’s just below the amount dedicated to “pedestrian safety” ($193 million) and just above the amount for “bicycle safety.”
Like a handful of other forward-looking communities, Seattle seems to be coming around to the view that mobility needs to be thought of more broadly in the 21st century.
