At a recent gathering at the Santa Ana Transportation Center, Orange County Transportation Authority board members from Santa Ana and Garden Grove unveiled their plans for a new streetcar system that would connect the two cities.
The $250 million, four-mile route would take travelers through Santa Ana’s downtown, past the government offices and the courthouse, to a new transit center envisioned in Garden Grove. Ultimately, they say, it could prove a catalyst for streetcar development around the county and change the way Orange County residents view transit.
The only problem is that streetcars almost never live up to expectations.
The line would stop at 12 stations at a cost of nearly $6 million a year to operate. But with a fare estimated to be $2 one-way and $5 for an all-day pass, and with an estimated 6,000 riders a day, the project will easily pay for itself, proponents claim. However, the ridership level predicted by the OCTA might not come till 2035, and, as we’ve learned from ARTIC and other optimistically projected public works projects, the reality is likely much different.
Beyond simple financial considerations, however, streetcars simply do not provide mobility improvements over buses, nor do they, by themselves, create the economic development that has been experienced in Portland, Oregon, which has been held up as a model for streetcar projects.
In the Portland example, few mention the massive zoning changes made, nor the hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives to developers along its route. Moreover, streetcars are a fixed system incapable of responding to delays or population shifts. If planners truly see a need for more transportation options, expanding bus service would do so much more cheaply and better get people where they actually want to go.
The decay of inner cities has largely been caused by government’s oppressive regulation, complex historical preservation rules and a general business unfriendliness. Transportation planners seek to remedy this with even more government, in the form of a mode of transportation that had its technological heyday when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still around.
The public wasn’t sold on a 9.3-mile, $1 billion CenterLine light-rail system nearly a decade ago – with good reason. They should be no more amenable now to $250 million for just four-miles of track.