Orphan Road

Vulcan welcomes the Streetcar! I guess they'd better. After all, they paid for the darn thing.

Meanwhile, the Times puts the Streetcar in the context of the last South Lake Union streetcar, built in 1890. Reading the article, a lightbulb finally went off in my head about why this thing, which I've been ambivalent about and which seems at first glance like an overpriced toy, actually matters:

The streetcar is meant to attract tourists, serve the cancer center, and help a new wave of office workers run errands downtown. For some, it will be a connection to express commuter buses or future regional light rail, at Westlake Center. Tracks run along the edge of Lake Union Park, which is being expanded and rebuilt with the idea that it will become a popular destination.

When New York first conceived of a subway -- also around 1890, as it happens -- it was because downtown needed to grow. You had lower Manhattan teeming with people, but farms and estates just a mile or two to the North. Why? There was no practical way to get up there and back in a reasonable amount of time. The Subway was, on a micro-level, the inner-city equivalent of the Trans-Continental Railway: it opened the frontier (i.e. Midtown Manhattan) to development.

While the parallels are obviously inexact, it seems that we're seeing a similar trend here in Seattle 100 years later. Downtown is finally growing too big to walk from one end to the other in a reasonable amount of time. The streetcar opens the frontier.

Of course, streetcars still get stuck in traffic. But I don't honestly see any other option for the city right now. People feel burned after the monorail, and it's going to be a long time before we see another form of rapid transit to connect downtown and its immediately adjoining neighborhoods (Ballard, Queen Anne, West Seattle, etc.).

Ripping up Eastlake Avenue and other streets and removing parking spaces to extend the tracks up to the U. District will be controversial and difficult. But it may also be our only option. There are underutilized streets in the grid, and a well-designed streeetcar, with its own lanes and traffic signal priority, could actually work out pretty well for us.