Lack of City Council commitment to streetcar?

In July of 2008 the City Council of Fort Worth decided that a modern streetcar system might be beneficial to the rapidly growing city, a solution was needed to urban intra-city mass transportation and plans went into the pipeline, but two years on little progress has been made, it seems instead that the city council lacks the commitment to carry out the necessary work to see a streetcar system come to fruition.

In June of 2008 Fort Worth news media reported that a proposal was working its way through the machinery of the City Council, the proposal was that Fort Worth should redevelop its streetcar system, which it gave up in favor of busses in the late 20^th century.

Like many cities around the world and the US, Fort Worth has come to regret the decision to close its streetcar system. The city’s busses are little used and inefficient, while the city’s population has grown to such an extent that major road works are needed and massive expansion of the road network will be essential in the next few years to prevent a traffic nightmare.

The inner city of Fort Worth has undergone considerable reinvestment, the proposal points out, and in order to attract young professionals back to the central areas of the city a viable mass transit plan must be drawn up that could integrate well with the successful commuter rail systems of the TRE and SW2NE.

That proposal eventually became something more solid in July of 2008 when a committee was assembled to study the feasibility of the proposal and oversee planning and design. The plan was for a single lane of the current roadways in downtown Fort Worth to be rebuilt to enable cars and streetcars to use the road. The streetcar would carry onboard a computer system that would automatically change the traffic lights as it approached, enabling it to only stop at stations, which would be spaced every half to a quarter mile.

Initially, the streetcar will be implemented in the central business district and then expand outwards through the inner city with an eventual 13 mile system connecting Downtown, the Cultural District, the Medical District,  Will Rogers, Texas Wesleyan University,  Texas Christian University,  the Stockyards and Meacham Airport.

The total cost of the project after fact-finding trips had been done to cities like Portland, Oregon and Tacoma, Washington, and feasibility studies had been completed, was touted at $250 million, which would amount to the construction, design, associated utilities, construction of streetcars and a maintenance facility to run them. It’s a huge sum of money that will require the full commitment of the city council if the massive task of constructing a streetcar system is to be done properly.

So far, this commitment seems to be lacking.

“We have gotten behind on the road projects that voters approved in the 2004 bond vote,” said council member Danny Scarth to Forth Worth Weekly, a Fort Worth news provider. “We don’t want to put streetcars ahead of that.”

He was speaking in relation to the City Council reallocation of money that is meant to be spent on the planning of the streetcar system. In 2009, the North Central Texas Council of Governments were given a $1.6 million federal grant to contract an engineering firm to carry out a comprehensive study of the streetcar system, such as routing and the funding needed.

One month ago, Fort Worth news media reported that some City Council members were trying to get that money diverted to focus on fixing the Tower 55 freight train trouble, where freight trains are causing transportation problems. The North Central Texas Council of Governments resisted and instead half the money was spent on the streetcar feasibility study, with the engineering firm being told to reduce the extent of its study.

Fort Worth news media recently revealed that in 2009 Dallas and Fort Worth had worked together in trying to secure federal grants to improve mass transit. Dallas was ultimately awarded their money from the Transport Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant, while Fort Worth wasn’t, because in the request the city included an appeal for $17 million to fund a road project that had no relation to the streetcar system.

Clearly, there are a number of transport issues that need resolution, the city has grown rapidly in recent years and traffic is increasing along with public transport use. However, the city has to be fully committed to the project if they go ahead with it or it will create a disastrous situation for the city.

Once construction starts and cones are put up and barriers erected around construction sites on the roads, the traffic situation is going to be much worse for the duration of the project. And if the project becomes stalled by funding issues or legal disputes between contractors, the city could end up with a dead project and chaotic roads downtown.

The City Council must have a clear and transparent plan for how the streetcar system will be built and how associated disruption will be resolved, as well as how long it will take, in order for the city to plan ahead and anticipate the needs of its mass transit system.

If the progress so far is anything to go by, it seems the city has not yet reached that point.