I’m particularly interested in this remark you made:

“Sue/”Cassie”, “Jeff”/”Ethan”/”Heather”,
Sock Puppets won’t be tolerated on this website. Use an anonymous name if you so choose, but don’t change names nor pretend to have expertise you don’t have. If this continues I’ll simply change your commenter name.”

Do comments from these s/n’s come from the same IP, or are there other technical indicators that they are the same people? They surely seem to be based on their content, but if they definitely are the same person, this information should be disseminated more widely.

I’ll be glad to post a rendering of the alignments as time permits. I have been overwhelmed by the response and support for a Wisconsin Avenue streetcar at this point, however.

And Tom, your ideas about handling left turns sound intriguing, but a visual would really help me see how it might be implemented. I don’t think you can post drawings here, but perhaps posting on the Facebook page and adding a link would handle that.
Thanks, Michael.

I threw it out in the context of considering what, if any, additional riders a street car might generate over the existing bus service but it was purely a guess.

And Michael raises some valid questions about how to squeeze a streetcar line onto Wisconsin Avenue as well as about the impact of a line on pedestrians.

But I would remember that a streetcar does not necessarily have to have a dedicated right of way for the entire route – it really just needs its own space where the stops are.

I mentioned this in passing in my original post but Wisconsin Avenue badly needs to better manage left hand turn movements.

What if you eliminated a lane of curbside parking in the corridor and the streetcar stops were in that added center lane space?

If you added the stops at intersections with left hand turn signals the streetcar could proceed straight (or alternately get signal priority) and re-enter a travel lane there.

So the streetcar would not have a dedicated lane but by creating a center turn lane the flow of traffic in the left hand thru lane would dramatically improve because cars would not be queuing up at every single intersection.

If this could be engineered drivers would benefit as well as transit users except at those intersections where cars queuing to make a left hand turn would get stuck behind a street car stopped to let passengers on and off. But since there are currently no queue lanes anyhow I would not consider that a loss compared to the status quo.

But the big hiccup with this is you could not have northbound and southbound stops in the same place and you would have to put stops on opposite sides of an intersection which would presumably cost more money.

And I agree that losing a curbside parking lane is bad for pedestrians but that lane is already lost during rush hour so that is a sacrifice we already make at least part of the time.

Finally with regards to where the streetcars would turn around hopefully it will be somewhere north of Bethesda but if it is in Friendship Heights WMATA’s Western Bus Garage was originally a streetcar garage and there is no reason it could not be again.

The Skoda streetcars are 8 feet wide. Each lane on Wisconsin is 10 feet wide. This gives you 4 feet. You could reduce the width of the sidewalks by one foot in each direction where the stations/platforms are and have 6 foot wide platforms. This should be sufficient.

Michael, I also think I noted above that I would reduce the speed of vehicles from 30 mph to 25 miles per hour between Calvert to Fessenden and add new trees on the sidewalks to create a barrier between pedestrians and vehicles. Reducing the speed to 25 mph would reduce the travel time differences between transit and private automobiles, thereby making transit relatively more competitive.

Second, where do you get the figure of 10,000 more riders per day? If Sue/Cassie and Ethan/Heather/Michael(?) insist on rigorous econometric analysis of this investment, I certainly think you should be obliged to do the same and not make up numbers.

I would have a curbside alignment from Calvert to M Street/K Street. Yes, this would eliminate curbside parking but the improvement in mobility would still be significant. Each block has approximately 10 curbside spots. Assuming (this is just an estimate) that each car has 1.2 passengers per vehicle, this is 12 passengers for each block of curbside parking. The Skoda streetcars the District is purchasing can accomodate 157 passengers for each streetcar. I’d glad take the 157 passengers over the one block of curbside parking. Currently, a lot of people avoid going to Georgetown in the evenings and on the weekends because they expect parking to be scarce. An improved transit option that connects the metro stations in Tenley and Friendship Heights with the Minnesota Ave – Georgetown streetcar line will make Georgetown and Glover Park more accessible to residents and tourists throughout our region.

I assumed that rush hour travel lanes would be reduced with this configuration since currently there with three rush hour travel lanes for much of this area. With Ben’s configuration, there are only two travel lanes available, so obviously, there aren’t three travel lanes during rush hour.

Ben assumed the elimination of curbside parking, and I noted that there is a reduction in pedestrian safety with the elimination of curbside parking, as pedestrians have lost the buffer of parked cars between the sidewalk and the traffic. See, for example, http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=4764, where Eric Fidler discusses that effect.

As to the impact on local businesses, that is based largely on the elimination of curbside parking, which inconveniences customers and affects the ability of many small businesses to get deliveries.

I didn’t address a major omission in Ben’s description. For the area with dedicated streetcar lanes in the center of Wisconsin Avenue, Ben did not provide for the space in the median for passengers to safely wait to board the streetcar and to safely wait to cross the street or the tracks after leaving the streetcar. I suspect this is necessary. Adding a passenger station or waiting area in the median would reduce the number of travel lanes on Wisconsin Avenue to one travel lane at each streetcar stop.

You have provided a solution to the lack of a plan and lack of space for a turn-around at Western Avenue by proposing that the line be extended to NIH, so now Montgomery County will deal with that issue.

Of course, all the advantages of streetcars hinge on the assumption that there are a large number of people (10,000 more rides per day) who are not willing to sit on the Wisconsin Avenue buses and would not sit on the Wisconsin Avenue buses even if they introduced more buses and better equipment, but would ride standing on a crowded streetcar. Quite frankly, I doubt that is the case. Before we consider spending $190 million based on that assumption, many DC taxpayers would want to see strong evidence that there would be that increase in riders and that it would last beyond the novelty stage.

Of course, obviously, the configuration Ben described doesn’t apply to Georgetown, the focus of this blog, and perhaps you can shed some light on a configuration in Georgetown.