FAQs
What is the objective of the Cincinnati Streetcar?
Simply put, the principal objective of the streetcar is the repopulation of Cincinnati, which enjoyed its highest population ever when our city had over 200 miles of streetcar tracks and people lived near where they worked and shopped. Three American cities have built modern streetcars since 2000, and in those cities the population has increased dramatically in the census tracts served by the streetcar.
People may have other objectives too. Policy makers believe the streetcar will help rebuild the tax base of the city. Some see streetcars as the first step along the road to building a regional system of electric trains. Advocates for persons with disabilities applaud the barrier-free, user-friendly design of modern streetcars. There's something in this for everyone.
What is the specific mechanism by which the streetcar will improve Cincinnati?
Good question!
The biggest barrier to redeveloping the core of our region is the burden of accommodating the automobile. Building two garage parking spaces for a new downtown apartment adds at least $50,000 to the price of the apartment. If some or all of that cost can be eliminated, the unit can be sold for much less. Plus, the average Cincinnatian spends about $8,000 per year on his or her car. If some of this money can be diverted to housing, then the condo buyer or renter would have more disposable income to purchase more or better housing. So the streetcar reduces the cost of the housing while the purchasing power of the resident goes up. In effect, housing becomes more affordable.
But there's more. As people begin living and working along the streetcar route, they will tend to shop and entertain themselves within a smaller footprint. Earned income that now leaks out of the city will instead be spent more locally. Restaurants, grocers and other retailers will spring up to meet this demand. The Cincinnati Streetcar is all about creating a climate to capture more spending in the places where paychecks are earned.
It seems like the City of Cincinnati has been working on this forever. Why so long?
This is the first passenger rail project built in Cincinnati in over a century. During the development process, the route was lengthened. Then in 2009, opponents gathered signatures to force a ballot issue to stop the Cincinnati Streetcar, which was decisively defeated. These things delayed the project. A new Ohio governor took away $52 million from the project in early-2011, and so the route had to be shortened. This required more changes and re-design. The award of $25 million in Federal Urban Circulator funds required an extensive environmental review process, and the State of Ohio had to rule whether the Cincinnati Streetcar would endanger historic districts it passes through (it won’t). The Feds also require a specific process for procuring the vehicles and the rails, 90% of which must be American-made. The truth is, major infrastructure projects take a long time. The best example is the replacement of the I-71/I-75 Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River. First proposed in 2000, the new structure won’t be operating until 2020 or later.
How much will the streetcar increase my taxes?
Not a penny! The City of Cincinnati has pledged that the Cincinnati Streetcar will not require a tax increase. In fact, by repopulating and increasing the tax base of Cincinnati, the streetcar is a defense against all of us paying more taxes. None of the three cities that operate modern streetcars has ever had to adopt a general tax to pay for them even as they expanded their streetcar systems.
Ok, just give me the basics on the Cincinnati Streetcar’s operation.
Five electrically-powered streetcars, each with a capacity of 125 to 150 people, will initially operate along a 3.1 mile track between Fountain Square and Findlay Market. There will be sixteen stops, and the trip will take about 12-13 minutes from end to end. The streetcar will “dwell” at each stop for about twenty seconds to board and de-board passengers. The streetcars will also “lay-over” at both ends to the line for a few minutes on each trip.
The streetcar will operate from 6:00 A.M until 10:00 P.M. weekdays and until Midnight on weekends. At peak commuting times and at lunch, a streetcar will arrive every ten minutes. During less busy times, streetcars will arrive every 15 to 20 minutes, and they will run every fifteen minutes on weekends.
My friend told me no one will ever ride it. Why shouldn’t I believe them?
Your friend is wrong. The three modern streetcar systems operating in the United States today are all expanding – adding stops, lengthening the route, and in one case, building another streetcar line in a different part of town. None of this would be happening if no one were using these systems.
When will the streetcar get to Uptown?
The City of Cincinnati will soon commence an “Alternatives Analysis” of the streetcar’s connection to, and circulation through, the area near the University of Cincinnati known as Uptown. The Alternatives Analysis will make the streetcar eligible for Federal funds to extend the tracks from Findlay Market to the Zoo and perhaps other destinations in Uptown. Construction of the Uptown Streetcar could commence before the Downtown Streetcar’s construction is finished. Everyone wants the streetcar to go to Uptown, and it will happen sooner rather than later.
Why aren’t we building the streetcar to Covington and Newport?
First we need to get the Cincinnati Streetcar project underway, but much of the infrastructure on the Ohio riverfront is already designed to accommodate streetcars and light rail trains.
Tell me again how we're paying for this.
Sure. About $25 million of the $95 million cost of the project (not including the cost of moving utilities) is paid by the Federal government, which has a long history of backing urban rail projects in other cities. In fact, Cincinnati is one of the largest metros never to have received any of these funds until they were awarded last year. Cincinnatians have been paying Federal taxes for many years to build streetcar and light rail systems in other U.S. cities. Now it's our turn.
Duke Energy and some private gifts have amounted to about $7 million, and about $4 million came via the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments.
The City of Cincinnati will also issue $64 million in bonds for the project. The Cincinnati City Charter requires that 0.15% of the city's Earnings Tax be spent on improvements costing at least $10,000 and having a useful life of five years. None of this money can be spent on police, fire or other salaries. The city is also issuing bonds backed by the expected increase in property tax revenues along the streetcar line. The funds raised by the bonds must be spent in the area where the increased property taxes are realized and cannot be spent elsewhere in the city. Finally, the city is issuing bonds backed by payments made to Cincinnati by the City of Blue Ash, which is purchasing the Blue Ash Airport from the city. It seems reasonable to reinvest the profits from a no-longer-needed transportation investment in one that has good prospects for improving the wealth of our city.
Why can't we just decorate a bus and paint a stripe down the street to designate the streetcar route instead of spending $100 million?
I like the idea of streetcars in Cincinnati, but I don't live in Downtown, OTR or Uptown. How does this benefit my family?
Phase One of the Cincinnati Streetcar passes through our region's largest employment center, and it will soon be extended to our region's second largest employment center in Uptown. Extensions have been mapped to Mt. Auburn, Corryville, Avondale, Price Hill, Northside, Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, and East End.Starting the line through the Central Business District is critical. A huge percentage of the tax revenue of the City of Cincinnati is generated there. This is what pays for much of the cost of parks, street maintenance and police in College Hill, Westwood, Mt. Washington and other Cincinnati neighborhoods. North of downtown, the streetcar travels diagonally thorough Over-the-Rhine, one of the largest historic districts in the nation with plenty of historic buildings and some large parcels of land. OTR once housed 35,000 people and could again.
Look at it this way: when President Eisenhower committed our nation to the fifty-year task of building the 47,000-mile Interstate Highway System, someone had to decide where the first mile would be built.
I'm disabled. How can I ride the streetcar?
Very easily. The streetcar has saucer-sized buttons along its exterior and interior walls. If you are in a wheelchair or motorized scooter, or pushing a stroller or pulling a grocery cart, you simply push the button when the streetcar stops, and a ramp quickly extends to the curb for level boarding. If the rider is blind, the streetcar operator can signal for the ramp to ease access to or from the streetcar. In other cities, persons with disabilities choose to live independently along the light rail and streetcar lines.
Is Charlie Winburn right when he says it would be better to run a diesel bus instead?
Charlie Winburn is an important leader in our community, but he was badly misinformed when he devised his plan for a rubber-tired trolley to serve Downtown, Over-the-Rhine and Uptown.First, ridership: Mr. Winburn projects that his trolleys will attract 5,000 riders per day. Yet the Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky's Southbank Shuttle, a similar rubber-tired trolley operating for almost fifteen years in the densest parts of downtown Kentucky and Ohio, carries about 1,300 riders per day, while Louisville's trolleys attract only 1,100 passengers per day.
For the past decade, bus ridership has been generally flat in almost all but America's smallest cities. On the other hand, new light rail lines have achieved first-year ridership that wasn't expected for ten or fifteen years. Where it's available, consumers see rail as car-competitive. It's just the way it is.
Second, cost: Assuming the trolleys run fifteen hours per day, Mr. Winburn figures they can be operated for about $40 per hour. However, Louisville operates similar vehicles at a cost of $75 per hour for labor, maintenance and fuel. Each of TANK's Southbank Shuttle buses costs $70 per hour to operate. It costs TANK $6.05 per passenger trip to operate the Southbank Shuttle over its 5.9 mile route, but Mr. Winburn claims his system of bus trolleys can transport passengers on a route connecting Downtown through Uptown, about six miles round-trip by the shortest route, for around $1.42 per passenger trip.
Third, environmental impact and sustainability: Mr. Winburn's plan promises "sustainable and green" technology. Regrettably, what he proposes is a fleet of diesel-powered trucks gussied-up as streetcars. As many know, diesel-powered engines are a main source of micro-particulates, the kind of pollution that gets deep into the lungs and causes all sorts of health problems. Cincinnati is already our nation's ninth-most polluted city in terms of micro-particulate pollution. You know what is really sustainable? Electric rail transit. No American electric rail system that has opened since the end of World War II has ever gone out of business. Fake trolleys come and go whenever some money appears or finally runs out.
Finally, economic development: If buses promoted economic development, then we'd see cranes all over Cincinnati because we have lots of buses. Mr. Winburn likes the idea that a bus route can be easily changed or eliminated. But who would ever make a long-term investment in one of our neighborhoods because of a "here today, gone tomorrow" policy of infrastructure development? Serious critics of rail transit no longer dispute that cities which have invested in modern streetcar systems are seeing significant repopulation and economic development along the lines. Fixed routes with permanent tracks drive investment, create jobs, reduce pollution and assist in not only transporting a workforce but in retaining the young workers who are among our best assets for the future. Unfortunately, Mr. Winburn's trolley can deliver none of those benefits. A streetcar system is a substantial investment, but it will deliver even greater returns - an estimated $14 in new economic development for every dollar invested. Long-term, the Cincinnati Streetcar will be the foundation for a revitalized city-wide transit network, one of the best hopes for revitalizing our neighborhoods. Just a few decades ago, Cincinnati had 50% more people and thriving neighborhood business districts. That was when we had an efficient, customer-friendly and extensive system of electric streetcars operating throughout the city. We can be that city again. Cincinnati's competitor cities, almost fifty of them across the nation, are considering new electric streetcars.
The great cities of the 21st century - and we want our hometown to be one of those - will have modern, rail-based transit systems. Let's hope that Mr. Winburn will join efforts to move toward that future, but the bottom line is simple: Trains will get us there. Bus trolleys won't.
I hear claims about a 15 to 1 economic impact and a 2.75 to 1 Benefit/Cost Ratio. What's the difference?
Both answers are correct, but they answer different questions. Economists project that the Cincinnati Streetcar will cause new Downtown/OTR development worth $1.5 billion, or 15 times the cost of the streetcar. But that is simply a comparison of the cost of the streetcar to the cost of the buildings that are likely to be erected on account of its presence. A more sophisticated measure is a Benefit/Cost Analysis (a “BCA”). In a BCA, all costs and benefits are discounted to their Present Value because we’ll be investing $102 million up-front and about $2.3 million each year to operate the streetcar, but the benefits won’t happen all at once. So a new building that goes up in 2018 costing $10 million might be “worth” only half that much to us today. Another way to look at this is … would you take $5 today instead of waiting ten years to collect $10? Most people would. Same with the improvements in air-quality, congestion reduction and low-income mobility. They will be substantial, but they will occur over time. A true BCA looks at the entire stream of costs – the cost to build the streetcar in the early years plus the ongoing cost to operate it -- and then compares those costs to the benefits achieved in each year of its life. Those benefits are summed up year-by-year and “discounted” by a percentage equal to the cost of government funds, in this case, 4%. So a dollar’s worth of benefit that doesn’t actually happen until a year from now is worth only $0.96 in terms of its Present Value. Same with the operating costs – the costs of operating the streetcar five years from now are discounted back to the present. When this laborious summation of benefits and costs was tabulated by the economists studying the project, the result was a Benefit-Cost Ratio of 2.75 to 1. This is an astonishing finding. It’s as if you could deposit $1.00 in the bank when it opens for business tomorrow morning and then return at Noon to withdraw all your funds, finding that they had suddenly grown to $2.75. Who wouldn’t make an investment like that?Aren't the overhead wires ugly?
Modern streetcars and light rail use much smaller wires than those used by Nineteenth Century streetcar systems. And now there is usually only one wire, not two like we used to have in Cincinnati. Along tree-lined streets, the wires get lost in the foliage. See for yourself: look at the high-resolution photos of the overhead wires in the Portland Streetcar album under the “PICS” tab.
Why doesn't the streetcar use Vine Street through the center of Downtown and OTR?
Because Vine Street is a two-way street through Over-the-Rhine, it is problematic for fixed guideway transit. Our buses even get stuck in traffic there. There are good reasons for using Main and Walnut through downtown. For one thing, the Main and Walnut bridges over Fort Washington Way were designed to carry the weight of rail vehicles passing over them. If the streetcar route used Vine, Race or Elm to get to The Banks, then I-71 would have to be closed and those bridges rebuilt at a cost of $4 million each. Also, Cincinnati’s regional transit system is centered on Government Square along Fifth Street between Main and Walnut, so transfers between streetcars and buses can take place easily there. Finally, the center of downtown office employment is also near Government Square, and downtown office workers are the best candidates to repopulate Downtown and Over-the-Rhine. That process will happen faster and better if they can rely on the streetcar as a means of getting to and from work, redirecting the money they would have spent on cars for more and better housing near where they work.How do you pay to use the streetcar?
Fare policy has not been finalized, but it is a very important aspect in the design of the streetcar system. Typically you would pay at an onboard ticket machine, like the ones pictured here, after you board the streetcar. The ticket would likely be time-stamped and good for a couple of hours of streetcar-riding. Someday you may be able to buy your ticket at a “smart” parking meter along the streetcar route before boarding. Even better, you may be able to pay to park your car and acquire your streetcar pass in one transaction, perhaps getting a discounted price for each. You may also be able to purchase a monthly or annual pass to ride the streetcar
I bought a bike to ride to work. What's in it for me?
A lot. You can take your bike right on the streetcar. Once the streetcar gets built up the hill to Uptown, it will be a welcome development for cyclists.
Why doesn't the Cincinnati Streetcar run past our Convention Center?
We're building this for Cincinnatians who want to live their lives around the streetcar, not just for people from other cities who visit our city only occasionally. Conventioneers have plenty of spare time to walk a few blocks to the streetcar, perhaps even buying something along the way. The extendable ramp that allows disabled passengers to board in seconds also makes it easier to roll your luggage on or off the streetcar, as these travelers are about to do.
Won't the streetcar block traffic?
Streetcars hold up traffic less than buses do. Since everyone must enter one-at-a-time through a single door at the front of the bus, the boarding process is inherently slow, and it backs up cars behind the bus. Modern streetcars have six sets of doors – three on each side – and four of them are barrier-free, double doors so lots of people can board simultaneously. Take a few minutes to watch how easily people board the Portland Streetcar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL7QEQuRqq0
Won't the burning of coal to provide electricity to operate the streetcar simply add to our climate problems?
This question was studied extensively by Mayor Mark Mallory's Climate Change Initiative Task Force. For every ton of CO2 that is produced by burning coal to power the streetcar, two tons of CO2 aren't produced by autos that would otherwise be carrying streetcar passengers. So in terms of its transportation mission, the streetcar cuts the production of CO2 by half. But the real gains are achieved on account of new settlement patterns that are likely to develop as a result of the streetcar's presence. It is a known fact that persons living in dense, walkable communities produce much less CO2 because of the way their homes are built and operated, because they shop more locally, and because they are more likely to work near where they live. When those assumptions were plugged into the model and compared to typical suburban development patterns, the Cincinnati Streetcar reduced CO2 emissions many times over when compared to the emissions caused by the burning of coal to power it. And in any case, the Cincinnati Streetcar is not a heavy consumer of electric power.
How far apart will the stops be?
Between 800 and 1,100 feet, or two to three blocks apart in dense areas of Downtown and Over-the-Rhine. Some stops may be "call stops" where you signal the streetcar driver to let you off, like on a bus. The stops will likely be sponsored by businesses and have electronic notification of the arrival times of the next two or three streetcars. You may also be able to get streetcar arrival times on your Blackberry or iPhone.
