According to a spokesperson for the Red Rose Transit Authority, the trolley bus carries 2,900 passengers a month. That comes to 96 daily and, based on the 12 hour daily schedule, an average of about 8 an hour.

Businesses normally expand and upgrade when there is strong demand for their product and services.

Does it seem logical to spend $14 million of taxpayer money to bring back trolley cars and to subsidize the service for upwards of $300,000 a year when there is so little indication of demand?

At the present ridership rate of 34,800 per year, $300,000 annually would subsidize each ride by over $8!!!

Wouldn’t it make business sense to first publicize the bus trolley loop and provide it free or for fifty cents instead of the current $1.35 to determine how much demand exists?

The September 9th Sunday News ran a long article extolling the virtues of bringing trolley cars (they call them “street cars”) back to Lancaster. The article is available at http://local.lancasteronline.com/4/209236.

NewsLanc comments item by item and endeavors to provide the missing balance:

1) The formation of the Lancaster Street Car Co., a Pennsylvania nonprofit corporation, is recognition that no “for profit” company would be willing to invest in the trolley system.

2) How does a trolley “stitch the city together” any better than a bus? If “fifty-cent fares” is the key, we could simply subsidize loop buses.

3) “The 2.6-mile loop would cost an estimated $14.1 million.” Guess who will pay the $14.1 million. If you say we taxpayers, you got it!

4) The idea is that it would be ‘financially sustainable.’ But the published projections by the sponsors indicate an annual loss of about $300,000. Research trumps wishes. So who gets to pay the $300,000 deficit that is likely to soar? Again, taxpayers.

5) But wait. “…backers will certainly look for philanthropic dollars…” More wishes.

6) “…backers will chase advertising dollars…” But buses also run advertisements yet Red Rose Transit System requires taxpayer subsidy.

7) “…tax exempt status to provide donors with tax advantages and help solidify corporate partners…” Tax exempt status means indirect tax payer subsidy.

“…fine tune the route and design of the proposed system, with an eye on minimizing traffic disruptions.” They acknowledge that running trolleys down the street and stopping every time someone wants to get on or off disrupts traffic.

9) “Streetcars would operate at about 10-minutes intervals around a north-south loop along Queen and Prince streets, from the city Amtrak station to Southern Market Center at South Queen and Vine Streets.” These main streets are already congested several hours each day.

10) “There are, backers acknowledge, a lot of legitimate concerns about the project. Traffic is a major worry…[they] may in fact reduce traffic volume, if people park at the edges of the city and use the trolley to get around town.” The Amtrak station is the “edge of the city?” And even if parking garages are finally built at the station, would commuters be willing to park cars there and have to wait for a trolley rather than park downtown?

11) “Conventioneers and visitors … might want to visit Clipper Magazine Stadium or go antiquing in the 300 block of North Queen Street.” Conventioneers will come to Lancaster to watch our local baseball team? Shoppers won’t take a loop bus or walk a couple of short blocks to visit antique stores?

12) “It can be built quickly, inexpensively, right into the street to get around without a car more easily.” It requires $14.3 million minimum to create the infrastructure for the trolley line. It costs nothing towards added infrastructure to simply run a distinctively painted loop bus.

13) “This is not some harebrained idea,” said Jack Howell of the Lancaster Alliance. Seems so to us!

9/9/07

By Robert E. Field

My son Richard and I have been conducting business in Eastern Europe over the past 15 years. As such, I have had considerable experience with trolley cars. In fact, we have had to design entry ways in a manner to minimize the lethal risk that trolleys engender.

They do run silently. And they cannot be quickly stopped. Pedestrian fatalities take place each year. At least in Eastern Europe people have been admonished by parents about the danger since earliest childhood.

The initial route is to be between the Amtrak Station and downtown. How would you like your children or grandchildren to live on a city street with a trolley car that cannot be readily heard and cannot be quickly stopped?

I am old enough to recall riding trolleys in Philadelphia during my youth. There are good reasons why street cars were phased out by trackless electrical vehicles and finally by busses. Riding behind a trolley is comparable to riding behind a school bus. They impede traffic. They cannot pull over to pick up pedestrians, let alone the physically challenged. And if they run along curb side, they eliminate vital on street parking.

Of course when built in dedicated lanes in the center of broad boulevards (six to eight lanes including the center trolley lanes and platforms) street cars work very well. We have no boulevards in Lancaster.

I went to school at Cal Berkeley and love to visit San Francisco and ride on the cable cars. But they are something very unique and they can stop quickly under most circumstances since the brakes grab onto a cable. (Those of us who hung on from the sides learned to anticipate this.) And I have visited the New Orleans waterfront and seen the street car named Desire. If it wasn’t the object of the play and the movie, it probably would not be running now. It does serve the river front.

I suspect that a slow moving trolley on flat ground on a broad avenue along a waterfront in a town with many tourists attractions might be worthwhile. But that is hardly Lancaster. Our downtown is a mixed use commercial, retail and residential community with very little tourism. This is pointed out in the Feasibility Report. (I encourage readers to use this link to read the actual Stone Consulting & Design, Inc., February 2006 report.)

The study indicates that the initial project would cost $14 million. (The initial estimate for the Convention Center / Hotel Project was $70 million and ended up $200 million, all things considered.)

The estimated annual operating loss (that is before debt service) is about $400,000. However the report acknowledges the difficulty in anticipating ridership.

I see here a pattern of “Lancaster exceptionalism” whereby the power elite ignores hard facts and chase federal and state largess, regardless of whether the outcome will be good or bad for the community.

I have made no secret of my feeling that the convention center project is the worst thing that could happen to downtown and will be a major obstacle if not the death blow to the town’s ongoing revitalization. People revitalize a downtown, not boondoggles. Condominiums and shops draw people. Convention Centers generate dead zones in the heart of a city.

The Convention Center will likely be a community debacle. But fatalities resulting from trolley cars running on narrow streets will be a human tragedy.

The March 3 Sunday News contained an opinion piece by Althea C. Ramsay headed, “Climb aboard an old idea.” The article mentions visits to various cities and purports that “Business in formerly blighted areas was brisk. Construction of new projects was ongoing along the routes…The riders on the streetcar were most often local residents, commuters, grandparents with their grandchildren and couples visiting downtown from surrounding Counties.”

Here we go again!

When it comes to City renewal, the good, solid, conservative Lancaster establishment seems to have a single approach: Grab as much federal grant money as possible, float bond issues guaranteed by local taxpayers, and construct gigantic projects that are likely to do more harm than any good.

In the past, we had the eyesore and failed Lancaster Square. Currently a misbegotten, ruinous Convention Center / Hotel Project is being thrust upon the community despite wide scale reluctance by the public. And now our benighted leaders are suggesting that all will be well if we spend another couple hundred million dollars in bringing back streetcars.

Never mind that street cars were replaced by trackless trolleys and later buses a half century ago in most towns. Never mind that they congest streets and threaten pedestrian safety (They can’t be heard). And give no heed to the fact we already have to subsidize the far more practical and flexible Red Rose bus system.

Why cannot the local power establishment understand the route to revitalization is through attracting people to move downtown and simultaneously encouraging shopkeepers and restauranteurs to start or expand businesses, not hundred million dollar boondoggles at taxpayers’ expense?

Let’s stop wasting our tax money and the tax money of future generations and concentrate on allowing private enterprise — remember capitalism? — to invest significant private funds because then the projects will not be disconnected from reality.

Enough already!