When certain establishment forces behind the Lancaster Alliance decided to bring back streetcars to again clog city streets, they created the Lancaster Street Car Company. It in turn had the Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau conduct a recent “poll” alleging that meeting planners support the notion.

First the recipients were told about six cities “where new streetcar systems have emerged during the last decades … and have proven economic development successes.” As has been related in a series of earlier NewsLanc reports, in some of these cities the street cars ran in their own right-of-ways rather than in streets, and, in fact, proved to be economic failures,  heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

Then this so-called “poll” asked the following:

“If some of your hotel attendees stayed at hotels other than the Lancaster Marriott at Penn Square that adjoins the convention Center, how likely do you believe they would be to use the streetcar to reach the Convention Center (a 10 – 15 minute walk?)”

The 220 room Brunswick is two short blocks away, at most five minutes. And there is no other major hotel along the proposed loop that runs from the Southern Market to the Amtrak Station!

“How important is it that your meeting /convention is held in a walkable downtown with plenty to see and do?”

What does “a walkable downtown” have to do with a trolley route?

Concerning the need for transportation between the train station and the Convention Center, we already have trolley buses that run the route. And for the rare major event, buses can always be added.

Again and again, sponsors start off by promising privately funded projects which end up being built with taxpayer money and operated with taxpayer subsidies. And the Lancaster press uncritically, perhaps even conspiratorially, prints the sponsors’ propaganda. Rarely do they provide legitimate feasibility studies or impartial polls.

Is the bird brained streetcar project destined to be yet another such misguided boondoggle at tax payer expense?