City Of New Haven Photo Illustration
When the city’s streetcar comeback plan made its first stop at Coop High School, trolley boosters jumped on board — and pushed for more “daring” destinations.
The discussion came Thursday night at the downtown Coop High School, where city officials held the first public information session on a proposed streetcar system.
City consultants propose building a three-mile, 12-stop “starter” streetcar system designed to link Union Station, the medical district, and downtown. Some in the 50-person audience called on the city to push beyond the limited route to reach more “daring” places, such as Grand or Whalley Avenue.
Others came bearing memories of the city’s former trolley system, remnants of which can still be seen in city streets.
Eighty-three year-old Jackie Grace graduated from West Haven High in 1944. She remembers with affection the “M” trolley car that she took from home to work at Yale. Then there was taking that same line to shows at the Arena on Grove Street. A token was a dime or three for a quarter. Then the trolleys disappeared in 1948.
The city has been working to revive that system in modern form, as other cities have, since 2007. Click here and here for past stories.
Those in the audience applauded a streetcar comeback, and also offered measured critiques.
City transportation chief Mike Piscitelli (at left in photo with Yale architecture professor Elihu Rubin) said downtown streetcar systems are not only people-movers but “place-makers” with a history of generating economic value. He said the evolving plan could take as long as five or ten years to be realized.
Mayor John DeStefano has lobbied D.C. for $20 million to pay for the system, which would cost an estimated $30 million to build.
City Of New Haven
The city has been working with San Francisco-based consultants URS Corporation on a preliminary “starter” route, which could later be extended into Hamden.
The three-mile route would be a largely one-way loop. It would run north up Church and Whitney to Science Hill and return down Temple. There it would jog around an infilled Route 34, through the medical district and back to Union Station.
Check out the proposed route, and an overview of the plan, on the city’s website.
Piscitelli said 25 American cities operate streetcar systems, with some 25 more in planning. New Haven’s would be Connecticut’s first.
URS’s Stephen Gazillo said the downtown route was chosen because Yale, Union Station, the soon-to-be finished new home of Gateway Community College, and local inhabitants added up to a daily density of about 80,000 people, enough to make a system not only feasible but of “tremendous potential.”
Architect Gene Festa questioned whether Stop Two on the system, Gateway, made sense. The Gateway students are primarily car users from the suburbs, Festa said. “Assuming a major constituency at Gateway is wrong.”
URS’s engineer Jenna Nichols responded that even if the trolley system ultimately attracted only half of Gateway’s 11,000 students, that would be excellent. Piscitelli added, “We’ve reached the point where we have to embrace Gateway” by giving them opportunities not use cars.
Both Phil Langdon of the Ronan Edgehill Neighborhood Association and the Urban Design League’s Anstress Farwell questioned the placement of the repair barn for the streetcars, which according to the preliminary plan is now on Church Street South directly across from the Yale School of Nursing.
If the system results in raising property values around it, as promised, “You’d hope there’d be a pretty valuable real estate there in 15 years. The maintenance facility should maybe be at a different location,” Langdon said.
City Of New Haven Photo Illustration
Farwell called the proposal very exciting, but she said she thought the maintenance facility didn’t belong because Church Street South as it runs from Union Station to downtown should be conceived of as a grand and noble boulevard, not home to a repair barn.
The most serious criticism by far pertained to the lack of daring or seizing of opportunity in the route chosen.
“I like the idea of getting it started. That’s great,” said Norton Street resident Frank Panzarella, who went to high school in Munich and fell in love with that city’s trolley system. “But I was wondering why not go all the way out Whitney to Hamden or down Grand Avenue where there’s a whole new community of immigrants.”
Piscitelli responded: “We need to get started and then get the fingers into neighborhoods.”
Rubin, a professor of urbanism at Yale, questioned whether a sufficient density of population should be the key to organizing the system, that is, bringing people to and from stations and parking garages, as he sees the preliminary route proposed by the city.
“I would like to know who is the rider who goes from two to four [meaning from Gateway to the Grove Street garage]. And who goes from three to six.”
Rubin called the plan a nice beginning,but said it is not exciting. “The idea of spectacularly throwing something down Whalley or Grand Avenue. That’s exciting.”
Rubin went on to say that the truly cynical view of the city’s proposal as expressed in the route that goes up relatively well-off Whitney Avenue is “We will continue to have a segregated transportation system.”
He suggested also that the trolley system had potential to bring Trowbridge Square out of its isolation, but there was no stop near it.
When he told URS’s Gazillo that he also though stop number three should not be in front of City Hall but at Church and Chapel, where struggling businesses on lower Church could use the economic uplift, Gazillo said that was an interesting idea. “Will you give me your card?”
At the end of the meeting, 83-year-old Grace said she was encouraged but troubled that the line didn’t go by St. Raphael’s Hospital. The one-way loop was not as she remembered a trolley line should be, she added.
About the route and repair facility, Piscitelli said the decisions were far from final. He threw down a gauntlet to participants to continue their participation. He credited architect Robert Orr and others with turning him and the city into “believers.”
“No street car system has succeeded without citizen support.” And he said the most successful systems included people such as who were in Thursday’s audience.
Piscitelli noted that modern streetcars are succeeding not just in bigger cities like Boston and Portland, Oregon, but also in Kenosha, Wisconsin, population 90,000.
“If Kenosha, Wisconsin can do it, we can do it seven times better,” Piscitelli said. The next steps are full design and making the case to federal funders.
To contribute your idea of how a trolley system should work, take a city survey here, or leave a comment below.
Extensions are a great idea, particularly:
But first you need a starter system.
This proposal for a starter loop would make the extension systems feasible, without it, the extensions on their own would never work due to the job base and commuting patterns of this city.
A repair shed shouldn't go on a Grand Boulevard, but there are probably no other options for its location within the starter system. The shed could be screened with denser buildings, so you wouldn't even notice it was there. Look at the repair yards in other cities for plenty of examples of this.
All that said, $30 million would be put to much better use making the city more walkable and bikeable. $30 million could build hundreds of kilometers of crosswalks, protected bus shelters in the neighborhoods and bicycle lanes. That would do far more to reduce car trips than a simple starter loop.
The caveat to that is that federal funding is only available for streetcars, due to the transit lobbyists, and not for pedestrian improvements. Pedestrian improvements also create far more jobs and higher local revenue per dollar spent than streetcars or highways do, but these jobs and funding go to local firms and actual workers, who unfortunately do not have nearly the same political power as large industrial conglomerates like the ones who build highways and streetcars.
But either way, $30 million for a streetcar is a bargain compared to the $2 billion Q bridge.