Should streetcars return to Chicago?

What say you? I'd like to see that again. I should point out this post I made a few weeks ago with potholes revealing Chicago's transit history although those potholes have been filled.

The question is serious with this Sun-Times article. The idea is to get Chicago competitive with say Europe. I wonder if this might be important if Chicago should be blessed with the Olympics in 2016?

Their bones are still there, poking through the city streets.

Under the asphalt, you can still see the steel rails of the once-great Chicago streetcar system.

It has been 50 years since the last "Green Hornet" finished its route on June 21, 1958. But Bob Heinlein will never forget.

Chicago had one of the biggest streetcar systems in the world, the Encyclopedia of Chicago says. Before the Great Depression, streetcars run by Chicago Surface Lines carried almost 900 million riders, more than the city's other transit systems and cars combined.

Several factors helped doom the streetcar. One was a state and city cap on fares that kept the private streetcar companies from keeping up with inflation. The government also taxed profits at 55 percent. It's tough to run a business that way. When it proved impossible to reorganize the railways as a private enterprise, the state created the CTA to buy them out in 1947.

Another factor that hurt the streetcar was the postwar migration of city residents to the suburbs, which decreased customers. Increased numbers of autos made it hard for streetcars, which ran on a fixed route down the middle of the street, to move through traffic.

"Being in the middle of the street, where the left turn lane was, worked against the streetcar," said Heinlein. He remembered the motorman would get stuck behind cars turning left and just have to wait.

"I was on the last one," said Heinlein, 70, assistant superintendent of operations at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, which has Chicago streetcars on display. Heinlein was a CTA employee in 1958 and rode that last car with other CTA workers. "When the rails weren't all over Chicago anymore, it was a letdown," Heinlein said.

It was also a mistake, argues Rick Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association: "We made some really bad assumptions as a society about what the automobile was capable of."

Rather than maintaining the streetcar track and figuring out how to integrate streetcars with auto traffic, it was easier for the CTA to replace all streetcars with buses, Harnish said. Now Chicago is behind European cities when it comes to having an energy-efficient street transit system, Harnish said.
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A few attempts to revive the streetcar have been ballyhooed over the years, but none made it. A plan for a "Streeterville Trolley" made headlines in 1989. In 2003, then-U.S. Rep. William O. Lipinski (D-Ill.) proposed a route on Ogden Avenue and Cermak Road.

Harnish's group has been trying to talk the city into running a streetcar line from Navy Pier to railroad stations and the Shedd Aquarium, so far without success.

Instead of new streetcars, the CTA is planning a pilot "bus rapid transit" program, which would give buses their own designated lanes during rush hour on certain streets. The CTA is also trying to reduce the cost and pollution of buses through the use of more hybrids.

Streetcars, which run on electricity, are less polluting and more energy-efficient than buses, since they travel on steel wheels on steel rails, instead of tires on asphalt, Harnish said. He says streetcars should one day make a comeback here in Chicago, as they have in Europe.

Should the Chicago streetcar come back after a period of 50 years in time for the 2016 Olympics or should we even wait for the Olympics? Chicago's transit system is in need of an upgrade anyway to get people around the area. Streetcars or some form of light rail could be a way to go.

Article via Gaper's Block Merge.