Nearly six months since its long-awaited debut, the District’s first streetcar line in more than half a century is quietly exceeding early ridership projections while avoiding the kinds of mishaps that have placed the Metrorail system under constant and intense scrutiny. Although not without its own issues to iron out, the 2.2-mile line in Northeast Washington is surpassing the low expectations that resulted from years of ad hoc planning, project delays, cost overruns, and a degree of public apathy.

“So far we’ve been doing quite well. The running times have improved. I think our customers are pleased with the service. The vehicles are being maintained properly. And we haven’t had any safety incidents,” said Leif Dormsjo, the director of the District Department of Transportation, in an interview aboard a well air conditioned streetcar on a hot August afternoon.

D.C.’s top transportation official believes the line’s largely drama-free start is the result of the careful approach he took after inheriting a host of design and construction problems 20 months ago. Dormsjo hit the reset button on the project, bringing in outside experts to evaluate its shortcomings and to establish a better relationship with local safety oversight officials who ultimately had to approve the start of passenger service.

At the end of the month, DDOT is expected to make two decisions that could improve streetcar service: whether 1) to run streetcars more frequently and 2) to operate seven days per week. Sundays are currently set aside for maintenance.

Less than 20 minutes end to end

From the top of the Hopscotch Bridge outside Union Station in the west to the intersection of Benning Road and Oklahoma Avenue Northeast in the east, the average streetcar trip is taking less than 20 minutes — an improvement from the early days of operations, said Dormsjo.

“We’ve seen improvements in the running time since we started in February. We’re about 17 minutes end to end in the early morning hours,” he said.

In fact, the longest trips are during middays instead of rush hour. And more people are riding in the middle of the day and late afternoons than in the morning, although D.C. Streetcar ridership is more evenly spread throughout the day compared to the typical mass transit system that sees big peaks during mornings and afternoons.

DDOT data show the average trip takes about nineteen and a half minutes between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.; rush hour trips are anywhere from 30 to 90 seconds shorter. The frequency of delivery trucks and lunch hour visitors along the corridor may be slowing streetcars down during middays, Dormsjo said.

That is the assessment of Kenny Cook, the manager of a Lebanese eatery at the corner of H and 5th Streets.

“There are a lot of issues with parking. There are a lot of issues with delivery trucks. If you park one millimeter on that red line,” said Cook, referring to the stripe that delineates where cars can safely parallel park, “it shuts down traffic and you have to get a tow truck, and a tow truck shuts down the other lane because it has to back in and pull the car out.”

Despite some traffic tie ups, Cook rates the streetcar as a positive so far.

“It helps business. It brings people to the business,” said Cook, who added that the streetcar also has dropped off a few unruly passengers whom he had to eject from his restaurant in the late-night hours. He stays open until 3 a.m. on weekends.

Also, westbound trips are consistently longer than eastbound trips by about one minute due to a problem with the traffic signal configuration at the intersection of H and 3rd Streets at the base of the Hopscotch Bridge.

Westbound streetcars often have to wait through an entire signal cycle before they are able to enter the intersection and cross over to the center-running tracks on the bridge.

“We’re working with the operators to make sure that they’ve got the vehicle positioned in the right place so when they call for the intersection signal to change they get into the sequence in the right fashion,” said Dormsjo. “We’re also working with the signal engineers to make sure the communications between the streetcars and the signal itself are working without any irregularities.”

The sleek, red and gray streetcars are attaining average speeds of about eight miles per hour, somewhat faster than Metro’s significantly more crowded X2 bus line, according to DDOT. In the end, streetcars are at the mercy of traffic congestion in the busy commercial corridor of H Street and Benning Road Northeast.

More riders than expected

Nearly 70,000 passengers rode D.C.’s five streetcars in June, according to DDOT figures. The weekday average was 2,773, and close to 3,000 passengers boarded streetcars on Saturdays that month. The average headway — the interval between streetcars — was 14 minutes, one minute better than the scheduled headway.

The June figures are higher across the board compared to May, but not quite as good as April’s mark of 3,399 average trips on Saturdays.

“We initially thought we’d be in the 1,500 range,” Dormsjo said.

To boost ridership over the next six months, DDOT will soon decide whether to shorten headways to 12 minutes. But that change would require having a complete fleet. One of the District’s six streetcars — one of three built by Inekon in the Czech Republic — has yet to see action.

The broken streetcar finally received the parts needed to fix its electrical unit and is undergoing final safety certification, Dormsjo said.

“We’re going to be at full strength very shortly and that is also going to coincide with the decisions that we make about service improvements,” he said.

While pleased with the relatively strong early ridership, DDOT is looking to Kansas City as example of potential growth. The city opened its 2.2-mile streetcar line in May and is already exceeding 6,000 daily riders. The KC Streetcar, which is free to ride, runs every 10-15 minutes and seven days a week.

“We are looking very closely at introducing Sunday service which is something that we have heard a lot from the businesses in the community,” said Dormsjo. “Friday and Saturday are our best days on the H Street line, so we think Sunday could be a real benefit to the businesses and communities along this corridor.”

No fare

One decision DDOT will not be ready to make for at least another six months is whether to charge a fare. D.C. Streetcar has been free since opening day on Feb. 27, and for two reasons it may remain free for good.

First, Dormsjo said charging even a minimal fare could hurt ridership. He pointed to Atlanta, where ridership plummeted 48 percent in the first three months of the year after the city started charging $1.00 to ride the 2.7-mile line.

“We’re definitely looking at what other streetcar services have done in terms of their evaluation of fare policy,” said Dormsjo, who said the streetcar’s annual operating expenditures will come to about $8 million.

Second, the cost of collecting the fare could exceed fare revenues, Dorsmjo said, depending on what system the District chooses to install aboard its fleet.

“The streetcar was never intended to be a money-making enterprise in and of itself. The intent is to support economic activity and investment along the corridor. So when you take a broader look at what the streetcar can do to the city’s bottom line it is a net positive, because it is supporting large scale private investment in places that have been neglected for years,” the DDOT chief said.

Dormsjo said if he could do the streetcar over again (he inherited the troubled project when the Bowser administration took office in January 2015) he would build it twice as long as the current 2.2 miles. DDOT is studying plans to extend the initial H Street/Benning Road line east to Ward 7 and west to Georgetown.

Public transit advocates argue the streetcar will not be worth the city’s initial large investment, now well over $200 million, if it is not expanded to additional neighborhoods.

“We really need more transit for District residents to be able to get across the city as we’ve seen with Metro capacity and any number of other challenges,” said Aimee Custis at the Coalition for Smarter Growth. “The next thing we want to see from the streetcar is to help more people get to more places.”

Her group also is calling for shorter headways.

“Right now we are at a 15-minute headway. We need more vehicles, and when you get to a 10-minute headway, it lets people not have to think about the schedule,” Custis said. “We’re not quite there yet with the streetcar.”

DDOT originally planned to run streetcars every 10 minutes along H Street, but aforementioned mechanical problems with one of the six vehicles led to the 15-minute intervals.

Shariffa Raheem, one of 24 operators hired by a project subcontractor. (Martin Di Caro/WAMU)

Streetcar figures: more than $100 million per mile

The cost of the District’s entire streetcar endeavor, which began when the tracks were laid during a massive streetscape renovation starting in 2008, has climbed to $229 million as of March 8, according to figures requested by WAMU 88.5.

That initial streetscape project on H Street and Benning Road Northeast totaled $15 million. More than $9 million has been spent on at least four corridor studies, and $14 million on operating costs that included months of test runs starting in August 2014 prior to the first six months of passenger service.

But by far the largest expenditures involve the construction of the route and two car barns ($152 million) and project management ($30 million).

Primary contractor Dean Facchina was paid $86 million for the design and construction of the 2.2-mile line ($54 million) as well as two car barn/maintenance yards. The first car barn is temporary and cost $5 million to build. The second, a permanent facility now under construction and due to open next year, has a total cost of $28 million, according to the DDOT documents.

The two projects were split up to mitigate the delay to the start of passenger service caused by the historic landmarking of the Spingarn High School campus, which required a complete redesign of the permanent car barn and maintenance yard with the approval of the Historic Preservation Review Board.

The Kingman Park Civic Association, which filed the application to historically landmark the entire campus, also filed an injunction to stop construction and a lawsuit — all costing the project time and money.

Included in the $229 million price tag is $20 million (to the contractor Fort Myer Construction) for an initial line segment (only 75 percent complete), test track, and temporary maintenance and operation facility in Anacostia — a reminder that the District originally planned to bring back streetcar service to the eastern side of the river first. Those pieces of infrastructure are no longer part of the District’s plans and it is unclear what the city will do with them.

The six streetcars cost $22 million, or about $3.6 million each. Three were built a decade ago by Inekon in the Czech Republic. Three were manufactured by Oregon Iron Works.

D.C. streetcar will cost the District about $8 million to operate, Dormsjo said, with — as of now — no fare revenues coming in to partially offset that cost.

The line has a staff of 53 employees through multiple contractors and subcontractors. Among them are 24 streetcar operators, four service attendants, nine maintenance technicians, three directors of maintenance, operations, and safety, eight supervisors, and a general manager under the firm RDMT, which operates streetcars in two U.S. cities: Washington and Tucson.

RDMT has been paid $10 million to date, according to the DDOT documents.

Image courtesy of Victora Pickering

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D.C.’s Inclusionary Zoning Program requires developers to price 8 to 10 percent of their residential units below market rate. Specifically, the program is for new projects with 10 or more units, such as the massive mix-used development coming to H Street NE. It also includes rehab projects that are expanding an existing building by at least half and adding 10 or more units.

Last January, the DC Campaign for Inclusionary Zoning petitioned the D.C. Zoning Commission to make more of the units available for residents who make less than 60 percent of the average income in the region, according to a joint release from the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute and the Coalition for Smarter Growth. The current area median income for D.C. is $108,600 for a family of four. This means that a family of three with a household income below $59,000 a year would pay $1,100 a month for a one-bedroom rental under the program.

The commission considered the recommendation yesterday, and voted to require developers to designate all of their affordable rental units for people who make under 60 percent of the area median income. This will make more than 2,600 apartments available to low-income families over the next five to 10 years (based on the pace of new developments, which has climbed to a 25-year high), according to the release.

Currently, the majority of inclusionary zoning units, for rent and ownership, are for people who make 80 percent of the area median income. These are people who can afford to pay $1,600 for a one bedroom rental—a cost that’s too expensive for three-fourths of families on the housing program’s waiting list.

“The economics show that this change strikes the right balance between encouraging market-rate housing production and incorporating greater affordability for those left out of the market,” said Cheryl Cort of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, which formed the DC Campaign for Inclusionary Zoning alongside the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO, Jews United for Justice, DC Fiscal Policy Institute, People’s Consulting, Somerset Development, City First Homes, and PolicyLink.

Carlos Jimenez of AFL-CIO thanked the commission for strengthening the affordable housing policy, and “listening to the voices of those who are being priced out” so that “working people can still call D.C. home.”

After a 30-day public review period, the commission’s decision is expected to become final.

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Photo courtesy it used to be me

The mood was festive as politicians and fans of all things transit gathered in Reston for the much-anticipated opening of the Metro’s Silver Line. The white tent where the official program was to take place was crammed so full that latecomers — or those without the right connections — were pushed to overflow seating.

The largest infrastructure project ever built in the Washington region was more than a year late and more than $100 million over budget. But on July 26, 2014, all of that was forgotten. As the first Silver Line train pulled out of Wiehle-Reston East station, there were cheers and smiles.

But the celebration would be short-lived. To make room for the line, Metro reduced service on the Blue Line, angering thousands of riders. New rail cars set to arrive before the line opened did not — leaving fewer trains in reserve when older cars broke down. The result? Worsening service disruptions systemwide. Adding to Metro’s woes, ridership was well below projections.

Some began to grumble that the line should never have been built.

Then came the deadly January 2015 Yellow Line smoke incident, followed by a series of chronic service disruptions and safety lapses that led to the rail system being placed under federal oversight. The worsening service led to declining ridership.

Metro blamed the chronic breakdowns on its inability to keep up with much-needed maintenance that had been neglected for years and said it needed more money to catch up. Some observers — and Metro to a degree — blamed the Silver Line, saying the new line placed too much of a burden on the system’s infrastructure. Some riders and others argued that the transit agency should have invested in rebuilding instead of expanding.

“To add to a system that was very widely understood to be failing due to a lack of maintenance as well as a failure of organizational culture, to expand and put more strains on it is beyond idiotic,” said Thomas Rubin, a longtime transportation consultant, who has been critical of rail projects as a solution for congestion. “The new line still has to operate through the old system.”

But does the Silver Line deserve the blame?

“The reality is that it’s just not that straightforward,” said Robert Puentes, president of the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonpartisan think tank.

Even if the Silver Line had never been built, Metro probably would be facing the same problems it is scrambling to fix today, Puentes said.

First, many in the region misunderstand how the line was being built and funded.

Metro is not paying for construction of the 23.1-mile line in Northern Virginia; it is being financed through a combination of federal, state and local funds raised in part through special taxing districts. Dulles Toll Road users are paying for more than 70 percent of the project’s $5.8 billion cost.

The Silver Line “seems like an obvious target, but you have to look under the hood of this issue,” said Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, a transit advocacy group. “There were entirely different funding streams for the Silver Line.”

The Silver Line extension, which is being built in two phases, is the first new line to be added to the Metro system since the Green Line opened in 1991. The first phase, opened in July 2014, has five stations, one in Reston and four in Tysons. The rail line’s second phase has six stations, including one at Dulles International Airport, and will for the first time extend Metro service into Loudoun County. It is expected to open for passenger service in 2020.

Construction of the rail line is being managed by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. Once completed, each phase is handed over to Metro, which then assumes responsibility for maintenance and operations. Metro officials’ only involvement in the construction is working with contractors to ensure that the line, once completed, meets its standards and will work seamlessly with the system.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who as chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors was among the rail project’s biggest backers, said if anything, blaming the Silver Line is a convenient excuse for those within Metro who have allowed the system to decline over the years.

That is not to say there weren’t additional costs associated with its opening and operation. Metro hired 461 people and trained 88 train operators and 74 station managers when the first phase opened in 2014, and budgeted $50 million to operate it that fiscal year. In 2015, the Silver Line’s first full year of operation, those costs increased to $55 million. But that money came from the transit agency’s operating budget, which in 2015 was roughly $1.7 billion, the bulk of which came from state and local funds. Operating budget money does just that — covers daily operations — as opposed to the capital budget, which pays for things such as rebuilding infrastructure.

Metro refused to make any of its staff or executives available to discuss or answer questions about the line, offering only a link to an online timeline and a notation that the choice to build the Silver Line was a regional decision.

Rubin, the Silver Line critic, said the push to build the extension despite warning signs highlights a fundamental problem plaguing efforts to restore the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

“We can get money to expand, but we can’t get money to maintain,” he said.

That is a dynamic that Bob Chase, president emeritus of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, remembers well.

Chase recalls that as details of the line were being hashed out, there was constant tension between a Metro management that “saw the need to rebuild and maintain what it had and public officials that wanted to expand Metro and get it to Tysons.”

The bottom line, he said: “I don’t think the Silver Line was driven by Metro. I think it was driven by local officials.”

Virginia leaders said the line was critical to economic development in the Dulles corridor and would connect Dulles International Airport with the District’s downtown. Many have noted that Dulles is one of the few major airports that does not have a rail connection. The Silver Line also connects another important economic center — Tysons — to the rest of the region.

The Silver Line “was a critical piece missing from the original investment,” said Connolly, who served 14 years on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, including five as chairman. He also served as chairman of the board of the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission.

“The region is not the same as it was when we opened Metro” 40 years ago, Connolly said. “Economic growth has shifted toward Northern Virginia — and we have to have supportive infrastructure.”

But perhaps the one aspect that Silver Line critics point to most often — particularly Blue Line riders, who have seen their service cut since it opened — is ridership, which has fallen short of projections.

Wiehle-Reston East — the outermost station — has met projections, including drawing some riders who previously rode the crowded Orange Line. The Tysons Corner station, with its direct connection to Tysons Corner Center mall, has done reasonably well. But overall, according to ridership figures released by Metro on the line’s one-year anniversary in July 2015, the average 17,000 weekday boardings is far short of the 25,000 the line was projected to have after its first year.

In comparison, when Metro extended the Green Line and opened five new stations on its southern end in 2001 — Congress Heights, Southern Avenue, Naylor Road, Suitland and Branch Avenue — ridership overshot projections, leading to crowded platforms and packed trains. The situation was exacerbated by a shortage of rail cars.

Projections were that the new Green Line stations would generate 18,000 new passengers after six months of service; ridership on just the second day of operation was more than 19,500.

Sharon Bulova, chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, said while Silver Line ridership has not materialized, the economic benefits of the expansion are already apparent.

“I don’t pick up any regret among property owners and people who have been contributing to the expansion of Metro with special tax districts,” Bulova (D) said. “They know there’s going to be future benefit.”

Some say Metro added to its own problems by not fully grasping the impact and difficulty of integrating the Silver Line into the existing system. Nor did transit agency officials prepare riders, they say.

“I think they didn’t do a fully adequate job of explaining [the impact] to the public,” said Mortimer Downey, a former Metro board member and chairman.

For example, controllers in Metro’s operation center have experienced difficulty moving all the trains they need because of congestion at some rail junctions — particularly at Rosslyn, where the Silver, Orange and Blue lines come together before moving through an underwater tunnel into the District. It is similar to what motorists experience at heavily used interchanges on the Capital Beltway.

“It is difficult to determine how long it takes for riders to react, or by how much, but rail reliability began to decrease for customers around the time of the Silver Line launch, turning down particularly since May 2015,” Metro staff wrote in a report to the board in February of this year.

Around that time, Metro’s managers also acknowledged that the launch of the new rail line “stressed” the agency’s ability to deploy an adequate number of rail cars each day. Officials had hoped to have 64 of the new 7000-series cars online by the time the Silver Line opened, but production was delayed by a 2011 tsunami and earthquake in Japan, where the cars were being built.

Metro officials also conceded that they could not maintain the service levels they had committed to before the Silver Line opened.

Despite the problems, Connolly chafes at assertions that the region would be better off without the line.

Long term, the congressman said, adding stations in Tysons helps guarantee that Fairfax County will remain an active partner in paying for the line’s maintenance and upkeep. That is because Metro is funded, in part, by subsidies from the jurisdictions it serves.

He also noted the extension into Loudoun County means officials there also will contribute to funding to the system.

“The choice [to not build] says we can never improve on or expand Metro’s reach,” Connolly said. “That is a recipe for utter gridlock and economic decline. We have to do both. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Photo courtesy of Amanda Voisard/Washington Post

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Just about everyone has an idea for improving Metro. The challenge presented in a new contest launched by the blog Greater Greater Washington is to develop an idea within these bounds: Metro must be able to implement the idea in three to six months, the cost must be no more than $100,000 to create and almost nothing to continue, it must be legal, and it must not have any bad effect on service or safety.

The contest, developed by Greater Greater Washington in collaboration with the Coalition for Smarter Growth and Metro, already has drawn a bunch of entries. You can see them, comment on them and submit your own ideas, at metrogreater.org.

Contest entries will continue until July 15. Then by Aug. 5, a jury will select 10 of the entries that meet all the rules, and those finalists will be put to a public vote from Aug. 8 to 19, with the winner announced by Aug. 24. David Alpert, founder and president of Greater Greater Washington, says Metro has committed to using the winning entry within six months.

Alpert noted that Metro is in the midst of some huge rebuilding projects. Most prominent lately is the SafeTrack maintenance plan. In the meantime, he said, “there are opportunities to make smaller, faster, cheaper changes along the way which will improve the rider experience both during rebuilding and beyond.”

He pointed out the new decals on some platforms that mark where the back of a six-car train will be when it pulls into the station and the green “8” on the next-train signs that give riders a heads-up about the approach of an eight-car train. To that, I’d add the Customer Accountability Report launched by Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld. (You can find a link to that PDF on Metro’s home page.)

“Those of us outside the transit agency can’t turn wrenches or replace rail ties,” said Stewart Schwartz, executive director at the Coalition for Smarter Growth. “But riders, advocates and the public have a wealth of knowledge, ideas and energy that we can share. Riders know the system intimately, and we’re excited to see the small, creative and implementable ideas the contest brings to light that WMATA can use to improve the rider experience.”
The contest winner gets “public recognition and some transit memorabilia,” according to Greater Greater Washington.

This is a great idea on the part of everyone involved. The transit authority needs to be more in touch with riders on the seemingly little things that actually could do a lot to boost customer service. Little projects with high visibility can help restore some of the public’s lost confidence in Metro.

Photo courtesy of J. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post

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WMATA General Manager Paul Wiedefeld is already implementing new ideas to make the Metro better, such as adding decals to platforms and color-coding eight-car trains, but these ideas aren’t enough. Starting this Wednesday, WMATA launched a crowdsourcing contest, called MetroGreater, that will allow the public to submit ideas on how to improve Metrorail, Metrobus, and MetroAccess.

These ideas must be able to be implemented within a span of six months or less, cost no more than $100,000, and not violate any laws or regulations. Other requirements include that these ideas must not negatively impact service or safety and must not have negligible costs to continue into the future.

The contest is produced by Greater Greater Washington in collaboration with the Coalition for Smarter Growth and WMATA, according to a recent press release.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons/Mariordo

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