Subject: Electric railways, streetcars, interurbans, trams, light rail lines and trolley buses worldwide. City officials announce Downtown Milwaukee streetcar route.
From: "LouRugani" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 04 May 2010 23:30:24 -0000
List-Id: <Trolleys.yahoogroups.com>

City officials have reduced the three options for a Downtown Milwaukee streetcar route – presented at a public meeting in October –to a single plan recently obtained by NewsBuzz under a federal records request. The photo is posted here.

While similar to the options released previously, the route described in the February grant application released by the U.S. Department of Transportation follows none of them exactly. Milwaukee's half-dozen streetcars would be electric, share a lane of traffic with cars and stop at numerous small stations.

The primary Downtown Streetcar Circulator route, to be built using federal money already awarded to the city, would run from the Downtown Intermodal Station east along St. Paul Avenue then north on Broadway Street until Wells Street, where it would turn east again. Streetcars would run north and south from Wells Street to Ogden Avenue by Jackson and Van Buren streets.

The application (large PDF) seeks additional federal funding from DOT's Urban Circulator Grant Program, which is awarding up to $25 million to cities out of a total of $130 million in funding to improve bus and rail systems. The city would use the boost in funding to extend the primary route at both ends.

One extension would run from the Intermodal Station north on Fourth Street to Juneau Avenue, where it would turn west and end near the Brewery Project. The other extension would run from the eastern end of Ogden Avenue in a loop on Farwell and Prospect Avenues, turning around at East Royall Place.

Largely due to public input, the route has changed considerably since early 2009, when it ran in a circle around the center of downtown.

City officials are still finalizing proposed plans for the streetcar project, according to DPW spokeswoman Cecilia Gilbert. The plans to be submitted to DOT, called a locally preferred alternative, "will be rolled out very soon," she says. "In order to meet federal guidelines, the (grant) application was submitted on February 15 of this year before the LPA was final."

Some plans have changed since February, Gilbert says. In the grant application, service was scheduled to begin in November 2012. Project dates have changed, she says without specifying.

Downtown Ald. Bob Bauman, a former transportation consultant, says city officials lowered estimates of the streetcar line's operating costs from initial projections and settled on a fare price of $1 after deciding a free-fare system wasn't economically feasible.

Ridership with a $1 fare, given the construction of both the primary route and the two extensions, is estimated at 3,830 riders a day in 2015 and 4,559 by 2030 in the grant application. Ridership estimates for a no-fare system are 6,412 and 7,729, respectively.

In February, operating costs for the primary route were estimated at $2.9 million a year. The Fourth Street and Prospect/Farwell extensions were estimated to cost another $1.7 million a year.

In February, the primary route was expected to cost about $64 million to construct, mostly funded by $55 million in federal funding awarded in 2009. The rest would come from local sources. The two extensions were expected to cost a total of $31.5 million to build, funded by the $25 million grant the city is seeking and supplemented by local sources.

Development expected

Bauman says a rail system is more expensive to expand than a bus one, "but the return on that investment is much higher" than the return on the expansion of a bus system. The Circulator is "primarily an economic development tool," he says, since developers are much more likely to invest in properties if a light rail line passes nearby.

DOT, under the Obama Administration, supports using rail lines to spur progress in under-developed areas, according to Bauman. The proposed Fourth Street extension would provide service to the Park East area, a section of Downtown the Department of City Development has targeted for redevelopment as well as the ongoing Brewery Project at the site of the former Pabst Brewery.

The extended line would also reach several city housing developments, including Hillside, a 470-unit neighborhood near the Brewery Project.

"This is sort of exhibit A in the changing priorities of federal transportation investment," Bauman says.

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