RALEIGH – Call me unashamed to admit that when I see someone make effective use of a Judy Garland song title, I crack a smile. One might say my heartstrings go “zing, zing, zing.” But when I read the original headline of a Christian Science Monitor piece on streetcars and downtowns – “Clang, clang, clang went development” – I had to wince. Apparently so did others, because when the story went online, the tone of the headline went from sentimental musical to Tennessee Williams: “Desire grows for streetcars.”
Unfortunately, it was only the headline and emphasis that changed. The piece still reports mostly uncritically the grandiose claims of city boosters than by bringing back downtown streetcars, they have created billions of dollars in development. Because this is exactly the sort of hooey used by advocates of Charlotte’s trolley, a proposed Winston-Salem streetcar, and other dubious projects in North Carolina downtowns, it’s worth examining the claims more closely.
Officials in Tampa, Florida, for example, claim that its 2.3 mile streetcar line, opening in 2003, has cost about $55 million and attracted more than $1 billion in new investment in commercial and residential development along the line. Little Rock, Arkansas has spent $20 million on its streetcar, which runs 2.5 miles, and claims to have induced $200 million in new development. Kenosha, Wisconsin claims that its 2-mile line, at a cost of $5.2 million, is responsible for about $150 million in development.
At least these streetcar boosters aren’t alleging that their toys are making a discernible impact on transportation patterns. Still, their economic-development claims are risible. A correlation is not evidence of causality. Downtown properties get bought and redeveloped all the time. To separate out the incentive effects of a streetcar line from the background churn would require far more diligence that any of these city governments and activists have yet exhibited.
Just consider the numbers for a second. Tampa’s streetcar claims about 1,200 riders per weekday. Little Rock carries only 300 riders per day. Kenosha carries just 100 per day, less than most kiddie trains carry in places like Raleigh’s Pullen Park. If these communities are following standard transit practice, they aren’t attempting to separate out multiple rides by the same person per day, so even these numbers likely overstate the number of actual human individuals who might set foot in a streetcar on a given Tuesday.
Is it conceivable that the prospect of a few additional riders embarking or disembarking at a given street corner played a significant role in major business decisions? I can see setting up a hot dog stand or watch kiosk during lunchtime next to the streetcar stop, but unless we’re talking escargot relish or diamond timepieces, we’re not talking development in the tens of millions of dollars.
Perhaps picking on the fabulous, wealth-generating Kenosha Treasure Trolley is too easy, but the fact is that policymakers and activists here in North Carolina makes claims of the same kind all the time when selling government subsidies for their pet projects. They allege that a large number of sports fans at a taxpayer-owned ballpark are from far away and will each spend hundreds of dollars in town that would have otherwise circulated elsewhere. They allege that apartment buildings and storefronts next to rail-transit stops represent entirely new, and newly taxable, property value rather than simply development redistributed from one part of the community to another.
They stretch things. They prevaricate. They fantasize. I’d make some reference to a fanciful land somewhere over the rainbow, but that feels excessive.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.