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Track Marks

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The other day I took a bike ride down the waterfront. I have to say the bike trail in the Southern part is pretty cool. I hope they expand that all the way up and maybe to the Sculpture Park. Still, riding by some of the recently torn out tracks from the old waterfront streetcar hit me surprisingly hard.

Sure, it’s tough to mourn a line that hasn’t been in service for the better part of a decade: Nobody really believed the route would come back any time soon, and with the tunnel, it has been a done deal for some time that they’d never have that streetcar along the waterfront. I’ve said before that I’m fine in theory with the bus route that replaced it, although I wish it ran both ways and more frequently.

Still, seeing the gravel beds without the tracks had a sense of permanence that the things in the above paragraph don’t. If you’d asked me before, I would have told you that the streetcar wasn’t coming back. But now I can say it with more conviction.

Comments

  1. 1

    Hey Carl, thought you might find this interesting.

    This post was written by Christine Borne Nickras and originally appeared on her blog, Queen of the Bondo.

    “Mike doesn’t understand how you can do it,” says my friend Ruth, of her fiancé. Our companions at the bar are a retired surgeon and his wife. The bartender admires my gumption or lack of pretension or both when I ask the piano player to play “Stairway to Heaven,” which he then does, reluctantly.

    “Well, I’m a crazy person,” I tell her. “And trying to do this for the last five years has made me crazier.”

    She orders a second glass of riesling. “Why don’t you just get a Smart Car?”

    This is the moment in the script that I always dread. The moment where I have to explain that my foolhardy commitment to public transit in the Rust Belt has nothing to do with the environment, and has everything to do with my deep-seated resentment that we’ve arranged modern American life in such a way that all but forces you to own something you probably can’t afford.

    It might be doubly uncomfortable to explain to this to Ruth, who grew up in nearly identical middle class circumstances as me. Our respective sets of parents were both tight-fisted with cash, and we grew up in a size of house that kids don’t seem to grow up in anymore: the size where you have to move out at eighteen because if you don’t, you and your parents are going to drive each other to homicide. We took the same classes, got similar degrees. But Ruth became a young professional and I became…I didn’t become anything. I stayed the same person I was at 19, eating canned beans and granola bars and obsessing about loose change I found in the street. Middle class in income, yes, but without the trappings.
    http://rustwire.com/2012/03/19.....cleveland/

    Rustwire.com is a great blog.

  2. 2

    It is really sad the Waterfront Streetcar was killed slowly and quietly the way it was. Unfortunately since no one decision really was the death knell there never was any public opposition to doing away with it for good.

    I still haven’t found anyone who will say they wanted the streetcar done away with or who had it on their agenda. It was more a case that everyone had “other priorities” than replacing the maintenance barn. Then once the line was shut down the mantra became “it isn’t worth doing anything until the viaduct and seawall are dealt with”. Then other projects and pipe dreams started looking more attractive to the powers that be than spending money on restoring the line. Now we’ve got a fancy park designer who doesn’t think our waterfront needs transit. Apparently there is “no room” especially since Alaskan Way is going to be a giant surface highway even though we are spending billions on a bypass tunnel.

    I think we could generate a lot of carbon-free power from George Benson spinning in his grave.

    Sure it was a bit on the slow side, but it was a fun ride that brought a smile to your face. It made for some wonderful photographs. The tourists loved it. National Geographic ranked it the #2 trolley ride in the world. All gone now, unlikely to ever come back.

    Too bad as SF has a wonderful heritage streetcar line running along Market and the Embarcadero.

  3. 3

    There’s a kind of grating irony that right now a number of folks including our present mayor and a certain member of Congress who’s retiring to run for Governor are speaking proudly of their intentions for a bright, shining future of transit in Seattle, extolling the virtues of buses and “rail in all its forms”. There’s often even specific mention of the SLUT and how wonderful it would be to expand it further around downtown–but the waterfront streetcar seems to have completely (if not deliberately) forgotten.

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