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Charlotte Center City Streetcar Network


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14 hours ago, CLT704 said:

I still think these problems would have been resolved if new vehicles were used from the get-go. 

The original streetcar project to Southend was funded on a shoestring, and this starter line to Elizabeth was funded on a shoestring.   Both provided enough gravitas to create a larger, fully funded project on their corridors.   The $25m Southend Trolley that ran for tourists became the "why don't y'all extend them thangs to 485" light rail line.  The $25m starter streetcar line has not gotten the properly funded second phase to have a full 4 mile line with new vehicles like you're saying.      Sometimes you need a foot in the door and these lesser vehicles on the cheap have done just that for us over the decade. 

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6 minutes ago, dubone said:

The original streetcar project to Southend was funded on a shoestring, and this starter line to Elizabeth was funded on a shoestring.   Both provided enough gravitas to create a larger, fully funded project on their corridors.   The $25m Southend Trolley that ran for tourists became the "why don't y'all extend them thangs to 485" light rail line.  The $25m starter streetcar line has not gotten the properly funded second phase to have a full 4 mile line with new vehicles like you're saying.      Sometimes you need a foot in the door and these lesser vehicles on the cheap have done just that for us over the decade. 

I know that, what I'm saying is that new vehicles would have alleviated the problems from using speciality heritage cars, I know there wasn't money in the budget to buy new vehicles. And, the funding for the second phase, the SSGA was signed back in June, IIRC. 

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Oh the stories I could tell you about the maintenance and repair issues with the car 85 when I operated it. Shoestring is one way to describe it. Volunteers, grants money, donations, gifts-in-kind, etc., and an antique car with cobbled parts and no contemporary safety features made for "interesting" on rail experiences. But proof of concept was true.

The old trolley 85 operation was honest and transparent. Visitors saw everything for themselves and chose to ride despite all. This CATS operation adds levels of bureaucracy and inefficiencies. If anyone knows why they are having such trouble it has not appeared here, except as speculation.

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The updates page on Facebook mentions this: 

"The vehicle acquisition process is also underway. Several proposals for modern streetcar vehicles are currently under evaluation and a recommendation will be presented for City Council action in July." 

So any news about vehicle selection? I know that bids were way over so I don't expect news about them, but the vehicle contract should be awarded soon?

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So it appears (by the omission of articles in the Observer) that on street parking and the GoldLine are compatable. Now the KC Star has published that on street parkers has adapted quickly to the KC Streetcar as well. http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article96645417.html

Taking into account the KC Streetcar ridership it might be time to retire the "mixed traffic running is bad" trope.

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I think they're compatible, but the street parking toward the top of Elizabeth has very little room for error. If the parallel spots were deeper the uptime would be far better. It's crazy that someone parking out of place by a foot would disrupt streetcar operations

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23 hours ago, tozmervo said:

I think they're compatible, but the street parking toward the top of Elizabeth has very little room for error. If the parallel spots were deeper the uptime would be far better. It's crazy that someone parking out of place by a foot would disrupt streetcar operations

It's crazy how many people suck at parallel parking

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http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/blog/queen_city_agenda/2016/08/cats-to-re-bid-charlotte-streetcar-expansion.html

Someone on here had mentioned the platforms not being quite the right height - bizjournal article validates that. They say the line would have to close for several months for the the existing platforms to be modified for modern streetcar level entrances.

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  • 2 weeks later...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/nyregion/torontos-transit-advice-for-new-york-give-streetcars-their-own-lanes.html?_r=0

This Times article is rather unsurprising. "Streetcars need dedicated ROW because they are quicker..." This seems patently obvious but also entirely unhelpful.  Not really discussed are ancillary issues to dedicated ROW such as difficulties with signaling and to some extent carving up the city more rather than facilitating a more ambulatory environment.

Does anyone know of actual research that has been done on the benefits and limitations of full ROW with independent signalling, vs limited ROW with signal pre-emption, vs mixed traffic (or mixed traffic with signal pre-emption)? Surely, there is data out there with the growing number of systems - or extensive systems like Toronto. I certainly don't think a system needs to be all or nothing, and I do wonder about the phase 3 section of Central and whether its density and traffic patterns demand a different type of answer than on Trade at Johnson and Wales. 

It seems to me that once a certain percentage of the people using the route are using it as a transit route and not for neighborhood stops, then the streetcar service ought to transition as well. Again, I don't know what the numbers are - but I don't think that very many people who would ride on a line that goes from South Park to Uptown would be interested in mixed traffic service, for instance. 

Does anyone know of a source for this info? And can anyone propose some corridor criteria that would justify the different kinds of service?

Edited by tusculan
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^ I don't spend much time with that portion of the literature on transit but my guess is that good studies on the subject don't exist yet, since modern mixed traffic streetcars in the US are still a very new phenomena. You can pull data on ridership by system and get some rough numbers for riders per mile and compare some mixed traffic to dedicated row services. I did this exact thing about two months ago in the Long Term Transit Plan thread (iirc) and found that the mixed-traffic Kanasas City streetcar is outperforming nearly every dedicated row LRT system (including the Blue Line) in terms of ridership per mile. We may get some reinforcement to those numbers when the Cincinatti streetcar (opens today) has stable ridership numbers to report.

Personally I think the 'gotta be faster than cars' thing is overblown. Toronto, Zurich, Amsterdam, Prague, Melbourne and nearly every German city shows us that, for urban circulation, not-speedy mobility is still very useful, their mixed traffic streetcars get plenty of ridership from all demographics.

Having said that, its a long way from post-Eastland to uptown. Charlotte's most pragmatic option might be to build the full streetcar to run in mixed traffic and once it proves its worth convert its path to semi-dedicated row by closing the lanes to cars. This option becomes more politically palatable after 1) a more extensive transit system is established, 2) transit has a larger political constituancy, 3) service is frequent and 4) intown density, walkability and feeder buses have been improved. 

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Absolutely.   Why can't we just plan for median streetcars with limited combined lanes.   That is how they were in Charlotte originally, which is why most streets that followed old streetcar tracks have beautiful medians today (10th St in 4th Ward, the oldest part of The Plaza, all of the variations of Queens roads, East Boulevard.)   Even if they were not running over grass behind a curb, they still had their own area in the road on a wide cross section.    

Having a plan for where the modern streetcar will go should be coordinated with rebuilding the street.  Sadly, when they rebuilt Elizabeth Ave, they reduced it to one lane for much of it, when they should have probably just made a nice transit median that would also be better prepped to serve as the last few miles of a light rail line also.  

 

 

Also, that photo of the sleek Siemens S70 proves how terrible the CATS logo is.  They have hyper expensive design and planning yet still have an odd low res-shaded logo made with some graphics program in the 1990s.  Odd that it hasn't been cleaned up or at least re-shaded in high definition. 

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I think a better idea would be to end the streetcar in Plaza Midwood and to serve the Eastland area with a branch off the Silver Line (via Eastway and Central Ave) that could later be extended to I-485 along Albemarle Rd.  The Eastland area is just too far from downtown to make a mixed traffic streetcar with average speeds of 6-10 mph a viable transit option. And while dedicated ROW streetcar would eliminate the speed problem, I think that if, hypothetically, the Albemarle Rd corridor was chosen as a transit/redevelopment corridor, it would be necessary to have the capacity of light rail. Of course this is more an exercise in hypotheticals than anything, but I do think Albemarle Rd would make a great future transit corridor.  Also as Kermit said before streetcar can have solid ridership numbers where it functions as an urban circulator, but it's questionable how well it will function as a linear transit mode.  I think if we are going to spend the money on streetcar, we should spend it on something that is known to work well-a system that functions as an urban circulator.  In other words rather than having one line that travels 10 miles, it would be better to have a web of 2-3 mile streetcar segments serving Uptown and all the major destinations/corridors/employment centers just outside downtown (i.e. Midtown, Freedom Dr, Queens University, CMC, etc in addition to Plaza and JC Smith).

Edited by cltbwimob
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^^^ Completely agree with this.  Streetcar should not have 10-mile routings.  There should be an interchange with the Silver line some place, but extend no further than Briar Creek at the very furthest.

I would run a branch of the Silver Line straight down Albemarle Rd as a spur, and agree that a stop at Eastland site makes sense, as well as running this out to 485.

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1 hour ago, atlrvr said:

^^^ Completely agree with this.  Streetcar should not have 10-mile routings.  There should be an interchange with the Silver line some place, but extend no further than Briar Creek at the very furthest.

I would run a branch of the Silver Line straight down Albemarle Rd as a spur, and agree that a stop at Eastland site makes sense, as well as running this out to 485.

Albemarle Road is currently five to six lanes between US 74 and Harris Boulevard. Would it be realistic to cut that number down to four lanes, utilizing the median as ROW for light rail? Traffic is usually pretty heavy on that stretch already, so would a road diet have a detriment effect on congestion, or would light rail alleviate that pressure?

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1 hour ago, atlrvr said:

I was viewing it as a future phase spur.....so really two lines....Silver Line to Matthews and Orange(?) line to Mint Hill, that share the same track  between Uptown and Albemarle Rd along the Independence corridor.

This is common in lots of transit systems.

This is more or less what I was talking about for a branch off the silver line, except I think that the split should occur at Eastway/Wendover and should follow a Eastway-Central-Albemarle routing.

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