If you wish to travel near the riverfront between Canal Street and Julia Street, consider taking the 10 - Tchoupitoulas bus line. Passing the modern skyscrapers of downtown and the old Creole architecture of the French Quarter, the Rampart line opened in A one-way ride from end to end of the Rampart line takes about half an hour. Getting Around. New Links. Leaving From:. Departing Arriving. See all alerts.
Our Streetcars As streetcars glide underneath grand live oaks and past stately mansions, they offer up relaxing views of the beauty, charm, and history of New Orleans. Learn a little about our streetcars in the video below: St.
Charles Streetcar New Orleans residents and visitors alike love the St. Please wait. Tchoupitoulas Alert. In Seattle, the new line will be an addition to the city's existing system, while the other cities will be opening entirely new streetcar systems. In addition, plenty of other cities are considering starting or growing their streetcar systems. APTA lists 89 US cities in the "active planning" phase, a broad umbrella that includes everything from cities just talking about it to those that have secured funding.
While APTA admits its list may not be up to date and may include some plans that have gone inactive, it is nevertheless telling that around cities have seriously considered installing streetcar systems in recent years, and that more than a few are fully operational.
S treetcars require large initial capital investments — namely, laying down rails and buying the cars. This is the biggest complaint of streetcar opponents: that systems are simply too expensive for systems that just shuttle people back and forth.
Indeed, they tend to cost a lot more than a bus, another public transit option often compared with streetcars. And buses can largely cover the same routes as streetcars, at comparable speeds to streetcars. The cost of a streetcar vehicle, meanwhile, can run in the millions. Even an expensive electric bus is cheaper. In other words, buses are usually cheaper if the question is simply about moving people from point A to B.
This fight over cost came to a head in Cincinnati late in , when Mayor John Cranley tried to stop the city's new streetcar system. Though the city council later overruled him, he still insisted that the system was too expensive. Streetcars may simply represent a middle way between cheaper buses and much more expensive systems, particularly for cities that are strapped for cash. So when a city wants a transit upgrade but doesn't have the money for a hefty investment like more commuter rail, subway extensions, or light rails that run separate from the road, the streetcar could look like a good compromise Some advocates say the operating costs of streetcars are lower than buses over time, after the capital costs of putting down tracks.
Those longer-term operating costs can be lower in part because streetcars tend to carry far more people than one bus can, and streetcars also don't require gasoline. That said, for lower operating costs to offset the high upfront costs could take a very long time given the high price of streetcar construction. In addition, advocates argue that streetcar vehicles don't usually have to be replaced as often as buses.
A study from the Federal Transit Administration found that large buses have a minimum useful life of 12 years, noting that many city transit authorities move to retire these buses after that period, rather than stretching out the buses' lives.
United Streetcar, an Oregon company that builds the vehicles, says the cars last 30 years. And if a streetcar is given its own dedicated lane, it can go faster than traffic though it still has to deal with streetlights Advocates also say that streetcars confer all sorts of other benefits, like being environmentally friendly, giving cities a "sense of place," and boosting economic development.
Cities have a few ways of funding streetcars. One is government. They can get money from local, state, or federal government, as well as local businesses or other sources though state funding is rare. Local funding can come from a variety of places: raising taxes, selling bonds, or adding surcharges on to things like car registrations.
Federal funding often comes from competitive grants, with cities applying to the Department of Transportation and vying with each other for precious funds. The mix of funding varies widely from city to city. The rest will come from a variety of sources, including local taxes, private sources, and selling land. The bulk of one Seattle streetcar line, meanwhile, came from a business improvement district — a group of businesses that pay higher taxes in order to raise money for particular projects like streetcars.
The fact that streetcars are typically financed in part through special revenue measures that may not have been available for bus projects helps explain why this more expensive option is sometimes preferred over a thriftier bus. Advocates have a whole list of arguments for why cities should build streetcar lines.
Here are a few of them. He adds that tourists prefer streetcars to buses because streetcars tend to be less intimidating and more understandable for a newcomer. Streetcars also run on steel rails, but with no slot between the tracks, and no underground cable. Unlike the mechanical cable cars, streetcars are propelled by onboard electric motors and require a trolley pole to draw power from an overhead wire.
This makes streetcars more difficult to classify by sight than the cable cars, which are all very similar in appearance. And just to confuse things further, San Francisco is also one of the few American cities that operates trolley coaches, which look like regular buses, but are completely electric and have twin poles on the roof of the bus that draw power from double overhead wires. Our cable car grip operators and conductors are there to help. When you hop aboard these rolling landmarks you are climbing hills the same way San Franciscans did in the s.
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