New streetcar lines in St. Louis and Milwaukee

Two Midwestern cities—St. Louis and Milwaukee—both acquired new streetcar lines in November, and I went and rode them last week.

The lines are comparable in size. Both are miniscule given that they’re in urban areas that are dozens of kilometers across. The St. Louis line is 3.5 km (2.2 miles) long, the Milwaukee line 3.3 km (2.1 miles). Here are maps, drawn on the same scale:

The Loop Trolley in context, showing MetroLink, Forest Park, the Central West End, and the Delmar Loop.

The Milwaukee streetcar in context, showing the location of some of the neighborhoods it passes through.

The lines weren’t cheap to build. The St. Louis line is said to have cost $51,000,000, the Milwaukee line approximately $125,000,000. The difference is surely connected with the fact that the latter line is double-tracked throughout and has more rolling stock and much more elaborate stations.

Neither line is speedy. Each was taking approximately twenty minutes for a one-way trip; average speed was thus something like 10.5 km (6.5 miles) per hour. One factor here is that stations come along frequently. Both lines have ten stations in each direction (the Milwaukee line runs part way on two parallel streets and claims to have 18 stations in all).

The lines really are for the most part streetcar lines. The St. Louis line runs in traffic as it passes through the “Delmar Loop.”

The Loop Trolley in the Delmar Loop.

East of there it consists of a single reserved track, either in the middle of or at the edge of a street, but it still must wait for red lights.

The Loop Trolley on Delmar Boulevard east of the Delmar Loop proper.

The Milwaukee line runs in traffic the whole way except at its terminuses and for a few meters under a freeway. It too spends several minutes of each trip waiting for red lights.

The Milwaukee streetcar running south along N. Jackson St.

The two lines in some ways are quite different.

The St. Louis route—known as the Loop Trolley–seems to have been created chiefly to give a boost to the commercial district at its western end called the Delmar Loop (or just “the Loop” in St. Louis English). This is a congenial traditional commercial district that, these days, serves chiefly as a restaurant row. It is heavily patronized by students and staff from nearby Washington University, but in fact, people visit the street from all over the St. Louis area, which is extraordinarily short of congenial traditional urban commercial streets. The Loop’s advertising proclaims it one of “one of the 10 great streets in America.” The truth is that, on its own terms, the Loop may at best be one of America’s thousand greatest streets. There are many hundreds of commercial streets in New York that are livelier, and probably just as many spread among Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco. Even in St. Louis, nearby Euclid Avenue, in the Central West End, has many more pedestrians and more interesting restaurants and much more interesting architecture than the Delmar Loop and appears to be thriving these days in a way it’s never really done in the thirty odd years I’ve been visiting it periodically. The Loop seems pretty quiet in comparison. It’s quite possible that the presence of the Loop Trolley may help redress the balance. The new cars, built in an antique style, fit the Loop’s image as an old-fashioned, urban, pedestrian-oriented street. (And the shiny wooden interior of the cars is actually quite attractive.)

Inside the Loop Trolley.

The St. Louis line, short one of its two cars, was running only every 45 minutes or so when I was there, and there is no “next train” information available either in the stations or online, so the chances are that walking the whole route would be faster than waiting for a train. There is, of course, the issue that a transit line that runs every 45 minutes and, for the moment, only eight or eleven hours a day four days a week isn’t much of a transit line. As many observers have pointed out,¹ it’s hard to defend the Loop Trolley as urban transportation. It serves two MetroLink stations and runs in the same streets as several bus lines that offer faster and more frequent service.² The fact that it doesn’t accept transfers from Metro, the St. Louis transit agency, considerably limits its potential. There were only a handful of passengers on the runs that I observed.

It must be added that the Loop trolley isn’t quite as redundant as it first seems. There are a couple of dead blocks between the Loop proper and the Delmar Loop MetroLink station. This might seem trivial in New York, but St. Louis remains a city with an extraordinarily high crime rate; its murder rate by most measures is the highest of any big U.S. city—higher than the murder rates in Honduras or Venezuela. The Loop proper seems to be quite a safe place, but the nearby ghetto isn’t, and people in St. Louis are conscious of crime in a way that people in, say, New York no longer are. The ability to travel through a few possibly dangerous blocks in the Loop Trolley might add to people’s security (although the prospect of a 45-minute wait for the thing to come undermines this pretty much completely). But, again, the line was mostly built, I’m sure, to add to the Loop’s aesthetic appeal, and it’s quite possible to argue that it really does do that.

The Milwaukee streetcar (“the Hop”) is very different. It’s more like recently opened streetcar lines in Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Kansas City, and Oklahoma City in that it connects downtown with a nearby destination or two. In Milwaukee’s case, the most important non-downtown destination is the Intermodal Center, which incorporates the Amtrak station. The Milwaukee streetcar also grazes the “Historic Third Ward,” an old industrial area that’s become a fashionable residential and entertainment district. Its northern terminus is in the socially complex but mostly upper-middle-class Lower East Side residential area. It could be argued that the streetcar’s route doesn’t serve Milwaukee’s downtown very well. The heart of downtown Milwaukee runs east-west along Wisconsin Avenue, across a freeway and three blocks north of the Intermodal Center. This is where most of the major stores, hotels, and office buildings are located. The Milwaukee streetcar has stops at Wisconsin Avenue, but they’re a couple of blocks east of what would once have been identified as the 100% location. It’s likely though that, if the streetcar had run along Wisconsin Avenue, it would have encountered traffic problems. There seem to be few problems on the less trafficked streets it does run along.

The line uses modern streetcar equipment. It’s scheduled to run every fifteen minutes and seemed to be coming close to doing so when I was there. There are no countdown clocks in the stations, but schedules are posted. The trains were most certainly not crowded when I was in Milwaukee, but some runs had a couple of dozen passengers. Still, the cars were far from full.

Inside the Milwaukee streetcar.

The fact that the line is temporarily free and still a novelty is probably helping to build passenger loads. Current plans are to begin charging a dollar in a year and to keep fares separate from those of the Milwaukee County Transit System buses. I can imagine use of the streetcar plummeting when fares are implemented.

There are proposals to extend the Milwaukee streetcar route network, perhaps into the poverty-stricken areas northwest of downtown, perhaps up toward the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. The trouble with this idea, of course, is that a street-running streetcar with no signal preemption is likely to be slower than a bus. You can’t justify building a short traditional streetcar line on the grounds that it will speed up transportation; it won’t. It is possible that the streetcars will add to the aesthetic appeal of the neighborhoods through which they pass. In an era when places are expected to compete with each other, this isn’t a trivial reason for building streetcar lines, but it’s not the one usually stressed by their proponents.

Note added 1 December 2020. The Delmar Loop Trolley in St. Louis ceased operating after December 29, 2019. Its rolling stock continued to be unreliable, and it never did attract many passengers. Efforts to restore service have so far come to nothing. The Pandemic, of course, hasn’t helped.