>>1213460>DC streetcar, the most hopeless "streetcar" projectHa! You have never seen our pathetic streetcar system in Tampa, Florida. It's a single line just under 3 miles long like DC and is used by less than a 1,000 people per day (DC is about 3,000 per day). It doesn't even connect directly to the local Amtrak station, unlike the DC one. One article I read described it as an A-ticket ride for tourists, and it's currently doing a program until the end of the year where everyone can ride for free to test its viability definitively, before they decide to approve a proposed expansion. But hey, it does have brand-new streetcars built to look like they're 100 years old, and as long as they look good in tourist ads, everything will work out, right? Well, apparently not.
The main problem is that this streetcar system was not started to provide a new mass transit alternative for the city; it was started as an excuse to restore and run the last remaining heritage streetcar in Tampa from the old system a century ago (all of the infrastructure from the old system has been gone for ages and the current line was built this century), which they incidentally rarely run. It's a shame because I like old timey rail transport, and the execution of this streetcar has been terrible.
