Amsterdam - a public transportation heaven

Meanwhile we can't even get a rail line from San Jose>Sacramento>Reno..

We don't even have trains here and the public transportation is horrible lol

An urban planning tragedy for my hometown of San Antonio was the sudden death of its 2014 streetcar starter project, which had been directly modeled after the tram systems of Vienna and Amsterdam.

The suburban anti-rail luddites went berserk when they saw the Evil Progressive Liberal Downtown European Monstrosity, and, not content to have cowed the local politicians with fear of the Republican election tidal wave just months before project groundbreaking, they went so far as to change the city charter to effectively bar any new rail mass transit infrastructure in the future.  This still isn't enough, and some are trying in the Texas legislature to constitutionally block rail transit statewide.

Ironically, Amazon is now seeking bids from cities for the construction of a new corporate headquarters, and San Antonio has thrown its hat into the ring as one of the more serious wild card contenders.  However, Amazon has expressly stated in their program that they are prioritizing mass transit options, and today our city has effectively none when we could have had up and running one of the more novel setups for a major U.S. city.  For want of a relatively cheap and easily installed streetcar system, we may have lost out on an additional $5 billion in direct corporate downtown investment over and beyond the potential investment already stymied when the project was killed.

I could have already been riding one of those...  Thankfully, the mayor and city council that squandered the streetcar have all finally been ousted this year for their hopeless lack of vision, and I was happy to help vote them out specifically over their betrayal of this project.

 

Probably the context isn't helping that much yet. It seems all USA cities (especially those progressive-leaning ones) have joined the streetcar bandwagon all at once. Streetcars look like great ideas, but they can only become great ideas if implemented properly.  In several cases, their construction has responded only to corporate and real estate interests, trying to boost the value of properties nearby the tracks and stations. Maybe that was the case in San Antonio?

Kansas City has a streetcar network, it joins the central station with... nowhere. Just a sleek-looking cool futuristic train running through the downtown, they even had to make it free to ride so somebody would actually ride the system. Real transport systems, those that really work well, do nothing more that connecting residential areas with jobs areas. We SC4 players know that well. Streetcars running through downtown districts are a laughable idea, as downtowns per definition have a scarce population. Furthermore, that's an affluent population who won't bother using the streetcar.

Sacramento is jumping on the streetcar as well. It will be for a portion downtown between the capitol building and across the river to the baseball stadium in West Sacramento. Eventually they want to extend it into a new district north of the Valley Station where they are developing over the old UP railyards.

However, the main issues with Sacramento's transit have more to do with existing transit not servicing the areas they should be. Talks have been in progress regarding the northern Green Line for light rail to connect with the airport. This was discussed during the time they were replacing Terminal B in 2010 and it still hasn't gone there. It only goes up a few blocks from downtown to where the railyards are and only a few years after it was opened they were about to shut it down because the ridership isn't as promised. Had they just built the line out to the airport directly since the land in between is empty, at least you'd have some use from people not wanting to pay for airfield parking.  Then as the city spreads, the line could just have stops added along the way. Even Los Angeles is working on such a connection and San Francisco has had one for several years through the BART and Caltrain, which is being upgraded to an electric line too. But even San Francisco is having connective problems. They demolished the old Transbay Terminal (bus only) to build a new one over it (now with an underground train box and psuedo-subway extension). They are expecting Caltrain and CaHSR to reach it but the underground tunnel for them hasn't even been funded yet.

As for further out areas, most have other transit options but those aren't frequent. Roseville is building another set of tracks and will be seeing more frequent trains. But then it's only one stop of three going east of Sacramento. There are still a lot of commuters from Auburn and Rocklin that have to drive. Amtrak does have busses going from those other stations but you can't take it unless you ride the train too. By extending the line as Sac>Reno two birds can be killed with one stone as now you have ridership by tourists wanting to get to Reno and the cities between now able to reach either without a bus. There was a serious effort to make it happen but Union Pacific said no as that part of the line is mostly single-tracked with several tunnels and it's their line anyway.