North Park group seeks streetcars' restoration

Area merchants say they'd help business

By James Steinberg
STAFF WRITER

August 14, 2000

You don't have to be old to recall when streetcars ran along University Avenue in San Diego's North Park. Service began in 1907 and continued until 1949, when the streetcars gave way to buses.

The No. 7 bus, which runs along University, even has the same number as the trolley it replaced. And the tracks are still there, six inches below the street surface, although no one is proposing that they be used again.

Businesses in the area do want to bring the historic streetcars back. The benefits would be substantial, according to Jay Turner, executive director of North Park Main Street, a nonprofit group working to revitalize the community's commercial district.

It would, he says, enhance transportation in the area, boost economic development, serve as a tourist draw and restore part of the community's vanished heritage.

"People like rail transportation," Turner said. "It's enjoyable, and people will ride on it more readily than they will a bus."

North Park Main Street envisions a streetcar route that begins at 12th and C streets downtown, next to the San Diego Trolley station. The streetcars would proceed north along Park Boulevard past the San Diego Zoo, then turn east to run along University to 32nd Street.

A vestige of the vanished No. 7 streetcar is the dramatic "notch" at Georgia Street, Turner said. University runs through it east-west, and Georgia crosses it on the Renaissance Revival-style Georgia Street Bridge. The cut was made through the hill to bring the tracks into North Park.

Bringing the streetcars back to North Park makes business sense, according to the group's Richard Kurylo.

"Historic streetcars are one of the only forms of mass transportation that can travel along a main street and economically revitalize a neighborhood," he said, pointing to the success of similar projects in cities such as Tucson, Ariz., Portland, Ore., and Charlotte, N.C.

"It's not impossible to target 2005 for the groundbreaking, but it could be done even sooner," Turner said.

Possibly, but a lot will have to happen first, starting with a feasibility study. That's going to cost about $200,000, said Turner, who is looking to the state for money.

His request came too late to be included in the budget for the current fiscal year, which began July 1, said Kim Craig, an assistant to Assemblywoman Denise Moreno Ducheny, D-San Diego.

"We're trying to see if there's a possibility of getting them a grant, but at this time I just don't know what's out there," she said.

What's ahead

The feasibility study is only the first hurdle. City officials, the Metropolitan Transit Development Board and the Centre City Development Corp. will all have to come aboard. Among their concerns are the cost, who would operate the line, and whether it would be integrated into the rest of the city's public transportation system.

One of the drawing cards of a restored North Park streetcar service would be some of the vintage streetcars that once ran along University Avenue, according to Turner and Kurylo.

Of the 24 Class I cars built between 1912 and 1939 for the No. 7 line, three are already in San Diego. Nine later-model streetcars, called PCCs, which served on the line from 1939 to 1949, are in storage in El Paso, Texas, Turner said.

Christian Chaffee, an art and antiques dealer, owns the three Class I cars now in San Diego. They were ordered by San Diego businessman John D. Spreckels, and carried riders to the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park, Chaffee said.

The cars were being used as a private residence in El Cajon when Chaffee purchased them five years ago, and he said he would like to see them carry passengers once more.

"Their best use is to go back online as a transportation alternative, and to revitalize the neighborhood," Chaffee said. "If they go back online on the route they traveled, they will meet the criteria for a National Historic designation, which can qualify for federal funding."

The streetcars in El Paso are a different matter. The city was set to bring six of them here a decade ago as part of the San Diego Trolley system. The cars were free, it first appeared, with shipping them here being the only cost to the city, according to Ron Smith, a city redevelopment official.

"We had a right of way and tracks into downtown," he said, but the deal fell through when preservationists in El Paso realized the cars' true worth and balked at the giveaway.

At least some of those cars are available for purchase, Kurylo said. And there are historic streetcars to be had from other sources, according to Turner.

Other costs

The cost of restoring them, including putting in modern braking systems, can run up to $500,000 each, compared with the $350,000 price of a new 40-foot bus, he said. New state-of-the-art streetcars cost more than $2 million, according to San Diego Trolley officials.

The overall cost of building a North Park streetcar line won't be known until the feasibility study is finished, but similar historic restoration projects average about $10 million per mile, according to Kurylo. That includes tracks, cars, stations, overhead electrification, and revising the streets, he said.

For the 31/2 miles from North Park to downtown, that would be about $35 million.

Although historic streetcars in some cities operate as separate entities from the municipal transit system, Turner says the ideal situation is a fully integrated mass transit system -- buses, light rail and streetcars -- run by a single agency.

In San Diego's case, that would be the Metropolitan Transit Development Board, which operates the San Diego Trolley and San Diego Transit bus system.

"This project is not something we would be directly involved in at this point," said the MTDB's Dave Schumacher. He said streetcars could use the trolley's City College station at 12th and C streets, but could not run on the trolley tracks because the trolley system is operating at or near capacity.

"We're supportive of their efforts," Schumacher said.

But he adds that the No. 7 bus, which replaced the streetcars and now goes between North Park and downtown along essentially the same route, already provides the best service in the city system. He says the buses operate on six-minute intervals at peak times, 10 minutes at other times, and carry about 18,000 people a day.

Turner answers that the streetcar line would not replace existing bus service but supplement it. The cars could carry up to about 100 riders each and, at 10-minute intervals, could move 1,200 passengers an hour in both directions.

Schumacher, however, calls the proposal "too conceptual at this point."

Turner contends it is as an economic redevelopment tool, not as a means of transportation, that a restored streetcar line would pay the biggest dividends.

"Monorails, people movers, trams, buses and the San Diego Trolley didn't result in economic revitalization," he said.

Example given

North Park Main Street cites Charlotte, N.C., as a positive example. Launched in 1996, the $20 million Charlotte Trolley has a 1.2-mile route through an old downtown warehouse district that is coming back as a mixed residential-business enclave. The area's original streetcar service was discontinued in 1938.

The Charlotte Trolley operates Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and carries about 60,000 riders, said Hank Ingebretesen, the executive director. The route will soon be extended to 2.1 miles, he said, and within two years the trolley will run 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

Property values along the trolley route were $11.5 million before the service began four years ago, and now total $207 million, Ingebretesen said.

"Tax revenue from just 12 of the new trolley line developments shows that the city will recoup its investment in six years from the completion of the new developments, not the eight years originally forecast," Ingebretesen said.

The local proposal has the backing of the Greater North Park Planning Committee and more than a dozen groups in the community, said Roger Lewis, a committee member.

"My feeling is that the streetcar is an economic generator that has an ability, from the historical standpoint, to be federally funded," Lewis said.

And Park Boulevard is a natural light-rail corridor, he said. A streetcar along the route would provide an automobile-free link between North Park and downtown, he said, and take some of the automobile pressure off Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo's parking lot.