Well, I guess one wawy to look at it is that $32 million for 2 miles is chump change compared to the price tag for 8 miles of the Cross-County extension of dubious value for most St. Louisans?

Considering the disgustingly massive subsidization of road construction and maintenance in America I wouldn’t feel bad at all about getting federal money for a trolley system.

While the Loop is very successful, it is currently a very auto-centric environment. Cars are everywhere, Delmar is often at a standstill and many of the sidestreets dead-end to the north or are totally inaccesible to the south.

The trolley will help relieve the congestion there while building on the density.

However, one of the largest problems facing the Loop is the lack of connectivity of Delmar with the surrounding grid. To me, that is a huge problem that I would like to see Joe Edwards fix.

One good thing that the trolley line would do is connect the History Museum to a vibrant neighborhood. Currently, the History Museum stands in a dead zone.

As a northsider, however, I feel more than a little slighted by the trolleys. Why not build a trolley line from downtown north along Florissant? I’d rather ride streetcars than either buses or MetroLink trains. I wish that Metro would revise its expansion plan by replacing proposed MetroLink lines with new streetcar lines. They would be cheaper and faster to build and easier to connect with new lines that would be built in the future.

Hopefully it’s not an either/or sitution.

A trolley is just a pretty bus with steel wheels. It’s no quicker than a bus, so it will do little to attract the daily rider. Sure, it’s attractive in a nostalgic sort of way, but if it is/was the greatest thing since sliced bread, they wouldn’t have been removed in the middle of the last century.

Metrolink light rail “works” because it is quicker and moves a lot more people. As a tourist attraction or an economic generator, sure, consider building a trolley line, but only with local funds, from the businesses (and residents?) who benefit directly. Why should the rest of the metro area subsidize a boondoggle that’s planned for an area that’s already rebounding?!

[REPLY - Couple of factual problems with your statement Jim. First, you assert the streetcars were removed in the middle of the 20th Century because GM, Standard Oil & Firestone conspired to remove them from American cities and replace them with private cars and GM buses. They were all given a slap on the wrist.

True enough that a trolley/streetcar is not faster than a bus, I'll give you that much. And yes, it gets you from A to B in the same way a bus would. But ridership on the new trolley lines will far surpass any bus running the same stretch at the same times. That means more people in a given area, a good bit of which needs the increased retail traffic. This could also reduce the need for more parking in the loop as people can come to any number of MetroLink park-n-ride lots and then take the trolley to the loop.

Nostalgia is an interesting thing. They happened to pick vintage cars for this line but I'm guessing that if they had picked a brand new streetcar interest & ridership would be similar. We will attract people from all over just to ride the trolley. We'd never get that from announcing a new bus route. This is an economic development tool, no different than building a dome to attract people to an area. This form of development just doesn't happen to involve major league sports. - SLP]