Seattle’s South Lake Union streetcar is an empty monument to money

On a recent weekday I rode around on the South Lake Union Streetcar, hoping to catch the vibe as city leaders debate whether to expand the now 16-year-old trolley system through downtown.

When I got on near Fred Hutch, there was no vibe to be caught. I was the only one on the train besides the driver.  

Incredibly this solitude lasted the entire ambling run, 1.3 miles along Lake Union and then south through what has been one of America’s hottest neighborhoods, the land of Amazon.

I kept riding, to see if anything would happen. After turning around and heading back north, the train picked up a man taking cellphone footage of his trip. He said he was visiting from Sri Lanka. We enjoyed our circuit back through Amazon’s campus, past the Cricket building with the famed Banana Stand, and down again to the lake.

It was like being given a private tour, in a 30-ton quiet cab with floor-to-ceiling visibility. The tourist was ecstatic.

I felt kind of sad. I never supported the building of the streetcar back in the 2000s; my argument then was that Seattle needed real rapid mass transit, not more “transportation toys” like foot ferries or the World’s Fair monorail. I lost that debate, as I often do, but that was OK. The sleek trolleys turned out to be cool and fairly well-used, at least for a time.

Now they are ghost cars, circling pointlessly through a faded development dream.

“On paper, it was sold like one of those architectural brochures, with happy people in an urban utopia. It was a vision. It wasn’t backed up by data.”

That’s former Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata. Twenty years ago, he was a rare downer of a voice against the optimism of the streetcar. He argued then that the ridership was oversold, the costs underjudged. Mostly he argued the ongoing burden of operating the streetcar would become an albatross for the city, siphoning money from transit projects that might serve people in communities that needed more mobility help.

“Streetcars just have very high operating costs,” Licata said, when I called him out of the blue. (He retired from the council in 2015.) “I felt that the developer and private financial support would fade, and we would be left holding the bag on a system that doesn’t do much.”

Which is what has happened.

“I told you so!” he joked. “There’s your quote.”

South Lake Union Streetcar ridership peaked in 2013, at about 2,000 riders a day. It dropped by a third prior to the pandemic, then cratered and hasn’t much recovered. It’s now averaging about 500 riders a day — less in winter and more in summer — on trains running 15 hours per day.

The streetcar costs $12,000 per day on average to operate and maintain — more than $20 per rider at the current pace.

It would have been cheaper for the city to pay for me and my Sri Lankan tourist friend to hire an Uber.

Ridership on the other line, on First Hill and Capitol Hill, is much higher, about 4,000 per day. But at last accounting, it was costing $26,000 a day to operate, and bringing in less than $1,100 a day in fares — because two-thirds of the riders didn’t pay.  

With that dismal backdrop, Seattle’s overall streetcar vision has become hazy. The project to connect the two fragmented lines through downtown, ostensibly making the whole thing more useful, was just recalculated to be triple its original construction cost, from $135 million in 2017 to $410 million today.

That project is on indefinite pause. I knew it was in trouble when it got rebranded last year as the “Culture Connector.” It meant backers were really digging deep.  

How did we get here? Some of it is pandemic hangover for sure. But the streetcar was dwindling before the pandemic. Licata’s critique rings true — that it was always intended more to goose up real estate than move people. In the 2010s, when everything else in Seattle was on fire, ridership on the South Lake Union line dropped.

“It was pushed through by Seattle’s ‘deep state,’” Licata said — referring, he says half-jokingly, to an alliance of developers and civic planners that held great sway at the time.

So what now? Licata suggested the fundamental point of streetcars hasn’t changed — which is that they’re primarily tools for economic development.

“There’s nothing wrong with economic development, but the segment through downtown, the connector, it’s got the same problems,” Licata said. “If they insist on building that, they should get the property owners down there to help pay for it, with an assessment. Because that’s who would really benefit the most from having it.”

Back on the ghost train, the tourist says goodbye and gets off. Another rider gets on but gets off after one stop. So again I have the European tram all to myself, as we glide at perfect sightseeing speed past the glittering, green-hued Amazon spheres.

It occurs to me that I can’t think of this as a waste of money. Because that’s what it was built to serve.