Fort Worth City Council Smothers Streetcar in Its Crib

While some critics have said the project has been “rushed,” if tonight’s vote goes this way this will bring to a close a streetcar study process that has been going on now for nearly 15 years, dating back to the Linkages Study in 1996, which recommended a streetcar be part of the city’s transportation systems. In fact, studies of streetcars and other similar central city rail projects can be traced back to the ’70s.

Remember, this was not a vote to commit to building the streetcar – this was a vote to finish the latest study of the project, for which money had already been allocated. Finishing this study would have given us a finalized business plan, full preliminary engineering, and more to give us a complete information package to make the final fully-informed yes/no vote on the project at that time. Even as some of these critics, including councilmembers Jordan, Zimmerman, and Burdette have said we “don’t have enough answers” to build the streetcar yet, they’re actively going to stop looking for those answers. What sense does that make?

As peer cities like Tucson, Cincinnati, and Oklahoma City roll ahead with their streetcar projects, we’re not even going to finish the study that would have given us all the data we need to make our decision. Meanwhile, we keep repeating the mantra that Fort Worth has “the best” revitalized downtown in the United States, a statement that’s getting increasingly creaky as the years roll by and cities across the US continue to build real downtowns that function as true neighborhoods integrated with a larger urban core.

There is a huge vacuum of leadership and vision at City Hall these days. A streetcar supporter recently put it this way: Good ideas don’t die, but they sure as hell take longer when our political leaders can’t muster a few drops of courage.