The fine folks at the Fort Worth Business Press have been busy on the streetcar front lately – there are two new articles, one from Leslie Wimmer and one from John-Laurent Tronche. Leslie’s article reports on the latest news to come out of the city’s streetcar study committee. The group has settled on the modern Skoda cars like the ones used in Portland, Tacoma, and Seattle (an example of which can be seen in the above photo from Portland), and has been discussing routes. Townsite Co.’s Phillip Poole was one of the people who spoke to Leslie.

“We’ve isolated basically five or six routes that would start in the Downtown hub,” Poole said. At the meeting “we went over criteria such as how much density there is, where the development opportunities were, what routes would be the most economically viable in terms of both fares and which ones would create the most energy.

“One would go into the Medical District, one would go into the Cultural District, another route would come off of the one in Fort Worth South and go to Polytechnic either on Rosedale or on Lancaster, and one that would come, after the completion of the Trinity River Vision, to the North Side to the Stockyards,” Poole said. “The routes would come from the hub with radial arms that go out into where our urban villages are, where our big districts are: the Cultural District, Hospital District, Stockyards, and then one to Texas Wesleyan or the Lancaster Corridor.”

The group is also talking about color-coding the paint schemes of the streetcars to help identify their destinations.

One idea for the color aesthetic of the streetcars would be to create a color-coded system that goes along with signs in the city directing traffic to cultural areas, such as the green Cultural District signs, Poole said.

“My company designed a sign system in the districts, the Cultural District has green signs and Downtown has blue, and one thing we discussed would be for each of those lines to have a distinct color so the green line might go to the Cultural District,” Poole said. “The thing is that some of those cars would start in one loop and wind up in another, so you have to be careful if you color code not to cause confusion.”

The other article, by John-Laurent Tronche, takes a historical perspective on things. One of the people interviewed was North Texas Historic Transportation‘s Andy Nold.

Streetcar proponents argue the transportation’s reintroduction could bring residents back to the central city and spur business growth around potential stops. Depressed areas once served by the streetcar but now cut off, such as Como, East Side and, to some extent, the Near Southside, also could accelerate redevelopment efforts.

“We once were a leader and now we’re playing catch-up,” Nold said.