On the subject of the Cultural District modern streetcar public meeting, DC writes:

Anything interesting from last night?

So I thought I’d give my impressions from the two meetings I attended – the one at the Guinn School in the Near Southside, and the one at the UNT Health Science Center in the Cultural District.

Both meetings followed the same format – Andy Taft of Downtown Fort Worth, Inc. gave some opening remarks, and then Dana Burghdoff from the city’s Planning Department gave a detailed presentation on the system, followed by an open question & answer period.

Unsurprisingly, the attendees at the Near Southside meeting all seemed to be strongly supportive of the streetcar. Representatives from Fort Worth South, Inc. and district business owners and developers were on hand voicing their enthusiasm, as well as one of the Fairmount neighborhood association heads (the Fairmount NA has thus far been very supportive of the project). Also on hand were leaders from the East Rosedale neighborhoods expressing their support of the project.

A couple of notable moments: Phillip Poole, streetcar study committee member and head of TownSite Co., a local urban development company involved in many projects that have featured here on the pages of Fort Worthology (such as Museum Place, the Polytechnic Heights restorations, the Motheral Printing site, and the former Knights of Pythias Hall east of downtown) gave a passionate and frank monologue about the need for the streetcar in shaping the future growth of Fort Worth to support denser urban neighborhoods, and about Fort Worth needing to step up and realize that we’re not a small town anymore, but a big city that had better start acting like one. He called the streetcar a legacy project that will help not just current residents, but their children and grandchildren, and future residents, for decades to come.

Tom Struhs, developer of the Trinity Bluff developments in Uptown, was also on hand and said that he thought we should build the entire system (downtown/Cultural District/Near Southside/Eastside/Stockyards/etc.) all at once, really knock the thing out of the ballpark, and that it’d be a small price to pay compared to the good that would come from it (I have to say, Mr. Struhs – I like the way you think!).

Numerous attendees made comments about the city’s remarks about trying to find money for the system – usually along the lines of things like “we’re putting in a billion dollar toll road that’s just going to make sprawl and air pollution worse but you’re skittish about $250 million for a streetcar that’ll help our city neighborhoods strengthen and grow and accommodate growth and lessen car traffic loads and help central city air quality?” These comments warmed my heart – the Near Southsiders really get what this is all about, and it’s one reason why I always tell people that they should keep their eye on that district as time progresses and expect great things. A remark was made, speaking of the Southwest Parkway, that it’s projected to remove around 11,000 cars per day from Hulen – which sounds impressive, but is really just a drop in the bucket – and of course, the cars themselves aren’t disappearing, they’re just being shunted to another road, and still polluting. Compare that to the 50,000+ cars that pass through the 7th/University/Camp Bowie/Bailey intersection a day – an area where the streetcar would serve to get some of those 50,000+ car trips eliminated completely.

The Near Southside meeting was completely supportive and a lot of great discussion about starter routes and funding came out of it.

The other meeting I attended at UNT Health Science Center was actually also pretty positive. Cultural District residents, council reps, business people, and Dan McGraw from the Fort Worth Weekly joined us, along with a contingent of Near Southside leaders who came along to continue their support. One lady, a resident of one of the Cultural District neighborhoods, said she was against the streetcar because it would ruin all the roads with construction and string lots of wires all over the place but “have no benefits at all.” Despite evidence presented of the unobtrusiveness of the wires (a single wire over each track, with poles that can easily be designed to integrate with a variety of styles) and the speed at which construction of the lines can be accomplished (two-block stretches can take just two weeks from start to finish), this lady seemed unmoved. She said that buses were all the city needed and said that the she believed the streetcar would not attract any more riders than the buses. This despite the fact that while she said those words, the chap running the projector pulled up one of the slides about ridership, in particular the one about the Tacoma Link streetcar. Tacoma Link replaced a bus that followed the exact same route. That bus got ridership of about 200,000 people a year; with the Tacoma Link streetcar now operating on the exact same route, it gets ridership of 920,000 people per year. (I thought the inclusion of Tacoma in the study was interesting, as it’s a much, much smaller city than Fort Worth yet has had great success with its streetcar project.) For my part, I stood up and explained several of the reasons why streetcars tend to attract notably higher ridership than buses and why they attract “choice riders,” and my remarks were backed up by the reps from the city.

Apart from the one negative voice, the rest of the comments were quite positive, even from CD neighborhood residents.

At both meetings, city and committee reps made sure to emphasize the purpose of the streetcar – not a long-running rapid line like DART’s light rail trains, but a neighborhood-focused circulator and “pedestrian accelerator” meant to service central city neighborhoods.

So that’s how the meetings went down. Mr. Poole tells me I missed some…interesting…discussion at the first meeting (I believe it was held at the Rose Marine Theater), when one of the attendees said what we really needed to do was crisscross the central city with elevated maglev tracks upon which rode individual one and two-person pods which could be dialed up by cell phone to go anywhere you wanted and which would travel at 250 miles per hour and also go to Dallas (and that we’d need 10 foot tall solid concrete walls around the tracks). I have to say, I’m a little sorry I missed the more flamboyantly crazy talk at that particular meeting. I’d have been tempted to shout that particular attendee down and say that what we really really needed was a series of “Futurama”-style transport tubes running everywhere.