Wow after all those years of watching the city build streetcars even though we kept trying to tell them they are glorified theme park rides for tourists, the city is cutting back on streetcars because... there aren't any tourists.
Since the pandemic triggered restrictions on businesses in early March, the Regional Transit Authority's iconic streetcars have seen a 90% decline from normal ridership levels. The RTA already has most of its system running on the less-frequent Saturday schedule in response, but the streetcars — which once provided millions of dollars in fares when they were filled with tourists — are now costing the agency much more to run per passenger.
As a fix, the RTA is considering running the streetcars less often. While the schedule now has an eight-minute wait between streetcars on Saturdays, the RTA could increase that to a 15-minute wait or longer.
"It's just time for us to take a hard look at what that service level should be, but still maintaining adequate social distancing," said RTA chief executive Alex Wiggins during a meeting of the RTA board this week. "Right now eight minutes between streetcars is just too much service."
Because fewer streetcars would likely make keeping distance more difficult aboard any one in particular, they probably wouldn't want to cut it back too far. But do we really think the current bar is 8 minutes? Because, no. Also we need to talk more about this fee-based system for public services and why we need to move away from that altogether. But that's for another time.
What's really fun about this is many of us have spent the better part of 15 years since Katrina arguing that the city devoted nearly all of its attentions to "rebuilding" a city that serves tourists while neglecting the needs of those of us who actually live here. The streetcar projects have been a perfect example of this. In the case of the Rampart cars, the explicitly stated goal was less about transit than it was "economic development." But whenever the issue was raised in these terms, it was always met with denials. RTA has even been accused of re-configuring bus lines specifically to force more commuters onto the Loyola streetcar line in order to demonstrate its usefulness. These are your streetcars, we built them for you. What would ever make you think they were just a tourist amusement?
Cut to today and we're cutting streetcar service because there aren't enough tourists anymore. Oh well. The good news is, all these tourists who aren't here will be less frustrated figuring out how to get down to the pedestrian only French Quarter now that they can't ride or drive there.
Another option might be for the non-tourists to consider soon will be to not take the boat. Coming in September. We mean it this time.
After more than two years of delays, failed inspections and fingerpointing, New Orleans’ public transportation authority has announced that one of its new ferry boats will begin carrying passengers across the river next month.
It’s the first time since 2018 that the Regional Transit Authority has given a hard deadline for a ferry's completion, after contractors and managers have repeatedly blown previous deadlines assigned to the $10 million vessels.
The ferryboat RTA 2 should be repaired and ready by Sept. 18, officials said at a transit board meeting earlier this week. Then, Metal Shark, the Jeanerette company building the boats, is expected to resolve leftover issues with its twin, RTA 1. Though officials said the second job should wrap quickly, the agency did not provide a timeline for completion in that case.
Only one boat is ready. The good news there is since these boats don't carry cars, and we already know there are no tourists, and nobody has a job to get to downtown anymore anyway, they probably won't need the second boat any time soon.
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