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Detroit’s Cullen, who spent decades working for General Motors on its real estate projects, suggests it’s not so much the transportation that matters, but its byproducts. “We went to Portland and Minneapolis and Denver,” he says. “You really begin to understand over time that as much as it is a transit system, it really fosters people walking around. This is reinforcing a new pattern of development.”

New Orleans hopes for similar results. “We’ve seen streetcar projects in other cities in North America generate positive benefits in terms of property values, increased development and increased densities,” says Winsome Bowen, a consultant at HDR Engineering working for the local transit system. Yes, these projects will help get people around more easily, but transportation is only the means to an end: a more prosperous, active city.

But both cities have seen their respective populations cut almost in half since 1960, and neither has adapted to the economic structure of the new century. Meanwhile, they’ve both dabbled in a variety of transit projects to mixed success, and they’ve done little to improve their bus services. How can either be confident that what has worked for a growing city thousands of miles away will work for them?

A Different Model

New Orleans, of course, has a long tradition of streetcars, but their perceived utility had been in decline since all lines were replaced by buses by 1964, with the exception of the famed one running down St. Charles Avenue, a convenient shuttle between the French Quarter and the Garden District.

After New Orleans held the 1984 World’s Fair, which attracted 8 million visitors and contributed to the restoration of the city’s waterfront, James Amdal sensed an opportunity for a comeback — especially once the city secured the rights to host the 1988 Republican National Convention. Working with a group of downtown businessmen, the University of New Orleans professor and director of the university’s Transportation Center collected more than $1 million in aid from local businesses and received a matching contribution from Washington. A new 2-mile-long streetcar line was built along existing tracks adjacent to the Mississippi, serving a number of exposition sites, the convention center and hotels.

“As soon as it opened, it was like a running sardine can,” Amdal says. It was so successful, in fact, that the project covered its own operating costs, a rarity for any modern transit line. Though the line is primarily a tourist attraction, Amdal points out that it also serves some locals. The same can be said of the city’s other streetcar lines, including the Canal Street line, which opened in 2004 and runs down the city’s primary north-south thoroughfare.

Today New Orleans hopes to repeat that success with a new downtown streetcar. Having made a failed bid for federal aid to build a light rail line seven years ago, the city gained renewed interest in its historic assets after Hurricane Katrina. Now it hopes to spend $200 million on a project that will include 3.5 miles of routes between the convention center, the French Quarter and Faubourg Marigny east of downtown. It would be the first major transportation project completed in the city since the storm.

This time it won’t be privately funded — the expense is too great. But the local transit agency has reserved a significant portion of the necessary funds, agreed to take out a $75 million loan, and convinced the federal government to chip in for a 1.5-mile segment on Loyola Avenue that will run to the Union Passenger Terminal, to connect to Amtrak and future high-speed rail, one of the Obama administration’s top priorities. The first segment would open in early 2012 if all goes as expected.

All the New Orleanians whom I spoke with agreed that the route planned for Rampart Street and St. Claude Avenue is the most urgently needed. Not only will it link up to the French Quarter, drawing tourists, but it will open up rail service to low-income neighborhoods whose inhabitants are disproportionately carless. “It’s providing improved access between workforce neighborhoods and transit-dependent residents,” says Bowen, who predicts a daily ridership that is about two-thirds local. “It can’t just be about tourists; it’s about the people who live and work in New Orleans.”

Call this the New Orleans approach: Make sure a line attracts both tourists and low-income residents, and construction will follow. To University of California-Berkeley professor Robert Cervero, who works on transit-oriented development, this could work. “Tourism creates a lot of transit demand, because those are people who don’t have cars.” Cervero suggests that packed trains could inspire new housing and business around stations.

Detroit, for its part, has no delusions of becoming a getaway, and its project is fittingly not geared toward tourists. It hopes to build a 3.4-mile light rail line called M-1 Rail and use it to catalyze denser development to appeal to local demands. The city’s first modern rail line, proponents hope, will by 2012 run along Woodward Avenue, which divides the city in two from downtown to the city line. (The rail line, frequently referred to as light rail, would probably more closely fit the term “streetcar” in most cities because vehicles will share their right-of-way with automobiles.)

Woodward Avenue is more than just Detroit’s central street physically; it was the testing ground of the automotive industry, in 1909 featuring the world’s first mile of concrete roadway and at one time hosting the headquarters of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. But the street has also represented the city’s decline. About 5 miles down the road from downtown, the Ford factory in Highland Park (where the assembly line was born) stopped producing vehicles in 1927. In the late 1950s Woodward lost much of its vehicle traffic to new highways. In April 1956 the city’s last active street railway — along Woodward Avenue — was replaced with bus services. Vacant lots began sprouting up in many of the surrounding areas. What had once been the linear engine of the city slowly lost its importance as suburban growth replaced urban vitality and a manufacturing nation became a postindustrial society.

The street could be transformed with the reintroduction of high-quality mass transit. Until now, limited funds have made such a project difficult to undertake, but like New Orleans’ 1980s project, M-1 Rail — named after Woodward Avenue’s state road designation — will be partially funded by private investors. In a first for a major American transit system, M-1 Rail has managed to line up support from an array of nonprofits and local investors, including the Ford Foundation and the CEOs of Compuware, Quicken Loans and Penske, each of whom has committed personal funds. The corridor also received a $25 million grant from the federal government.

Currently, there isn’t much happening. “People are kind of sitting on their hands a little bit,” says Mary Chapman, a Detroit native who has written about the automobile industry for The New York Times. “What prevails is a wait-and-see attitude.” Yet the situation may change with the light rail line. Sean Mann, the founder of a local advocacy organization called Let’s Save Michigan, is convinced that the project could motivate change in a city that continues to lose population. “One of the things that’s going to bring people in is light rail,” he argues, adding that “the goal is to move 15,000 young people into the neighborhood” by 2015. But that will be possible only if the private sector follows through by building enough housing to hold them, and if people from other parts of the city decide to move in.

“There’s a false notion that transit-oriented development is a sort of magic bullet,” says professor Cervero. “Quite honestly, the problem is not access to transportation — there are bigger issues.” Cervero was hard-pressed to identify any economically deprived city in the United States that has rebounded thanks to a rail line. How realistic are the objectives laid out by New Orleans and Detroit?

Call this the New Orleans approach: Make sure a line attracts both tourists and low-income residents, and construction will follow.

A New Paradigm for Inner-City Growth

In the 1980s Detroit experimented with transit, hoping to renew its downtown with the creation of the People Mover rapid transit system. Paid for primarily by the Urban Mass Transit Administration (now known as the Federal Transit Administration), the train circles around a 3-mile elevated track. Though the project was relatively cheap at $200 million, its design was ineffective from the start.

Riders can go in only one direction on the loop, whose half-mile diameter often makes walking an easier option. A connecting rail system that was supposed to bring in commuters from the suburbs was never built. Thus a line that the federal government once predicted would carry 50,000 riders a day and make money doing so now attracts about 6,000 at a per-ride cost of more than $5 in subsidies from the impoverished city government. Nor did the People Mover change the urban landscape: The project’s opening in July 1987 was greeted by a collective yawn from developers. According to a recent report by the Detroit News, the area has 48 vacant structures and an almost 30 percent vacancy rate in those that are occupied. Hardly a transit success story.

Nevertheless, M-1 Rail is different. Unlike the People Mover, its two-way linear route along Woodward will provide truly useful journeys between the central business district and the New Center neighborhood, where the city’s Amtrak station is sited. Along the way it will pass through Midtown, home to the Institute of Arts, Wayne State University, and a number of theaters and performance halls. If the city is able to capitalize on the service to promote new housing on the vacant parcels in this area, transit could become an important connecting link.

Detroiters see the plan as just the beginning. “It has its pitfalls, but I think it’s essential for moving transit forward,” community organizer Mann believes. If it can obtain funds, the city hopes to extend the rail to its northern border, adding about 6 miles. It would be paid for by a dedicated regional tax for infrastructure investment, something that would have been politically infeasible just a few years back. While Detroit’s population is largely poor and African-American, its suburbs are primarily white and relatively well off. Even today separate agencies run the buses for Detroit and its surroundings. But if light rail encourages the kind of development its supporters claim will come, regional funding and decision-making may follow.

Proponents also suggest that while the M-1 Rail line will serve just a tiny percentage of the city’s overall population, it will introduce a new type of transit to the region and encourage more people to move away from an automobile-dependent lifestyle. Advocates hope that for new inhabitants, light rail will form the backbone of day-to-day life, establishing transit-oriented communities. Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and new planning consultant Toni Griffin are likely to prod most new construction toward areas around light rail stations, though the plan to do so has yet to be set in stone. Without some kind of commitment, development is unlikely to happen. John Renne, assistant professor at the University of New Orleans and associate director of its Transportation Center, argues that the public sector has to take an active role to encourage new construction, whether in his city or in Detroit. “You have to have a dedicated government,” he says.

Yet that may not be enough, especially for the Motor City. The People Mover could not stop downtown from declining, and once again the city’s economic prospects are likely to be influenced by trends beyond the scope of a streetcar’s influence. Renne is convinced that transit can be a motivating factor in any city’s growth, but “it is contingent upon having a healthy real estate market” — something Detroit lacks. Professor Cervero questions whether either city can profit from an investment in more transit, saying that “without congestion and buoyant growth,” there may be little effect. “Not all cities have those conditions,” he says.

Indeed, the disappointing truth for both cities is that while political and community leaders are convinced that investment in streetcars will pay off in new projects, previous experience suggests that this correlation isn’t reliably direct. Portland’s model may not be applicable everywhere. Meanwhile, while millions of dollars are going into M-1 Rail, local government has thus far made no commitment to better buses, the public transportation mainstay in Detroit, serving 140,000 people each day. Will those riders be let down once they realize that improvements for their services may have been sacrificed for the construction of light rail?

Despite the cataclysmic effects of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is more stable and thus more likely to take full advantage of streetcars — especially since the community is already used to them. The city’s downtown office vacancy rate is low and the urban core is growing in population — some areas surrounding the French Quarter have double the population they had 10 years ago. Though bus ridership is less than 50 percent of what it was before the storm, according to an analysis last year by the Brookings Institution, it has been growing steadily.

Moreover, the city benefits from a group of committed investors who think that the new streetcar could attract downtown dwellers. Chief among them is Pres Kabacoff, who has been working in historic preservation in New Orleans since 1982 and now is the CEO of HRI Properties. His vision for the streetcar is broad: “It could make us a Caribbean Paris, make us a walkable city in every direction.” Not only has Kabacoff committed to funding a new housing development directly on the streetcar’s route — a 54-unit apartment building on a vacant plot — but he has allied himself with a group of community members in the St. Claude neighborhood to create a “Healing Center” designed to incorporate economic, social, environmental and spiritual well-being through local commerce, arts and services. Several theaters near the streetcar are designated for renovations, a cluster of houses near the Healing Center is earmarked for reuse by artists, and the city is planning to reopen the St. Roch Market for produce sales after it was closed by Katrina.

New Orleans’ newest transit asset may provide fertile ground for this series of local initiatives. But, confined to a small area and featuring mostly small businesses, they likely won’t be enough to expand the city’s economy significantly.

Too Little, Too Late?

After decades of underinvestment in public transportation, Detroit and New Orleans may be misleading themselves by expecting big results from relatively minor projects. While Portland experienced major change downtown thanks to its streetcar, it fed traffic into the area with a now more than 50-mile-long light rail network that has cost more than $1 billion to construct since 1986. Neither of the projects studied here will be nearly as large.

For Jeffrey Schwartz, arguably New Orleans’ greatest transit cheerleader, the city’s investment in a streetcar is only the first step of dozens of projects necessary for sustained mobility. His group Transport for NOLA has developed a long-term vision for light rail. “There’s a mandate that we need to start reinvesting in the historic core of the city,” says Schwartz, but no one has articulated a realistic manner by which to fund the system that he argues would make that possible. Similarly, though Detroit’s leaders argue that the M-1 Rail project is just the start of a series of future transit investments from a commuter rail line to Ann Arbor to a triangle of bus rapid transit routes into the suburbs, there have been no commitments from either municipal or state governments to back those projects.

Nevertheless, inhabitants of both cities’ downtowns can be expected to experience qualitative improvements in their commutes, thanks to the improved ride quality offered by streetcars compared to buses. The experience of other American cities shows that some people will likely choose to ride the train instead of driving cars — something they wouldn’t have done had they had access to only a bus. And despite the expenses the construction of these new lines will require, they will at the very least offer the possibility of development in areas around stations, a benefit less likely to materialize with other, less-expensive transportation modes.

Indeed, these rail projects really are about changing the economic dynamics of cities that are struggling to define their role in a 21st-century economy. If the streetcars are successful, they’ll simply be the backdrops to something more important: urban rebirth.

“The thing is,” Mary Chapman says, with hope rising in her voice, “Detroit will never be what it was in the past. It will be better, but because of the people, not because of the light rail system.”

This article appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!