Trolley Town

Last week, Paige Miller became the Woman Who Saved the Trolley. On Wednesday, March 23, the Port of Seattle commissioner announced a plan to rescue the George Benson Waterfront Streetcar Line from extinction by extending the tracks 7,200 feet north, along Seattle's Myrtle Edwards Park, and locating a needed maintenance barn somewhere in the port's Elliott Bay Park, near the towering grain elevators at Terminal 86. With this one stroke, Miller simultaneously untangled a three-way bureaucratic snafu between the city of Seattle, King County, and the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) and helped her nascent campaign for Seattle City Council. The resulting hullabaloo says a lot about Seattle's love affair with the trolley and the state of politics and transportation in the city.

Started in 1982, the two-mile Waterfront Streetcar, aka King County Metro Route 99, was built by the city with the leadership of then–City Council member George Benson, who died last year. King County Metro, the public transit agency, operates the streetcar, which runs from the International District to the south end of Myrtle Edwards Park. The trolley's maintenance barn now sits in the park's parking lot, which is about to be claimed by the Seattle Art Museum's $85 million sculpture garden. The city, which owns the land there, and the county, which owns the barn, agreed to move the maintenance facility so the sculpture garden could slope down in terraces to the edge of Elliott Bay and to enable unobstructed views of the water and the Olympic Mountains. But the relocation proved more difficult than anticipated. Earlier this month, Metro announced that no acceptable relocation site had been found and that the line would probably be shut down forever, to be replaced by dolled-up buses. The public went berserk.

Businesses in Pioneer Square and along the waterfront were predictably outraged, but more striking was the fury of just average folks at the possible loss of this toy train. Make no mistake, the streetcar is not a rational transportation system. It would be a much better use of scarce transit funding, not to mention a much faster ride, to simply run buses along the trolley route. The 1924 streetcars, found by Benson on a trip to Australia, are antiques requiring two operators (almost all modern transit vehicles require one) and expensive daily maintenance. The trolleys carry an average of 449,000 riders a year, which sounds like a lot but really is nothing special compared to Metro bus routes. Mostly tourists ride the streetcar, although some commuters do also. The streetcars are a fun amenity for the hokey central waterfront and clearly have value to businesses and the public beyond their transportation utility.

Much of the dialogue that ensued after the proposed closure reflected a feeling that the rich and powerful elites who launched the sculpture garden were trampling on Seattle's funky old-time charm. It's not just at Myrtle Edwards Park that this battle is taking place, but throughout the city, especially in the South Lake Union neighborhood, where Mayor Greg Nickels wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in public money to aid billionaire Paul Allen's development of that crusty old neighborhood into a 24/7 biotech wonderland. (See "A Gift That Gives Back," p. 14.) Since Nickels wants to build a separate trolley and maintenance barn to spur South Lake Union's development, the suspicions about local government's inability to simply relocate the existing trolley's maintenance barn were rife. North Seattle Industrial Association President Eugene Wasserman reflected this widespread view of events when he pledged to cancel his SAM membership in protest over the trolley's problems. Says Wasserman: "Basically, the mayor has lined up for being a world-class design city. They want a new streetcar for the highly educated people in South Lake Union. They don't want a tacky streetcar for tourists on the waterfront." Wasserman found it unbelievable that Nickels and King County Executive Ron Sims, who has direct authority over Metro, couldn't find a new site for the barn. "These guys know how to push hard, and I don't have a sense that they are pushing hard at all," Wasserman said. Throughout the process, however, Sims and Nickels claimed complete fealty to the waterfront trolley and pledged to preserve it.

Miller's experience with the issue will not calm Wasserman's suspicions. "The Port had proposed a couple of times in the past extending the trolley north," says Miller. "We did not get a lot of interest from the city and Metro."

Regina LaBelle, Mayor Nickels' counsel and trolley point person, says she is not aware of any past proposal from the Port. As far as the mayor was concerned, however, says LaBelle, the northerly route was being actively considered but was entangled in funding problems.

As the crisis over the relocation of the trolley barn grew, Miller pondered the issue and began to sense an opportunity. "It seemed like an actionable moment," she says. When she stepped into the bully pulpit last week, she had a compelling solution to offer. The Port would provide the land gratis and "would arrange for the track extension"—note the considerable wiggle room in that language—to the new site.