Delayed again; no streetcar until 2016

The Cincinnati streetcar, the $110 million-plus project that city leaders once hoped to have completed last year, will not be ready for riders until at least the spring of 2016, new city records show.

The streetcar’s revised timetable is the latest delay in a schedule that has been pushed back several times over the past three years. It’s outlined in construction bid documents recently issued by City Hall for the line to run from the Downtown riverfront to Over-the-Rhine.

The bid papers also detail other phases of the 3.6-mile streetcar project:

• The city plans to buy and begin receiving five streetcars in mid-2014, more than 11/2 years before the system is operational. But Meg Olberding, a spokeswoman for City Manager Milton Dohoney Jr., said Thursday that schedule could be altered, with the vehicles perhaps not being delivered until later in 2014. That is well before the streetcars start transporting passengers in 2016, but Olberding said considerable lead time is needed to train the vehicles’ operators and maintenance crews.

• During track construction, expected to start this spring, some intersections may be closed on weekends. At other times a uniformed police officer and patrol car will be stationed at all signalized intersections to help direct traffic through the reduced street lanes available.

• Tracks for the Over-the-Rhine section of the route will be completed first, by a “substantial completion” date in June 2014. The remainder of the project, including the tracks extending to the system’s southernmost point on Second Street on Downtown’s central riverfront, is to be completed by October 2015.

Construction details included in the hundreds of pages of documents make it clear that the city’s most recent target date for the streetcar’s opening – the summer of 2015 – will be postponed by at least three seasons to April 2016.

As the streetcar project began to take substantial shape at City Hall in 2009, city leaders pointed to 2012 as the year when the line – then envisioned as stretching from the riverfront to Uptown near the University of Cincinnati – would be up and running.

That date has been repeatedly pushed back, however, by a number of factors, some beyond the city’s control.

Two ballot measures drafted by streetcar opponents slowed progress, even though Cincinnati voters on both occasions rejected the efforts to scuttle the project.

Ohio’s withdrawal of nearly $52 million in funding in early 2011 after then-newly elected Gov. John Kasich questioned the streetcar’s projected economic benefits was a particularly serious blow, one that forced city leaders to substantially scale back the initial route.

Negotiations over various aspects of the streetcar deal – some of which remain unresolved – also took longer than anticipated.

A dispute with Duke Energy over utility relocation costs is yet to be settled.

A contract with CAF USA, the subsidiary of a Spanish firm selected last April to build five sleek, European-styled streetcars, that the city expected by mid-spring 2012 was not completed until late last month, Olberding said.

Under that contract, the city expects to receive the first streetcar on July 15, 2014, followed by the other four vehicles, which will arrive at the rate of about one per month, according to the documents.

The streetcars initially will be tested along a portion of track through Over-the-Rhine.

During construction, crews must maintain one lane of traffic in each direction, as well as pedestrian and bicycle access on the Downtown and Over-the-Rhine streets affected.


However, the documents also specify that intersections may be closed “on selected non-event weekends ... on a case-by-case basis.”

Mayoral candidate John Cranley, a former Cincinnati city councilman who opposes the project, questioned why City Hall, under the documents’ timeline, plans to begin acquiring the streetcars about 21 months before the new estimated 2016 opening date.

That schedule could be compressed, Olberding said. The city expects to receive the first streetcar about 18 months after it gives CAF “notice to proceed,” she said.

With that notice likely to come this spring, that would mean that the first vehicle probably would be delivered no earlier than the fall of 2014.

“We’d like to get them about 1 1/2 years in advance, or at least a year, to burn them in and train the staff,” Olberding said.

That explanation, Cranley argued, “doesn’t get at the real issue.”

“This mayoral election in part is going to be a referendum on the streetcar, but this ties the city’s hands 2 1/2 years into the new mayor’s term,” Cranley said.

“Even allowing for months of training, the city’s spending tens of millions of dollars long before it has to,” he said. “That’s fiscally irresponsible and shows contempt for the public process.”

No Desire for it.

Too bad they won't delay it forever and save us a ton of money that we don't have. Still trying to figure out how often it will actually be used, but I'm sure it will be nowhere near enough to cover yearly expenses, much less ever really begin to pay back the huge investment, which will probably wind up going way over budget like all government led projects.

They just keep shoving it down our throats and shoving it down our throats.

(01-04-2013 04:41 PM)ctipton Wrote:  They just keep shoving it down our throats and shoving it down our throats.

The essence of capitalism is consent and voluntary exchange.

The essence of statism and socialism is force.

We are simply in an age where our future is being squandered by deficits and debt and EVERYTHING is being shoved down our throats.