The Committee of 100 on the Federal City recently issued a petition against streetcars with overhead wires in DC (which essentially amounts to a petition against streetcars in DC) and a call for neighborhood organizations to sign it. Their petition includes many inaccurate statements plus several insinuations about streetcars and overhead wires that are false, including this whopper:

“Around the world, cities are installing systems that are not powered by overhead wires.”

To date, only two cities run electric streetcars that do not use overhead wires: Bordeaux, which uses the APS technology developed by Alstom, and Nice, where batteries power streetcars for a (very) short stretch through a downtown square. However, even in Bordeaux, the bulk of the system, 30 kilometers out of 44 kilometers, uses overhead wires. Indeed, the APS system proved so problematic and costly that Bordeaux city leaders nearly abandoned it entirely in its early days! Those kinks were eventually worked out, but all new extension built since then use overhead wires and all future extensions of the Bordeaux system will use overhead wires.

In addition, for a variety of reasons, Alstom has no interest in exporting APS technology to the United States. Even if they agreed to sell APS to DC, that would leave our city stuck using expensive and often unreliable proprietary technology, unable to seek competitive bids for new streetcars.

One part of the Committee of 100 quote is accurate: cities around the world are installing streetcar systems. But they are almost exclusively using overhead wires. The list of historic, attractive and livable cities that benefit from streetcars that use overhead wires is long. Even the list of such cities with new or recently expanded systems is long. Off the top of my head, the following cities have added or expanded streetcar networks with overhead wires over the past decade:

* Paris
* Strasbourg
* Nice
* Bordeaux
* Marseille
* Lyon
* Orleans
* Grenoble
* Dublin
* Barcelona
* Bilbao
* Vienna
* Prague
* Melbourne (home of the world’s largest streetcar network, which is much beloved by that city’s residents — do DC residents feel the same way about Metrobus?)
* Toronto
* Portland
* Seattle

* San Diego

And there are many more!

(Future posts will counter other falsehoods and misleading insinuations included in the Committee of 100 petition.)