Photo by bossa67

Written by former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent

If you’ve been over to H Street NE recently you’ve no doubt noticed that it’s a complete and total mess. As part of an effort to repair and upgrade the thoroughfare the District has basically ripped up the entire street, with the exception of two tiny lanes set off by Jersey barriers and orange barrels. Makes for an exciting and swift drive.

The fun part of the project is that the District is taking the opportunity presented by the gutting to install streetcar rails for the planned H Street line that will one day connect Union Station with the Benning Road Metro Station, along H Street and Benning Road. In a sight that warms the heart of transit nerds like myself, the rails can be seen piled alongside Benning Road this very moment. As BeyondDC notes, this means that the District owns and is installing tracks, and owns fully functioning and operational streetcars. So surely it’s a mere matter of months before folks can hop a trolley at Union Station and trundle down to the H Street Country Club, no?

No. There are planning problems to address – where to put a turnaround and maintenance facility – but the big hang-up for the H Street line is that unlike the Anacostia route, it travels through the L’Enfant City. And in the L’Enfant City, overhead wires are verboten. There are technologies available to power streetcars through a source embedded in the road, but for modern systems these technologies are expensive or unproven.

One might imagine that the District government would respond to these impediments by either pushing forward with producers of in-ground technology to develop a workable system or, you know, changing the law about overhead wires. It’s not as if the presence of such wires in places like San Francisco and Vienna has dimmed tourist enthusiasm for photographing the sites. Instead, it seems that the Council has focused on conflicts over baseball tickets, in the meantime hoping the wire situation will solve itself.

That’s an understandable response, but given all this stimulus money floating around, record high demand for transit in the Washington area, and the fact that we’ve already purchased cars and rails it seems like a little expeditiousness on the whole streetcar powering thing might be warranted.