Streetcar

[OKC Guy]

Some may think these numbers aren't so impressive. But if you consider how people in the streetcar route move about prior to the streetcar system then these numbers might be more impressive. I fully believe if the streetcars can be more accurate on arrival times and once conventions start arriving on completion of the convention center we will see riders increase substantially. Time will tell.....

I disagree these are horrible. Especially when you consider the initial cost and future operating and replacement costs. Had we spent $140m in the exact same SC footprint on other forms of transpo imagine what could have been done. And could adapt fast to changing downtown. I ran the numbers posted a few pages or so back and the per car average is pitiful.

We could have bought a fleet of 100 mini luxury buses and had stops every 5 minutes all over downtown and surrounding areas for less cost. Only a once in a lifetime grand park opening helped Sep numbers

It will increase once OMNI and CC are open and thats its peak.

[Zuplar]

Did they ever speculate or have estimates of what ridership would be? Curious if they did and if it was broken down like this for comparisons sake.

[amocore]

I disagree these are horrible. Especially when you consider the initial cost and future operating and replacement costs. Had we spent $140m in the exact same SC footprint on other forms of transpo imagine what could have been done. And could adapt fast to changing downtown. I ran the numbers posted a few pages or so back and the per car average is pitiful.

We could have bought a fleet of 100 mini luxury buses and had stops every 5 minutes all over downtown and surrounding areas for less cost. Only a once in a lifetime grand park opening helped Sep numbers

It will increase once OMNI and CC are open and thats its peak.

I am not sure why they are horrible.
We can not compare railroad and bus. Nobody care for taking the bus around here except if you are stranded.
The streetcar is linking all the part of downtown together. It is great although not perfect.

[David]

They're horrible if you have prejudged all possible streetcar ridership numbers as being horrible.

[jerrywall]

When did the street car's free period end?

[David]

It'll be interesting to see if the park opening establishes a new trend, or if that blip up will mostly be an exception to just the grand opening weekend. I wouldn't expect the numbers to always match that of course, but every new attraction along the line is a new source of riders so I'd like to think it should go up and stay up at least a little.

[dankrutka]

Nobody care for taking the bus around here except if you are stranded.

Actually, lots of citizens rely on and choose to use buses for transportation. Unfortunately, this view of buses has resulted in OKC having a dramatically underfunded bus system.

[OKC Guy]

I am not sure why they are horrible.
We can not compare railroad and bus. Nobody care for taking the bus around here except if you are stranded.
The streetcar is linking all the part of downtown together. It is great although not perfect.

I don’t think you read or understood my post then. If we had put the same money ($140,000,000) into luxury micro buses we woulda had the model system in country. It would far surpass SC. Just imagine folks in Medical district having ability to catch a micro bus over to Bricktown for lunch and reliably getting to/from in short time. The money would have done that and not just there but all surrounding downtown districts. A 5 mile radius of downtown and having a lux micro bus every 5 minutes would have interconnected all these districts. Could get to any place or event. More workers could use. Could then have created parking lots outside of downtown on edge of these districts knowing can get downtown and back.

Right now you have to be in downtown to use SC and even then its faster to walk or use scooter. It cannot adjust routes either.

The context is using the same money and pouring it into micro lux buses running frequently and can easily get around (unlike clunky large buses).

[Teo9969]

Anybody who can't see that ridership is directly correlated to the activity downtown has an agenda. If Downtown were more enticing, there would be more streetcar use.

We like to think that our downtown is spectacular, but realistically, it's only amazingly better than the complete wasteland it was 10 years ago, but is still 15-20 years away from being the amazing place we all want it to be. I imagine bus ridership would be even worse on the same route unless you're passing out shots of jack when you on-board.

Sure, the argument can be made about it being costly, but more often than not, this seems to come from people who have lived and grown in OKC their whole lives (though it's not a 1:1 ratio) and seem to have little experience outside of this region of the country and what mass transit *should* look like. Yes, the streetcar needs growth in ridership and far beyond in order to maximize its utility, but that growth has to do with factors that were always supposed to come after the fact: TOD, RTA for expansion and improved network infrastructure and route mapping, increased population both in downtown and the places that immediately feed into it.

Until people are coming into downtown on public transportation, any downtown circulator is going to show less than inspiring ridership. But if you were going to install a streetcar, MAPS 3 was the time to do it, and not 25 years down the line when costs would have been truly exorbitant ridership even less effective, and the TOD effects useful at a time when downtown development is sprawling. Establishing the right of way and strengthening specific corridors was important. Otherwise, Automobile Alley would take longer to develop, Midtown development would be further spread out, and Downtown as a whole would feel far more separated even than it does today.

As an anecdote, I spent a few weeks in Salzburg and got away from the touristy places with someone I met. One day, we were walking around and she asked me what I would do if I got lost in that area (my German was pretty awful) to which she responded "I would look up at the (catenary) wire and follow it until I got to the center of the city". They only have buses in Salzburg, but it goes to show that having a "fixed guideway" has psychological effects on the populace.

The streetcar needs to be viewed properly for what it is: The last leg of a multi-modal system. So until that multi-modal system is up and running, judging it is useless. If we end up denying the RTA and managing mass/public transit over the next 30 years the same way we have for the last 30 years, then forget it, it was probably a pretty silly way to spend $150M. If we successfully use it as a tool to help our community re-imagine the use and quality of mass/public transit, and TOD is readily apparent along the route, then I'd have happily spent $300M on the exact same system.

[HOT ROD]

I don’t think you read or understood my post then. If we had put the same money ($140,000,000) into luxury micro buses we woulda had the model system in country. It would far surpass SC. Just imagine folks in Medical district having ability to catch a micro bus over to Bricktown for lunch and reliably getting to/from in short time. The money would have done that and not just there but all surrounding downtown districts. A 5 mile radius of downtown and having a lux micro bus every 5 minutes would have interconnected all these districts. Could get to any place or event. More workers could use. Could then have created parking lots outside of downtown on edge of these districts knowing can get downtown and back.

Right now you have to be in downtown to use SC and even then its faster to walk or use scooter. It cannot adjust routes either.

The context is using the same money and pouring it into micro lux buses running frequently and can easily get around (unlike clunky large buses).

I don't understand why you keep harping on if we would have spent $130M on busses this and that and then taking time every time to put down or throw dirt on the streetcar. We get your point, that you are against the streetcar.

But safe to be said are facts, if we had spent $130M on buses there would be no difference in ridership because A) the buses would be implemented half baked in a nearly circular manner like they are today, instead of a linear system where routes intersect to allow for transfers in-route B) we'd buy small 40' buses and complain about having to spend more on O&M C) we wont implement any bus or HOV lanes ANYWHERE D) the buses wont have near the frequency nor schedule to suite people's real needs and/or destinations (see no, not ONE bus to the airport or FAA academy), and most obvious E) they said they already added buses and basically no change to ridership since it was implemented as I've described above.

The so called BRT that will get implemented will instead be a bus route with priority signaling, using raised platforms, likely 40' buses, in existing traffic, and with no schedule that will run from 6am-10pm if we're lucky. Real BRT would at LEAST have 60' articulated or double deck buses but no, we can't do that even though they're getting money from the Federal Government AND MAPS IV (if it passes). Oh, and the real killer - for this ridiculous implementation we have to wait until 2023 (4 more years, IF Maps IV passes) to see it realized. ... ???

Why would this take so long? And what makes you think that COTPA would implement a real transit system if we gave them a $130M slush fund from MAPS III instead of building the already running within one year of construction streetcar?

I will agree that we should have had more dual track (esp along Sheridan) and it is stupid for MAPS IV to not have any extensions into Capital Hill AND the OHC. But the streetcar is NOT a failure even though it is being poorly run like the bus system is being run, instead of running the streetcar like a TRAM line should be run (no schedules, just headways/every X minutes).

My recommendation, get rid of the folks running Embark/Cotpa (including that head guy who thinks he knows what rapid transit is, because HE DOESNT!!!) and get somebody with proven experience from a successful system; let them come in and redesign OKC's existing system - it CAN be done and with the same funding and have better ridership and meet the needs of the public even with the existing resources; then we can throw money at the bus network and see results in all modes of transit you're dreaming of.

[Anonymous.]

The ridership for the park opening is interesting. I wish we had more detailed stats. I want to know where those people boarded and unboarded, and if they had OKC parking garage tickets as their fares or not. I think having Sat and Sun running the parking garage promotion without the draw of KOL concert, it is already an indicator of free = large increase in ridership.

The city should run experimental weekends or weeks and promote the streetcar as being free. Not just with a parking receipt, but for everyone. I know they do free 3rd Fridays or something currently, but not sure how well that is promoted.

[hoya]

I know they do free 3rd Fridays or something currently, but not sure how well that is promoted.

Not very well at all, because I didn't know this.

[Laramie]

Last month (September) was the last Friday to ride the streetcar free. Just how well this was promoted is anyone's guest; like hoya mentioned, he wasn't aware of the free ride. Don't know if the City (Embark) will extend this into October.

Friday Free Rides on the OKC Streetcars

Friday Free streetcar rides: https://www.metrofamilymagazine.com/...kc-streetcars/

[LordGerald]

Not very well at all, because I didn't know this.

Just for some historical perspective, COTPA (now EMBARK) used to offer free transit rides on Ozone Alert Days. The Alert Day program got a little out of hand in the summer (sometimes up to 19 days a season). As a concession, EMBARK offered third Friday free during the summer, despite the fact that they could get reimbursed for fares with the feds for Alert Days. This is probably as good as it gets for the summer.

[shawnw]

I mean, each month, both leading up to it and the day of, it's all over their social media (both Embark and Streetcar), so if you don't know, it just means you're not following and paying attention to their social media. They also have a monthly email newsletter you can sign up for if it's tough to keep up with social (which it certainly can be). Anyway, not judging, just sayin. Not sure what else they're supposed to do for promotion these days. Probably not worth radio or TV commercials or a direct mail campaign. The amount of social promotion they're doing seems reasonable to me.

[Rover]

I mean, each month, both leading up to it and the day of, it's all over their social media (both Embark and Streetcar), so if you don't know, it just means you're not following and paying attention to their social media. They also have a monthly email newsletter you can sign up for if it's tough to keep up with social (which it certainly can be). Anyway, not judging, just sayin. Not sure what else they're supposed to do for promotion these days. Probably not worth radio or TV commercials or a direct mail campaign. The amount of social promotion they're doing seems reasonable to me.

Why not do radio, tv and other. There’s a huge part of okc citizenry not into their social media accounts. Markets are really fragmented and that is the challenge for advertising/promotion these days. If you count on one channel only you miss whole segments.

[shawnw]

Embark has an pretty limited budget, I'm not personally opposed to the city advertising transit on all media modes, so long as they don't take it out of the Embark budget.

[Rover]

Advertising done right brings in more revenue. It’s not just an expense. If you are saying there is no market to be had, or there is no advertising promotion that will work, well that’s a different claim.

[jccouger]

Advertising done right brings in more revenue. It’s not just an expense. If you are saying there is no market to be had, or there is no advertising promotion that will work, well that’s a different claim.

I think they should stick to social media, but EMBARK & Streetcar committee needs to get all the businesses along the route and other pages (like the scissortail park) to also market when free ridership days are.

I doubt its worth the expense to advertise on radio & TV.

[KayneMo]

I just noticed that streetcar stops are on Google Maps now.

[shawnw]

streetcar is also in TransitApp now, but according to Embark it's just scheduled times at the moment, though real-time is coming.

[dankrutka]

Waited for the downtown loop with a huge group after the Thunder game last night. The screen said 5 minutes when we got there. After 15-20 minutes the screen said 3 minutes. Then someone told us all that a cyclist was hit on the track (not sure if by a car or streetcar?) and everyone left. Hopefully, the person is okay.

[kukblue1]

I was wondering if anyone else has had a bad experience on the street car like I did last night. Got on at Myriad Gardens on bricktown loop. There are maybe 5 of us on there at a little after 5. First stop Cox center. No one pushed the button no one waiting on platform we stopped. Probably for a good minute. Next stop bricktown. Once again no one pushed the button no one on platform we stopped. Next stop Mickey mantel. I pushed the button to request stop. Got up standing by the door. The other people on there also got closer to the door also. Did the drive stop. Nope kept right on going. The one guy was even pushing the yellow button on the door. Then he went up and knocked and said hey we wanted to all get off.

Then we all got to talking and he says he works downtown and there have been a couple of times during his lunch break that he as been waiting on the platform and they have just drove right on by him. Does anyone else have any horror stories?

As far as it being full. It wasn't before the thunder game but was afterwards. No one checking fares and I bet 50% of the people getting on after the game didn't pay. They either need to do away with the fares all together or come up with some sort of scan system at the door.

[Plutonic Panda]

They really need to get rid of the parking by the streetcar and install protected bike lanes along with a possible barrier between the streetcar and traffic lanes to prevent cars from using the streetcar lane. Why this wasn’t done in the beginning is beyond me. I think this would do wonders to improve streetcar reliability.

But instead we have this:

In a quiet meeting of the City Council, one Councilor’s motion to deny new parking was overridden by a vote of the suburban council members. Meanwhile, Mayor Holt’s redrafting of the controversial Greenwell Ordinance was passed by a 6-3 vote.

Street Parking

An item allowing a developer to create new parallel parking spots on NW 11th between Walker and Dewey in Ward 6 came on for consideration.

Ward 6 Councilwoman JoBeth Hamon* moved to deny the new parking.

Hamon cited the protest of Streetcar representatives at the Traffic and Transportation Committee meeting where this item was first heard.

- https://freepressokc.com/its-urban-v...ial-ordinance/

[Plutonic Panda]

For any streets that only have two lanes of vehicle traffic, make them one way and/or ban cars from using certain streets and convert the other lane to bus only lanes where feasible.