Preface: I love Street View. I love transit. It's the first day of (my last?!) Spring Break, and instead of going on a road trip to Santa Fe with my friends, I'm in bed with a cold. Indulge me.

UN GRAND TOUR of light rail and tramway systems, selected for no particular reason other than my own familiarity with them. Not being an expert, it seems to me that there is a good deal of ambiguity between heavy rail, light rail, tramways, and streetcars, and it doesn't help that Wikipedia often seems to use the terms interchangeably, and when my own experience with the systems seems contrary to those designations. Just outside the USC School of Architecture, construction crews are tearing up Exposition Boulevard for the new Expo Line. The Expo Line is supposed to be light rail, but that is some heavy construction going on. Having ridden a fair number of "light rail" systems, ranging from the very train-like one in Los Angeles to bus-like ones in Portland, I thought I'd explore the spectrum.



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Blue Line in Los Angeles. This is "light rail" but acts much more like heavy-rail or commuter, certainly closer to BART than Muni Metro. In other words, it's not always clear what the difference between the Red and Purple lines and the Blue and Gold lines is, other than the former two are underground and the others aren't. Also: why are the trains so ugly? I don't know. This section, along Washington Blvd, could be quite nice but isn't. If Caltrain : Metrolink :: BART : Metro, why does Los Angeles have no equivalent to Muni Metro? Metro Rapid hardly counts, and the Orange Line, though successful in many ways, is weirdly tucked away behind bushes.

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N Judah line in San Francisco. These streets aren't particularly wide, either; Los Angeles boulevards like La Cienaga or Normandy or Santa Monica could easily accommodate rail like this, I think.

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Portland Streetcar. Trams like this are smaller, require smaller platforms, and have lower capacities, but run quite a bit more frequently than proper light rail. The Portland Streetcar is being adapted to downtown Los Angeles, linking the Historic Core, South Park, LA Live, and the Music Center (ish), which seems like a perfect loop, and just the sort of range for a streetcar, as well as a good foundation for what could be an expanded network to replace the DASH buses (extending to Chinatown, Little Tokyo, City West, USC/Exposition Park, &c).


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Portland MAX. In Portland, the light rail and streetcar systems interface quite well, intersecting downtown near Pioneer Square. The light rail works similarly to the streetcar downtown and later operates in dedicated right-of-ways and stopping less frequently. This adaptability would be perfect for Los Angeles, as density is sometimes very high and then quite low. A system that operated more like a tram in, say, Santa Monica and more like light rail in Brentwood seems ideal.


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Tramway des Maréchaux, Paris. This is my favorite line. Technically a tram, the cars have seven sections, allowing high capacities, and the dedicated, grassy right-of-way allows it to move fairly quickly; this seems to me to combine the best of tramways and light rail, and seems applicable especially to broad boulevards (like Sepulveda, for example, which used to have a Red Line route down the middle anyway).


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Trambesòs along Avinguda Diagonal, Barcelona. Along the Diagonal, it runs in a grassy strip similar to the Maréchaux in Paris. Between the two directions there is a long, tree-lined pedestrian promenade, forming a sort of linear park running from Gloriès to the Forum.


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Tramway in Strasbourg (Homme de Fer). Those Citadis trams are so pretty! Contrast with the Blue and Gold lines, and, doubtlessly, the Expo.


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Line 8 in Rome (in front of San Carlo ai Catinari, on of my favorite churches in Rome).


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Tramway in Bordeaux. Bordeaux and Strasbourg show quite well how nonintrusive these lines can be in the urban fabric. Quieter and cleaner than buses, obviously. There was quite a bit of fuss about the Expo Line crossing in front of some elementary schools. Certainly, as there have been many accidents along the Blue Line, the school board is justified in its concern, but banishing the trains underground (at great expense) hardly seems to be the answer. No one is afraid of the light rail/tramways in Zürich or Vienna (or, as my friend Christina points out, in Portland); they run along the sidewalk, sharing the road with pedestrians, bicyclists, cars, and buses.


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Straßenbahn in Zürich (Schaffhauserplatz). Now we are getting to more bus-like systems: streetcars rather than light rail, strictly speaking. Still, run frequently enough, they seem to be able to move people as efficiently as heavier systems, and must be much cheaper to operate. Using curbs as platforms and simple shelters rather than "stations" is clearly a huge advantage.


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Awesome olde-timey streetcars in Milan.

Lest you think I'm too eurocentric:

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Scandalously ugly tram in Melbourne. But the Melbourne system testifies to the advantages of a large, interconnected network of trams. One can imagine Los Angeles, with its relatively straightforward grid of boulevards, with a network as dense as Melbourne's (which has half the population density of Los Angeles).