The Time We Almost Got Our Streetcars Back
Everyone in Victoria knows that we once had an amazing streetcar network. It is almost a rite of passage in becoming a true Victorian to find out about them and then be perpetually upset about losing them. It doesn’t help when every few years we get such visceral reminders of their destruction when roadwork uncovers another set of paved over old tracks. This happened most recently during the installation of the Fort Street Bike Lanes. Either in kindness or cruelty, the city actually took a portion of those old street car tracks and made them into a little public art installation where Fort and Yates streets diverge. Officially this summer it will have been 76 years since the last street car moved down Victoria’s streets. July 4th 1948 was the last ride for our streetcar system, but ever since then it seems like the collective consciousness of the city has regretted that decision and tried to bring them back, or at least something similar.
Just to be clear, I do recognise the benefits that a modern bus based transit system brings to a region. It is nimble and can be changed not just year over year, but day by day or even hour by hour if there is a street closure. That is definitely something you can’t do with a streetcar system. The thing is though, if you want a good metropolitan transit system, it isn’t a one or another proposition, you obviously need both rail and buses to meet demand. All you have to look at is any large city that has a subway system, they still have buses and still need buses. The rail portion of systems work as a central nervous system that can be built off of by other modes of transit. Our new Blink Bus is supposed to take the place of that rail based system in Victoria. You can read my review of that system here. The nimbleness of the bus system, is also its Achilles heal, just as for streetcars or subways the fact that the route is permanent is both its biggest problem and its greatest asset. Humans want to simplify things as much as possible for themselves and transit planners know this. If you increase bus service to a rate where potential riders no longer have to think about when the next bus is and can just show up and know that one will be by soon, ridership goes up. Change those rubber tires to train wheels and put them on rails, riders will know that they don’t have to worry about whether the route has changed and ridership will go up. People get confused by this because people that ride the buses a lot know when a route is going to change for a week or two, or if a temporary stop has been put in. Increases in ridership come from those that don’t know these things and who are taking a chance in using public transit. Serve them well and they will keep using it.
I think since we buried all those streetcar lines we have known this, and as I have said, we have regretted that decision and wanted to reverse it. A couple of times we actually got close to doing it. I have been doing a lot of reading of old newspapers and have taken a couple of trips down to the city archives recently to dig into one particular story, Victoria’s thought of bring back the streetcars as a part of the Victoria Accord in the early 1990’s. Though I really think after reading a lot of those old articles, it may have had its origins about seven years earlier, as Vancouver prepared to welcome the world to the World Exposition in 1986.
It was when I was initially looking at the city archive documents regarding the Victoria Accord that I found another document listed called “Streetcars for Victoria”. This was a report proposal from the big infrastructure consulting firm N.D. Lea & Associates. The report had been prepared not for the City or the CRD but for a society named just as the report was, Streetcars for Victoria. I couldn’t really find much of anything about this society and there wasn’t any mention about how they funded a large engineering firm to conduct the study either. Unfortunately, the archives have a copy of this report proposal, but not the actual end result, if it was ever done by N. D. Lea & Associates. Since it was a little bit of a rabbit hole, I decieded not to get to far into it and see what happened with it, however from looking at the route map, there was a lot of similarity to the project we are going to talk about. In the 1986 plan, the route went from the Belleville Ferry Terminal (Coho and Clipper Ferries), down behind the Legislature and then up Government to Pembroke. An interesting piece was a little side loop it would do around the old Hudson Bay building (now the Victoria Public Market). There were a couple of articles talking about this earlier proposal in the Times Colonist, but nothing in detail. That moves us up to 1993.
1993 would have been a heady time in Victoria, just a few years earlier the city had been awarded the 1994 Commonwealth Games. While the Commonwealth Games may not quite have the cachet they once did, certainly in my childhood they were nearly equal to the Olympics. There was a lot of talk of this being a time of change in Victoria and I think a lot of the city leadership were looking at the city through new eyes and seeing a lot of opportunities to improve it. A huge part of this thought process at the time was the Victoria Accord. The Accord was an agreement between the City of Victoria and the BC Government to work on the redevelopment of some key parcels of land and to develop a plan for a new streetcar line through downtown Victoria. Obviously, I am going to focus on the last item, but just so you know the other projects were to create new government offices on the lands behind the legislature where Capital Park is now. I suppose that one can be marked off as complete, though it took a further twenty years to get going. You can see some of the original drawings for that land here. The second big project was the redevelopment of the Belleville Terminal. While there is not much happening yet, we can mark this one as underway at just over 30 years since the Accord. A final project was the redevelopment of what was known as the Y-Lot. I believe that there were some grandiose ideas, it was redeveloped by Concert Properties (I think) in the early 2000’s. The lot is home to the downtown Marriott and two other condo towers as well as the large, though seemingly forgotten public space along Humboldt Street.
The streetcar plan was the fourth item in the Accord, it was in some ways considered the least controversial, the least ambitious, and the most likely to succeed. One of the key foundational members of the Victoria Accord was Sam Bawlf, and he was also a huge proponent of the idea of bringing back streetcars to Victoria.
The plan was part tourist attraction and part functional people mover. To plan the line, a sub-committee of the Victoria Accord Planning Committee was created called the Downtown Streetcar Project Review Group. This was not some small discussion, this sub-committee had a membership made up of a huge cross-section of Victoria institutions and had numerous meetings for almost a year. There job was to get a plan in place to move forward and not some pie-in-the-sky discussion. Newspaper articles at the time talked about the project in a positive way that made it sound as though there was a real chance of it moving forward. The membership of the committee included people from the Chamber of Commerce, the Provincial Capital Commission, BC Transit, Tourism Victoria and many other neighbourhood and city associations.
There seemed initially to be a lot thought generated from the heritage streetcar lines in San Francisco. To be clear, I am not referring to the cable car system, but rather the set of trains that run on the F-Line down to the Embarcadero. These trains are mostly from the first half of the 20th century. These cars fulfill the role of both tourist attraction and mass transit, though I would suggest that they lean towards the tourist market, especially given the need to ensure accessibility now. While the San Francisco system may have been the inspiration, the committee moved to support a train car that was more in line with Victoria’s tourism focus at the time of being a “a little bit of old England” and so a rolling stock of double-decker trains similar to those that run in Blackpool was brought forward as the preferred vehicle. One wonders if this decision had any impact on the decision a few years later to purchase the first double-decker buses for BC Transit.
The vehicle decision was perhaps what finally did this plan in though because as you read through the minutes you can see increasing frustration with delays on a report from BC Transit that would compare streetcars with a new rubber tire system that followed the same route. When it did come in, later in the Victoria Accord process, the CRD said it wanted to do a broader regional transportation study and further meetings regarding the streetcar plan were put on hold. I do note that the BC Transit report, when it was tabled at the December 9th, 1993 committee meeting, the discussion seems to indicate that the streetcar plan was the way to go.
If the plan had moved forward, there were several options for routing the trains around downtown. The final preferred route started in James Bay on Menzies Street just south of the Five Corners intersection by Thrifty Foods. It then ran north to Belleville and went in front of the Legislature before turning onto Government Street. The trains would have then run up Government to Chatham, where to looped up to Douglas Street and then back to Government on Herald. This definitely would have been a tourist focused route and looking at the city now, I am not sure how much it would get used by locals. There was a third option, called the “Commuter-Oriented Route” that I think over the longer term would have been a much more used option by locals, and the committee in their discussions seemed to agree, but they thought there would be a better financial return if the focus was more on the tourist population. The commuter route started in the same place, but ran behind the legislature on Superior and continued along to Douglas and then went north to Chatham and again looped, but this time down to Government and then back to Douglas on Herald Street. Given the proximity to the core of the city, I could easily have seen this being used a fair bit by Victorians. The estimated total cost for the routes was between $25 and $30 million, for a converted cost of about $60 million today. By modern infrastructure investment costs, that seems like a great bargain.
As I said, it all came crashing down due to the study from the CRD which perhaps rightly said that a downtown streetcar was a lot to invest on a train system that never ventured out to other communities. Since those heady days when a streetcar seemed like it was just about to come back, we have seen numerous reports on the feasibility of LRT in Victoria running out to the West Shore. Still I do wonder if we had seen a successful implementation of streetcars downtown 30 years ago whether there would have been greater impetus to drive that rail north rather than just continue to study it and change the colour of a few bus signs to make us feel like we have rapid transit.
I would love to know your thoughts, what would be different in the city today if we had moved forward with this streetcar plan? Did we make the right choice? Let us know in the comments. I also want to thank the staff at the City of Victoria archives for their help in gathering the reference materials for this article.