Mayor Bob Buckhorn gets it.
He gets that Tampa’s downtown streetcar is less a mode of serious transportation than it is an economic-development tool and helpful downtown amenity. It’s not commuter rail. Nor is it, alas, the light-rail starter set envisioned a decade ago by transit progressives. It helps Channelside but is impacted by the entertainment district’s struggles. It also helps pitch conventions. Ask Tampa Bay & Company president and CEO Kelly Miller or Ybor City Chamber of Commerce president Tom Keating if a streetcar-amenity matters.
And, yes, subsidies are a given. And soon the endowment will be depleted.
What also is a given, however, is that the trolley system has to be smarter. You can’t run every 20 minutes, charge $2.50 a ride, not run in the mornings and expect it to attract enough non-Shriner and Super Bowl traffic. Ridership is projected to be down more than 25 per cent since (the Super Bowl year of) 2009.
Mayor Buckhorn, who was not on board at inception, knows there’s no turning back now. It’s his watch (the streetcars are a joint operation of the city and HART) and scrapping the trolley is not an option. The federal government invested millions in necessary infrastructure–and may just want all that money back if there’s literally nothing to show for it. This amenity has to work. And the better it works, the better it helps sell Tampa. The better it works, the better the downtown-Channelside-Ybor City synergy. That’s why it’s worth subsidizing.
“I have to say the marketing of this entity has been an abysmal failure,” bluntly assessed Buckhorn. But the mayor is more than the complainer-in-chief. He’s also head pragmatist.
He personally lobbied the Tampa Port Authority (where he’s a board member) not to withdraw its annual $100,000 streetcar subsidy. He’s also proactive by infusing new blood on the board of Tampa Historic Streetcar Inc. that will help it draft new business and marketing plans. He wants results, not hand-wringing. To that end, he’d like to see those quaint yellow trolleys running much more frequently–and for free.
They are not self-sustaining public transportation. They are the streetcars named reality.