| | 
| | H Street trolley plan to
be unveiled at meetings | | October 16, 2009 | | | | Staff Writer | | H Street NE is now first in line to get a streetcar line after Ward 6 D.C. Council member Tommy Wells said he convinced Mayor Adrian Fenty that the up-and-coming corridor is the best place in the city to start.
The District Department of Transportation announced Wednesday that it will hold a series of meetings throughout the city to reveal its proposals for streetcar lines. Up first is an Oct. 22 meeting at J.O. Wilson Elementary School, 660 K St. NE. More meetings will follow, with one held in each ward.
“The meetings are really just to give people an opportunity to see what we’re laying out and why,” said Transportation Department spokesperson John Lisle.
Thought the city’s plans for H Street are still unclear, tracks are already being laid. Under the expected proposal, the line would run from H and 3rd streets down Benning Road to Oklahoma Avenue, according to Wells' office.
Another likely future line would probably include 8th and M streets SE, Nationals Park and the Southwest waterfront. There are also continuing plans for an Anacostia line, where tracks are already being laid, and potential lines have been discussed for Georgia Avenue and K Street, according to Wells' office.
Transportation Department director Gabe Klein said at a summer H Street community meeting on streetcars that he intended to make a citywide streetcar project a priority and would form a new division to accomplish the huge task.
Wells has also listed streetcars as a main priority, and he intends to soon introduce a bill that would repeal a law banning overhead wires in the H Street area and other parts of the city. A major cause of delay in bringing streetcars to D.C. -- a project that has been in the works for years -- has been a three-year-long jurisdictional dispute over an 1889 federal law that bans overhead streetcar wires within the original City of Washington, which includes the H Street corridor.
“We’ve been drafting different elements of the bill,” said Charles Allen, Wells’ chief of staff. “At the end of the day, the bill is there to move the city toward a decision on how the streetcars are powered … so that we can move from the planning stages for streetcars to actually implementing them.”
During the summer meeting, Klein discussed the possibility of using alternative technologies, some of which have yet to be fully developed, to power the streetcars in locations such as historic Georgetown where overhead wires would be undesirable.
“I can’t say that all those details have been worked out,” Lisle said. "But [the meetings] will address the different technologies that are out there and the different possibilities." | | | | | Log in to comment on this article |
| |
|
| | | |
|
