The OKC Streetcar is Good, Actually

Is a light metro system too far fetched for a city like OKC? Let us know your thoughts!

Add the OKC Streetcar to the growing list of modern streetcars that have an inexplicable battery section somewhere...

I think one of the biggest obstacles for American cities is that, because we've sprawled so far we can't even afford to pay for the infrastructure we have, we can't afford to develop new infrastructure. Cities are pretty much entirely reliant on the federal government for developing their transit, and the Feds don't exactly hand out a lot of money for transit.

Another example of a mid-sized city with a great light-rail network is Jersey City which is part of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail network, a system that effectively acts as an interurban! Jersey City also has the PATH which is a rapid transit-commuter rail hybrid that goes between Newark, Harrison, Jersey City, Hoboken, and NYC (with different services to 33rd Street in Midtown and WTC in Lower Manhattan). Now I know people reading this will be like "But Jersey City is a satellite city of NYC, that's not fair" and while they have a point, Jersey City still shows what happens when you build transit where people wanna go (whether it's a science museum, university, shopping at the mall, etc) with great TOD, a bike network, and Vision Zero to complement it! The HBLR has many connections, like Hoboken Terminal being a hub for buses, ferries, NJT rail besides the HBLR, or Bergenline Ave for the Spanish jitneys! Much of the HBLR is grade-separated, even in downtown Jersey City except for street-running on Essex Street. Much of the HBLR is repurposed ROW, though the downtown JC segment was built brand-new. The repurposed ROW selected goes through dense neighborhoods, like the Weehawken Tunnel formerly used by New York Central trains is now used by the HBLR with an underground stop at Bergenline Ave in Union City! With all the TOD and pedestrianization, both the PATH and the HBLR have led to the revitalization of the NJ Hudson waterfront! Jersey City was the first to have a bikeshare system when Citi Bike expanded there in 2015, with Hoboken joining in 2021. Jersey City was also the first in New Jersey to implement Vision Zero with an executive order signed by Steven Fulop in 2018, and in 2022, the city realized zero car crash-related fatalities on city-owned streets, the first city of its size in the country to accomplish this! Rather than concentrate pedestrian safety improvements in a single area downtown, Jersey City worked with Street Plans and pursued interventions across six corridors, one in each of Jersey City’s six wards. Thus, they not only built trust across different constituencies, but was able to experiment and did it fast through tactical urbanism and committed local leadership! And neighboring Hoboken hasn't had a single traffic death since 2017 because of Vision Zero, thanks to implementing things like lower speed limits, daylighting and rain gardens!

Portland, Oregon is smaller in area than Oklahoma City but has a solid transit network that serves as a role model! Portland has a streetcar with different routes to serve the areas surrounding downtown, and the MAX light-rail network to complement it and serve the broader Portland metropolitan area! There's also the WES (Westside Express Service) commuter rail service which connects to the MAX system at Beaverton Transit Center. The MAX system is actually home to the deepest station in North America, Washington Park! It has a depth of 260 ft or around 79 m! It doesn't have long escalators like Soviet metro systems but rather elevators. The station has a geological theme, and so to go along with it, the floor indicators outside the elevators refer to its two levels not by floor numbers but by "the present" and "16 million years ago"! The "16 million years ago" refers to the basalt layers the Robertson Tunnel (named for William D. Robertson, who served on the TriMet board of directors and was its president at the time of his death) passes through, and due to variations in the rock composition, the tunnel curves mildly side to side and up and down to follow the best rock construction conditions! A core sample taken during construction is actually on display at the station with a timeline of local geologic history! The station serves the Hoyt Arboretum, Oregon Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Oregon Zoo, and World Forestry Center! The station opened in September 1998 as part of the Westside MAX extension to downtown Hillsboro. The reason the station is so deep is because prior to the start of preliminary engineering efforts, the Portland City Council asked TriMet to consider building a rail tunnel through the West Hills instead of following the Sunset Highway alternative proposal to run tracks on the surface alongside Canyon Road. TriMet's engineers noted that this surface option would carry a steep six- to seven-percent grade as opposed to only two percent in a tunnel. Thus, they went with a tunnel, identified three tunnel options, and chose the one with the option to serve the Oregon Zoo!

OKC could do really well with a more commuter focused Light Metro or Interurban service that uses DMUs, kind of like Austin's CapMetro Rail. It could even pass through the main Amtrak Depot (blanking on its name right now, I think it's an old Santa Fe Depot) and travel down to Norman, and similarly up North to Edmond. Get it running with 30 minute headways to hourly off peak and have it use old freight ROWs. I bet it would see a lot of service and then it can be upgraded down the line to higher frequencies

Kansas City's streetcar has been incredibly successful in promoting development along the corridor connecting Union Station and Crown Center to the River Market. The extensions now under construction that will bring it to the riverfront and Country Club Plaza will have a profound impact on development along the entire line. I don't know what the secret to its success is -- being fare-free certainly helps, and maybe the linear nature is a big part of it, too -- but it serves as a great example for other cities to learn from.

Philadelphia needs these. There's still some leftover infrastructure, just refubrish, rebuild and we'd have a spiritual successor to the trolly hayday

In case of light rail to heavy rail, while I do agree that there is a spectum, I wouldn't say it's strictly tram - metro - regional because of the different nieches. Systems like BART, DC Metro and MARTA also are "metros" but they fill in the gaps of regional railways thanks to their huge stop spacing compared to NY Subway, Chicago L and the T which are much more local. Conversely, regional and mainline railways can become a (regional) metro thanks to large scale as it's the case of the London Underground (subsurface lines in particular) and Berlin S-Bahn. Conversely, there are many regional railways in the US which are classified as light rail like the NJT River Line or eBART simply because they don't satisfy the FRA standards. If I were to catagorise them, I would use these categories: Light rail ranges from mixed traffic to protected operation to (nearly fully grade-separated) rapid transit while heavy rail goes from simple regional (relatively big stopping distances, mixed with intercity and freight trains) to proper rapid transit (own tracks, relatively short stopping distances). That being said, the one biggest challenge with the suburban experiment is the lack of space for new infrastructure like rails which makes a streetcar the cheapest and possibly easiest option even though they frankly shouldn't be used for a regional service IMO (especially something like OC Streetcar won't work purely for stop-spacing reasons alone) and cities like Seattle also show that you can't just put them on protected lanes either thanks to the complexity of operation (it started of as an at-grade tramway with some tunnel sections before every following extensions became nearly fully grade separated). I guess turning some stroads into limited access highways (i.e. remove all the driveways and reduce crossings) might make the construction a proper regional railway easier (since the tracks can be placed to the side and not in the middle of the highway while still providing road diet and safety features) but it still can't be applied everywhere where built.

Love the idea of a light metro supplemented by the streetcar. A light metro from Edmond to Norman with a spur to the airport along with an expanded streetcar system (out to Penn Square terminating at the new resort), would be such a great upgrade to the metro area.

I feel like trams definitely do have a place, but it feels like they’re never used properly. They’re either incredibly short and slow, making them nearly useless if you don’t deliberately work them into your trip, or they’re built onto a network that really should be a metro in order to save a buck. It’s really infuriating to see cities go for a tram rather than a metro to save half the purchase price, only to get 1/5th of the ridership and be saddled with a loss making boondoggle that makes politicians (who don’t understand the different types of transit) think trains are pointless. It’s much like how video games often get remastered, and the company says they’ll make a sequel if the remaster sells well, only for it to underperform since the only people who are interested already brought the last two remasters. Sometimes you’ve got to spend money to invest in something worth doing. I think you’re right that streetcars should be the lowest tier of rail transport, for lower density cities. For really busy places you can justify a subway like London’s Circle Line, but if your city isn’t dense enough a streetcar can be cost effective for lower ridership rates, if you build the proper infrastructure to support it. Light Metros definitely need more investment since they can theoretically be the most efficient form of transit; being vastly cheaper than a subway for lower capacity routes, as well as being faster and more efficient than a streetcar for longer or higher volume routes.

A trolley is single car, open. A streetcar is single (or occasionally double) car, enclosed. A tram is any length, but usually two or more, and provides more service slightly faster than either. A light rail is generally much longer than any of these, and can perform the duties of a metro or a tram.

So another difference between light rail and heavy rail is regulatory and crash compliance. Heavy rail generally includes regional rail which comes under the jurisdiction of the Federal Railroad Administration which has a much more developed set of safety and crash compliance standards. Light rail comes under the regulatory authority of individual states and the Federal Transit Administration which is more of a funding organization than a safety regulatory. Within that there are legal difference between streetcars and LRV's which generally have to do with automobile and pedestrian crash compliance and compatibility.

Loved using it during my time in OKC! Just hope they expand it to cover more area eventually

The new OKC thunder arena for OKC is supposed to have a public transit hub, so they are basically getting a metro. It will stretch the whole metro of OKC.

I think the dichotomy of light vs heavy trail is really a matter of technical specification and not a type of transit. For instance, in Macau or Singapore they have light rail and it’s entirely grade separated and runs very 5 minutes or less. Or PATH in NJ is considered regional rail and not a metro/subway because it runs on regular rail lines that could be used by “trains” in the traditional sense.

Great overview and lesson for transit planning! It's so funny how cities lean heavily on one mode when that's never completely worked Also really loved how you worked your logo into your thumbnail. Pro tip: for future videos, buy a pop filter for your mic! They're cheap and work wonders.

I just recently spent a winter in Milwaukee for work and used the streetcar fairly regularly. I primarily used it as a return trip from my job downtown and they're starting to expand it to more areas of downtown. If they expanded off of the island that downtown is on I would've been really happy since I would've loved to have visited the zoo and fairgrounds without getting in my car but for barhopping and commuting from lower east side down to the market and work it was great. I really hope they expand into more areas or connect to the airport but at the end of the day I was pretty happy just not having to walk through slush at 6pm after work.

I feel like whenever a government plans on building BRT or LRT rather than MRT they tend to over-invest in infrastructure that is exclusive to the system (BRT/LRT/whatever they decide to call it) such that if there comes a time to actually consider a metro the existing system makes it somewhat hard to make that transition. My city (not in America) is planning to in the coming decade build a network of what I can only describe as BRT and LRT out of the existing express bus lines and some of the regular tramways and that is a genuinely good thing. However, I worry that the BRT lines might not be so easily converted to LRT when the time comes when the BRT is inadequate for the region it would serve and similarly there's a worry that the LRT might not be so easily converted to a metro once density and traffic load warrants a metro. Thus the issue of eventually building the expensive metro ISN'T solved by building it in steps of slowly upgrading portions of the transit network from regular bus & tram traffic to BRT to LRT to MRT, but rather only pushed to a later date where the Metro would have to be built alongside the BRT & LRT and in a much denser city core which subsequently would make the creation of a metro far more expensive to build than if we'd lay the groundwork of it today.

I am a Tramdriver in Düsseldorf, Germany and I love the „light metro“ that’s exactly my job. But we mix everything between metro and tram. Today my line is pretty much like a tram but I’ll go under the earth for the Center of Düsseldorf. Other lines do partially have independent structures above ground. It’s really cool to have the different situations in my worklife!