Like the ridiculously long tracking shot in Jean-Luc Godard’s apocalyptic Weekend, Toronto’s Transit City plan inches closer to reality in certain parts of the city. One of the major routes, the proposed Eglinton Crosstown, has even gone so far as being showcased in a number of open houses over the past two weeks. It’s the biggest step forward for the Other East-West Corridor since the provincial government literally filled in the groundwork on what was to be the Eglinton West subway line back in 1995. The Eglinton Crosstown would link Scarborough and Etobicoke with an efficient transit route that doesn’t require a trip through Yorkville. And the plan calls for the route to be traversed by light rail transit (LRT) which is both far less expensive than building subways and can theoretically be completed in a fraction of the time. Hooray! Innovative thinking! Possible results within this lifetime!

But (there’s always a “but” isn’t there?) LRT might not be the best way from Kennedy to Pearson. A few American cities are constructing innovative transit routes cheaply and quickly using Toronto’s most famous TTC vehicle: the streetcar. In the past five years, Portland and Seattle have reintroduced streetcars to their respective commuters with much success. Even car-crazed Los Angeles — a city whose public transit ridership sags somewhere between 6 and 12 per cent — seems to be getting serious about resurrecting their infamously extinct transit vessel.

When it comes to pricing, there is simply no comparison. The cost of the proposed LA line is between $60 and $90 million for what amounts to 4.8 km of track. Compare that to $73 million per km for Toronto’s LRT. Besides, we already know how to build streetcar lines, and we’re still shopping around for some new vehicles to replace the aged fleet in 2012. But the real selling point, and this may be appealing to anyone who’s getting tired of packing themselves into the gridlocked 32 and 34 Eglinton busses, is that construction doesn’t need to last for the next few decades. The Portland route was built at rate of a block a week, and according to nycsubway.org:

Since the streetcars are lighter than light rail vehicles, fewer public utilities had to be moved in the excavation of tracks. Sidewalks and parking were not disrupted because stations only required small sidewalk reconstruction and the use of one standard city parking spot for stations. Electrical systems were built underneath sidewalks near streetcar stops.

Cheap and easy: two words not often associated with transit expansion.

What’s more interesting is that in LA, streetcars may return without any involvement from the city’s Metro council, nor from its Department of Transportation. Seriously. Building the three-mile route would be the responsibility of the proposed non-profit organization  LA Streetcar Inc — a private, third-party conglomerate of local councilors, business improvement groups and other individuals from the Broadway neighborhoods through which the streetcar line would run. They’re hoping to utilize the model set up by the Portland Streetcar Inc and have local businesses play a key role in bringing transit through their own streets. In Portland, businesses even voted to impose a tax surcharge on themselves to make it happen, and more lines are already in the works.

While this all sounds a bit unrealistic, given the kind of business-versus-transit confrontations from Toronto’s recent past, the bottom line is that Portland has a streetcar line whose ridership continues to grow. We still don’t even have a subway to York University or a rail link to the airport — though both ideas have been batted around since the mid-1990s. This is not to say that streetcars are the answer, they may just be a better option—or at least one that can be realized. And if Los Angeles can manage to build a streetcar line, maybe Hollywood North is already on the right track.

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