Streetcars in South Bend?

Close your eyes and you can almost see the future. It is 2031. You are in downtown South Bend. You walk to Michigan and Colfax and hop on the streetcar. Where do you want to go? Notre Dame for the football game? The Farmers’ Market for breakfast? Mishawaka for a bar where you can smoke cigarettes inside? Pick one. The tram will take you there.

So goes a new proposal for South Bend, in its (very very) early stages. The “RiverRail Modern Streetcar” group is calling for six miles of tracks to be put in the city, running from Notre Dame to downtown and to Mishawaka along the river.

It’s a tantalizing vision: tracks on the roads, wires overhead, streetcars gliding again around South Bend for the first time since 1940.

And it’s consistent with other positive transformations of the city in the past decade, united by their aim to undo decades of demolition: of public transportation, of old buildings, of South Bend as an urban centre, and—most important—of morale.

Much progress has been made on this front, and trams are indeed beautiful. RiverRail, as Mayor James Mueller said, should be commended for their “ambition” in thinking up such a project. Heck, West.SB might even make t-shirts with a map of the old streetcar routes.  

That said, we wonder whether this is the best use of time and energy. The proposal comes with an estimated $200 million price tag. These estimates are always conservative. 

The group suggests that much of the money could come from federal and state infrastructure grants. But the first step is $250,000 for consultants—to be paid, presumably, by South Bend and Mishawaka. Remember the new South Shore Station? So far, it seems the city has spent at least $305,000 on studies for that project, and the county another $120,000. As a recent Tribune headline concluded: “Lots of money on studies. No progress. No location settled.”

We ought to be cautious about plans that appear to benefit only consultants and planners. Streetcars in South Bend seems like another such plan. 

In the meantime, before we build streetcars or move the train station, why not pay attention to the bus system we already have? To begin, we might harmonize route 4 with the South Shore schedule, so that it’s actually feasible to take the bus to get the train. (Route 4 runs from the depot down Lincolnway to the airport and back again.)

Consider this scenario. You live in downtown South Bend and are returning home on the South Shore from a weekday trip to Chicago. If you take the 4:00 PM train from Millennium Station, you get to the South Bend airport at 6:55. 

You’d like to take the bus downtown—there’s a stop right near your apartment, and you wouldn’t have to drive or take a taxi. But the bus has just left the airport nine minutes earlier, at 6:46. The next one doesn’t come until nearly an hour later, at 7:43. Unless you want to wait for 48 minutes, you’ll have headed home another way.  

If you want to go take the train on a Saturday morning, same problem. To catch the 8:48 AM westbound, the bus will drop you at the airport (coincidentally) 48 minutes earlier, at 8:00.

And if you get back to South Bend after 6:00 PM on a Saturday—well, sorry. You’ll have to wait until Monday morning to take the bus back downtown.

Bus schedules are complicated things and fixing this problem likely isn’t as easy as editing the PDF on SBTranspo’s website. But, we think, it’s a reasonable aspiration to have for our city. Perhaps in the end it’s just as ambitious as building streetcars. No consultants necessary.