A New Orleans bus driver tips his hat to the streetcar he replaced in 1948. Only a fraction of the city’s historic streetcar network survived, but in recent years the city opened two new lines.
Photographer: Bettmann via Getty Images
How the New Orleans Streetcar Revival Left Bus Riders Behind
The city’s expansion of its tourist-friendly streetcar network did little to help long-suffering NOLA commuters, transit advocates say. But change may be en route.
Judy Stevens leaves her home in New Orleans East three hours before her shift at a local hospital begins. Stevens, who works as an ophthalmic photographer (“If your eye doctor wants to see something behind your eye, I take a photo of it,” she says), doesn’t have a car and relies on a pair of buses to get to work. When Stevens talked to Politico about her onerous commute in 2018, she explained that she left so early because her first bus was often late, causing her to miss her second bus, which only runs every half hour. Things haven’t improved since then.
It was frustrating, then, when Stevens saw the city pour more than $50 million into the Rampart/St. Claude streetcar line in 2016, restoring a stretch of the city’s historic streetcar network that had been torn out in 1949. This line runs along the edge of the heavily touristed French Quarter into the historically black Treme neighborhood. It operated for just two years before the collapse of a hotel along its path shut it down. Today, more than a year after the incident, most of the line remains closed.