When Michael Donovan walks around his neighborhood of Hillcrest, he sees the legacy of the streetcar all over. He sees it in the neighborhood's density and walkability, the mix of residential and commercial buildings and the wide streets that were necessary for streetcars to make turns.
"The San Diego streetcar era really was important in forming the type of communities we have," Donovan said. "This was a very pedestrianized area, and … the idea now is to try and get back to that."
Donovan is a co-founder of the grassroots neighborhood group Vibrant Uptown, which has been campaigning to bring the streetcar back to San Diego's urban core.
"We don't have room for all the cars that are going to be here as we continue to build out these neighborhoods," Donovan said. "It's not to replace cars, but it is to give us an option where you can fit 100 people in the space of a streetcar, as opposed to the amount of traffic it would take for 100 people in cars."
In contrast to the car-centric planning that shaped San Diego's development after World War II, the city's early growth was around the streetcar. The San Diego Electric Railway Company was founded in 1891 by sugar magnate John D. Spreckels.
At its peak, San Diego's streetcar network branched into neighborhoods that have no rail transit today, such as Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, Pacific Beach, Balboa Park, Mission Hills, North Park, South Park, Normal Heights, City Heights and Golden Hill. Many of the current MTS bus and trolley lines follow the same routes as the old streetcars.
But unlike the publicly owned mass transit systems of today, the San Diego Electric Railway Company was a for-profit business.
Ethan Elkind, Climate Program director at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at UC Berkeley, said streetcar companies were typically tied to real estate development.
"Real estate developers wanted to sell land, and a good way to boost the value of land was to build their own private streetcar systems," Elkind said. "That helped boost the price, and then they could sell the lots. And then people would just commute into where their jobs were, usually in the city centers, by riding these privately funded streetcars."
As the automobile became more widely available, streetcars got slower and were often stuck in traffic, Elkind said. One of the main reasons streetcar companies died out was an unsustainable business model.
"Once the real estate was sold off, there was no longer an economic incentive for these companies to continue operating the transit systems," Elkind said. "As buses came about, they were looked at as a newer, more adaptable, flexible technology to a streetcar."
The last streetcar ride in San Diego took place in 1949.
For Michael Donovan, the time is right for a streetcar revival. SANDAG, the county's transportation planning agency, included a streetcar line that encircles Balboa Park in its 2021 regional transportation plan. It was planned to come online by 2035.
But an update to the transportation plan last year pushed back the streetcar's timeline to 2050. Donovan said with the current pace of growth in San Diego's urban core, residents can't wait that long.
"Maybe it's time to rethink and learn from what we did in the past and revive the streetcars that we once had through neighborhoods that were originally designed for them," Donovan said. "I think that's a great way to celebrate the history that we've made over the last 250 years."
Vibrant Uptown is currently seeking $500,000 to fund a SANDAG planning study that would examine routing and funding options for the streetcar.
"Once that happens, then we'll hold town halls throughout the neighborhoods … to make sure that we're doing it in a way that people will use it," Donovan said.
