I had lived in Chicago for thirty years, and I like trains, but I’d never gone and taken a look at the Chicago area’s only streetcar line, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. So I set out one Sunday afternoon on Chicago’s suburban railroad system, Metra, to visit Kenosha. It was a pretty easy hour-and-forty-minute trip, past familiar cityscape for a while, then along a bicycle trail through well-off suburbs, and finally (and much more speedily) through increasingly open country. Kenosha may in some senses be a suburb of Chicago, but there is plenty of unbuilt-on land close to the state border.
The Kenosha streetcar runs for a mile or so between the Metra station and the Lakefront. Its complete route is a loop, said to be two miles long in all.
Map of central Kenosha showing the routes of the streetcar line and of Metra trains to Chicago. GIS data from Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap.
Its development was justified on the grounds that the line would serve the inhabitants of Harbor Park, a relatively new townhouse condo development on the Lakefront. The Kenosha streetcar seems to have been an abysmal failure at attracting Harbor Front customers though. The current schedule—7.5 hours a day starting at 10 or 11 for most of the year but on weekends only in winter—would not allow commuters to use it. To get to the Loop by 9 you’d have to take a train at 7:13 or earlier, and the first train from the Loop after 5 wouldn’t get you home until 6:38 or later. Clearly the streetcar line has become essentially a tourist attraction and a modest one at that. The latest figures (2014) from the American Public Transit Association (APTA) suggest that there are 45,054 passengers/year, or maybe 140/day (and you wonder how Kenosha Transit counts people who buy a day pass; if you make several round trips on a day pass, does each one-way ride count as an unlinked trip?). When I was there only one PCC car was running. It was taking about ten minutes to complete a loop, that is, making maybe 45 round trips, or ninety one-way trips/day. That means that there were something like 1.5 passengers per trip. Actually, I was struck by the complete absence of passengers on the Sunday afternoon I visited. There were, however, people out photographing the nicely repainted PCC cars, of which Kenosha Transit has acquired six. To someone who likes trains, it’s quite appealing to see these PCC cars running in a small city. It’s not clear that the cars have much to do with urban transit, however.
The Metra trains, interestingly, were just jammed, especially the late afternoon train back from Kenosha to Chicago. There were standees between Ravinia Park and Ravenswood. But the train wasn’t just serving people attending a Ravinia event. People got on and off at every one of the 27 stops. Perhaps there should be more than nine trains a day on Sunday! It was certainly interesting to contrast a transit service that is filling a real need with one that seems to be serving mostly an aesthetic one. The Kenosha streetcar is, admittedly, probably bringing in some tourist dollars, perhaps enough to justify the $6.37 subsidy per passenger trip (but note that, according to APTA, Metra’s tickets—almost always for a much longer ride—are subsidized at only $4.93/ride).