What Other Cities With Streetcars Have To Say About The BQX

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — A proposed streetcar that would connect Brooklyn and Queens may be years away from becoming a reality, but now is the time to start preparing local businesses for the changes it will bring, a group of experts from other cities with streetcars said this week.

Business owners and advocates from Seattle, Kansas City, Portland and Minnesota — which each recently put in their own version of a streetcar — spent an hour Tuesday telling locals from the two boroughs how the new mode of transportation has impacted everything from parking to rent prices and gentrification in their cities.

The forum aimed to give a packed crowd at Williamsburg's Brooklyn Brewery an idea of what they can expect when plans for an 11-mile streetcar route from Astoria to Red Hook and Gowanus, known as the BQX, becomes a reality. The BQX project was most recently approved for an environmental review.

And, specifically, how local businesses along the route can get through years of construction to reap the eventual benefits of the new mode of transportation.

“If you’re going to lose 20, 30, 40, 50 percent of your business, how are you going to prepare now for those two years of construction?” said Isabel Chanslor, an organizer that helped more than 500 small business prepare for a streetcar in St. Paul, Minnesota. "It was challenging to get there, (but) the best thing you can do is marshal real dollars to real businesses to help them get through this."

Chanslor, a vice president with St. Paul's Neighborhood Development Center, explained how only four of the 520 or so businesses helped by a coalition of organizations in her city didn't survive the construction period.

The coalition used a series of marketing strategies, savings advice and forgivable loans starting three years before construction to ensure the businesses were around to benefit from the new transit option. Many saw business go up 40 to 60 percent after the streetcar was built because of its ability to bring more people to their storefronts, Chanslor said.

Other business owners from Seattle and Kansas City told the crowd that the streetcar in their cities has been worth any rough patches during construction.

"The streetcar has been a conduit for growth and our small business being right on the streetcar line, we have a front row seat to that growth," said Chris Goode, owner of Ruby Jean's Juicery in Kansas City. "It’s been a great thing for us."

Aaron Barthel, co-owner of Intrigue Chocolate Co. in Seattle, added that the streetcar has "stitched together" neighborhoods that were at one time isolated from one another.

Borough presidents from Brooklyn and Queens both said at the forum that connecting the city's own "transit desert" neighborhoods has been their hope for the BQX project.

The streetcar would provide a much-needed option to get between the two boroughs and make getting into Manhattan easier, meaning borough residents can reach jobs or other opportunities in the more centralized parts of the city.

“There are people in the communities in Red Hook, Gowanus and along our waterfront that do not know what is happening beyond that," said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who moderated the panel. "That is unacceptable and it must change.”

In St. Paul, Chanslor said, the need for the transit option became clear when the streetcar surpassed its prediction of 40,000 riders by 2030 in just a few months of opening.

Panelists also discussed how the streetcars would affect traffic and parking. Most said traffic was only mildly affected and that loss of parking was for the most part made up for by the increased transit options.

"There have been so many benefits to those same businesses (that lost parking) in getting people who otherwise would have made one ride into the city, parked, did their thing and driven away" Barthel said. "If you get them in and they can park and get around, they will stick around, spend more money and do more fun stuff."

The proposed BQX streetcar would run 24 hours a day, seven days a week and would cost as much as a subway ride. The car would come every five minutes during rush hour and every 10 minutes during other times of day, said Jessica Schumer, executive director of the nonprofit Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector.

The environmental review process will likely be completed by spring 2020 and the next planning stage, a land-use review, would be complete by the end of 2021.