Transportation chief asks if troubled District streetcar system can be saved
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The District has invested $200 million in what was projected to be a $3 billion streetcar project. Now, the city’s new transportation chief is asking an existential question about the beleaguered new transit system: Is it worth saving?
Appointed by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) in January after the previous administration’s unsuccessful scramble to open the streetcar line by the end of last year, Leif A. Dormsjo, a former top transportation official in Maryland, has spent a couple of months probing the project with a notable lack of sentimentality or defensiveness.
“We’re not planning for failure. I’m trying to prudently and responsibly prepare the service to be started. But if I can’t get to that point, I’m not going to be enchanted by some philosophy of transit that leads me to do something that doesn’t make sense,” Dormsjo said. “There’s been a lot of investment in this thing. It’s not a good outcome for that to be squandered. But at the end of the day, it has to work, it has to be safe, it has to have utility.”
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