Editor’s note: This story is part of a collaboration between Flatwater Free Press and The Reader examining Omaha’s future streetcar.
The day after officials and businessmen took a ceremonial final trip on Omaha’s streetcar in 1955, junkers lit nearly a dozen trolleys on fire at a scrapyard by the Missouri River.
Local leaders at the time saw getting rid of the outdated trams as helping the city realize forward-thinking plans to accommodate commuters and remedy bottlenecks in the urban core. They thought the answer was adding more one-way streets, more lanes for automobiles, more parking lots and new highways.
But today’s urban planners believe that in reorienting Omaha for cars, their midcentury counterparts unintentionally drained the life out of downtown.
City planners in the 1950s thought transit followed development. Now, they know it’s the reverse — transportation can drive development and help remake the city, said mayoral adviser Steve Jensen.
That’s what planners are hoping to accomplish with the in-progress streetcar. And that project could lead to downtown Omaha becoming less car-centric and closer to the vibrant urban environment that existed before the city abandoned rail transit.
Leaders are looking to reinstate two-way traffic on many downtown streets and to make space for walkers and bikers.
Jensen and other streetcar proponents envision parking lots transformed into apartment buildings, new storefronts filled with businesses and sidewalks teeming with pedestrians.
The new streetcar won’t solve all of Omaha’s public transportation problems given the challenge of serving a sprawling, low-density metro, said former Omaha Planning Director Marty Shukert. But it will make the city’s core more maneuverable without a car, he said.
More abstractly, the streetcar will bring a “cool factor” to the heart of the city, said Shukert, who has “sacred memories” of riding the old trolley as a child.
“That’s why a streetcar can do what a bus can’t,” he said.
The little streetcars that couldn’t
The half-page advertisements were splashed across a dozen local newspapers in the weeks leading up to the 1954 midterm elections: “Modernize Omaha’s Traffic,” the ads declared, alongside a drawing of a streetcar slashed through with an X.
Omaha’s streetcars were on the chopping block that election — voters would decide whether to replace the last of the city’s “antiquated, slow street cars” with “new, modern buses,” allowing cars to get around faster, the ad said.
Backed by a U.S. senator, a Husker football legend and some of the richest businessmen in town, the ad blitz paid off on Election Day.
Nearly 65% of voters approved the ballot measure, giving the Street Railway Company long-term control over the city’s bus service and condemning the remaining streetcars to the wrecking yard.
For many Omahans, from then-Mayor Johnny Rosenblatt to neighbors of the old streetcar, the switch to an all-bus fleet felt like progress.
“For years, these streetcars have been waking me up at 5:17 a.m. Now I can get some sleep,” a Dundee resident told the United Press when the trolleys stopped running.
After World War II, a flood of automobiles hitting the roads presented downtown Omaha with new problems: heavy rush-hour traffic, a severe parking shortage and declining streetcar ridership. An out-of-town consultant hired by the city offered solutions.
Chicago traffic engineer George Barton recommended Omaha build thousands of parking spots on public land, convert most downtown streets to fast-moving one-ways and eliminate the streetcars running down the middle of streets, according to a series of city reports released from 1949 to 1954.
Switching to buses would help relieve traffic congestion, city leaders and the Street Railway Company both agreed.
The city converted 15 downtown two-way streets into one-ways. It approved measures to widen lanes and raise speed limits on main roads like Dodge and Farnam streets.
“The movement of the car was front and center. That was the No. 1 priority,” said Julie Harris, director of Bike Walk Nebraska.
Away from downtown, the city was having a growth spurt.
Omaha’s land area nearly doubled between 1950 and 1970 as it gobbled up suburban and undeveloped areas west of 72nd Street.
Sprawling to the west
Omaha’s land area has more than tripled since 1950 as annexations pushed city limits farther west. Low-density suburban developments make up much of the added lands.
At the same time, the city’s population dispersed. The number of residents per square mile dropped more than 25% as city dwellers decamped to the fast-growing suburbs, according to a Flatwater Free Press analysis.
New office complexes, shopping centers and public schools popped up as Omahans moved west.
By the 1960s, Interstate 80 offered car commuters six lanes of “superhighway” to travel between the old city and the new suburbs.
City planners across the country veered from dense urban development patterns and opted for sprawl in response to what the public desired, Shukert said. Amid the baby boom, young families wanted to own homes with their own yards, and buying a car allowed them to do it farther from the urban core, he said.
As the places where people lived and worked spread apart, mass transit — let alone fixed-rail streetcars — could no longer serve commuters efficiently, Shukert said.
Postwar timeline
1947
Streetcars narrowly outnumber buses in Omaha, but the transition to buses is underway. Buses replace streetcar service on Sundays.
1951
Only three of the eight streetcar lines that ran in Omaha at the end of World War II remain in service.
1954
Downtown Omaha’s busiest roads are converted to one-way streets. Speed limits are raised across the city.
Omahans approve a measure to make the Omaha & Council Bluffs Street Rail Company an all-bus franchise, effectively voting streetcars out of existence.
1955
The last of Omaha’s streetcars are taken out of service and fully replaced by buses.
Omaha annexes more than 6,700 acres of suburban developments, extending its city limits west of 72nd Street.
1957
Work begins near Gretna on Interstate 80, which will later connect urban Omaha to the western suburbs and Lincoln.
The city’s western expansion paired with the focus on car-dominant city planning kicked off a decades-long decline in much of the urban core, said Jensen, the mayoral adviser.
Businesses and entertainment venues that anchored downtown gradually moved west, leaving empty storefronts and a sea of parking in their wake, Jensen said. Between 1963 and 2014, downtown added 13,000 parking spots but lost 21,000 jobs, according to a city analysis.
“The more parking you build, the fewer buildings you have. The fewer buildings you have, the (fewer) jobs,” Jensen said. “You ended up in this cycle where you just wipe out your downtown.”
The one-ways and wider streets made car commuting more efficient, but the high-speed driving they encouraged made walking and biking feel less safe, Harris said.
“Walking got engineered out of our daily routines,” she said.
The city needed something to help bring vibrancy and investment back to the urban core, Jensen said.
The streetcar fit the bill, he said.
Back on track
The resurgence of streetcars — much like their disappearance — is a reflection of public preferences, said Robert Cervero, a professor emeritus of city planning at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bringing back the once-discarded mode of transportation has plenty of recent precedent. Since 2000, more than a dozen American cities have launched modern streetcars, including Seattle, Atlanta and Kansas City.
Across generations, people are starting to favor walkable urban districts and neighborhoods where housing and shops are woven together on the same block, urban planners said in interviews.
“Everybody wants to be in a Brooklyn kind of environment,” Cervero said. “The streetcar can be an economic lever to help trigger that kind of transformation.”
City leaders and walkability activists have long agreed on what Omaha should do to create those types of spaces — at least on paper.
Downtown should be a dense, mixed-use environment “where you can live everyday life without using a car,” a 2010 plan stated. For two decades, city reports have consistently called for safety and accessibility improvements for pedestrians, cyclists and transit users. Omaha’s master plan repeats similar objectives, like adding bike lanes and maintaining and building sidewalks.
But city leaders haven’t consistently turned those ideals into action, said Harris, the Bike Walk director.
“Every time we go through these exercises in our city, the recommendations are always the same,” Harris said. “But we don’t have the equivalent amount of action to implement the things.”
The city’s commitment to the modern streetcar could be the catalyst that moves the needle, project supporters say.
The city is banking on the idea that the streetcar will allow more land in the urban core to be used for residential and commercial buildings instead of parking, Jensen said.
Because it will offer an alternative to cars, new apartments and office buildings won’t need to offer quite as many parking spots — a major appeal to developers, said Mike Moylan, CEO of Shamrock Development. The banks are starting to buy that logic when financing new projects, he said.
A key part of the plan hinges on making the most of existing public parking. For example, a city-owned spot can be used by a commuter on weekdays and by a resident on nights and weekends, Jensen said.
That way, real estate currently devoted to underused surface lots can be put to better uses, he said.
Just as eliminating the old trolley came with one-way streets, walkability activists hope the new streetcar will bring back two-ways. A soon-to-be released study could be a step in that direction.
The yearslong study lays out the possibility of reverting one-ways to two-way traffic, adding bike lanes and dropping car lanes on streets in the urban core, said city engineer Austin Rowser.
Over the last few decades, the city has converted one-ways with positive results, including Cuming and Burt streets near Creighton University and Farnam Street in Blackstone, said Bob Stubbe, head of Public Works. But making the change can be costly and challenging on streets with parking garages oriented for one-ways, he said.
Two-way traffic, narrower lanes and bikeways “make it less attractive to go fast,” improving safety for pedestrians, said Todd Nichols, a member of activist group Strong Towns Omaha.
Local Strong Towns leader Noah Mahlberg hopes the design adjustments come with other moves to make living without a car easier in Omaha. Integrating the streetcar with other transportation options and making Metro Transit buses free to ride, just like the streetcar, would be beneficial, he said.
Metro CEO Lauren Cencic envisions the streetcar complementing the bus system with people using ORBT to come into the urban core from out west.
The goal isn’t to get Omahans to stop driving — it’s to give people more options for moving around the city, Cencic said.
Retired U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer said he has seen streetcars spur the kind of results Omaha’s urban core needs in his own backyard.
The Democrat from Portland, Oregon, backed the first modern streetcar project 30 years ago and said the rail system has helped his city reorient its core around people over car traffic. Omaha, he said, is on track to do the same.
“I think this is going to lead to a renaissance of how people think about downtown Omaha,” Blumenauer said.
Photo credits
15th and Farnam streets, 1907 and 2026: Looking east on Farnam Street. 1907 photo from the KMTV/Bostwick-Frohardt Photograph Collection, permanently housed at The Durham Museum. 2026 photo by Naomi Delkamiller/Flatwater Free Press
16th and Farnam streets, 1930 and 2026: Looking west on Farnam Street. 1930 photo from the KMTV/Bostwick-Frohardt Photograph Collection, permanently housed at The Durham Museum. 2026 photo by Naomi Delkamiller/Flatwater Free Press
20th and Farnam streets, 1930 and 2026: Looking east on Farnam Street. 1930 photo from the KMTV/Bostwick-Frohardt Photograph Collection, permanently housed at The Durham Museum. 2026 photo by Naomi Delkamiller/Flatwater Free Press
26th and Farnam streets, 1924 and 2026: Looking north on Farnam Street, from Kountze Lutheran Church. 1924 photo from the KMTV/Bostwick-Frohardt Photograph Collection, permanently housed at The Durham Museum. 2026 photo by Lily Smith/Flatwater Free Press
36th and Farnam streets, 1915 and 2026: Looking east from the Blackstone Hotel. 1915 photo from the KMTV/Bostwick-Frohardt Photograph Collection, permanently housed at The Durham Museum. 2026 photo by Naomi Delkamiller/Flatwater Free Press
24 Comments
Reading your article, I find myself immediately in agreement with the guys literally lighting things on fire back in the 1950s, not the people metaphorically lighting things on fire in 2026.
Cars in American culture represent the freedom of movement. Instead of being constrained by walking distance or expecting the government to provide public transportation options, car ownership provides the means to go where you want to go (and perhaps more importantly, where you NEED to go) upon demand, in a state of relative comfort and convenience. As the American middle class became more able to easily afford and maintain car ownership, city planers logically concluded that better enabling car owners to drive on their city streets would bring people into the urban core, as opposed to creating reasons to avoid the urban core. That makes total sense to me, both in 1950 and today.
Now urban planners have flipped. They view “car-centric” thinking as a sin and demand more public transportation. This may be effective in attracting people who aren’t car owners and will have a reason to take advantage of public transportation. But I find it hard to believe that car owners would say to themselves, “Yeah I’ll leave this highly comfortable mode of transportation I paid thousands of dollars for so that I can sit in a dirty street car with a bunch of strangers. Sounds like fun!”
So Omaha has decided to gamble on this idea. I suppose that it up to the voters who elected their city leaders, who in turn came up with this plan. But as for me, I don’t expect I’ll ever wake up one morning and say to myself that it’s a good day to go to a far away city and ride their expensive public transportation experiment (particularly since I would have to use my car to even drive there in the first place, and my car apparently isn’t welcome anymore).
But cars aren’t comfortable modes of transportation. You’re forced to sit in a metal box for 20 minutes to get anywhere, unable to relax, dealing with other drivers, not getting any movement in, not getting any sense of social community. And then you have to deal with parking! Not sure if you’ve ever worn a watch that tracks your heart rate, but mine sure spikes any time I’m in the driver’s seat. I would much rather be able to sit and enjoy the scenery, respond to messages, or even shut my eyes while getting to my destination. Not to mention the impact car-centric culture has had on our elderly population. What are you supposed to do when you get too old to drive safely anymore?
Yesterday in the middle of the heat I stopped on the side of the road to pick up an elderly gentleman having a heart issue while trying to walk to work. Cars were whizzing by at 50-60 miles an hour. He had been out there for an hour and no-one stopped to check on him except me.
The city planners have made it clear that they don’t want to eliminate cars and are leaving the existing parking alone. Sounds like you love driving, well guess what: less cars on the roads makes driving more enjoyable for actual car/driving enthusiasts. The only people driving are people that want to be driving.
Your first sentence is false information. Cars are comfortable, much more so than dirty and poorly maintained public transportation systems. Who knows if public transportation will be overly hot in the summer, cold and damp in the winter, or smell like BO all year round. Meanwhile your car has air conditioning, heat and perhaps even leather seats.
You complain about the stress of driving in traffic, but that isn’t actually the fault of cars. That’s the fault of living in an overcrowded urban area with poorly designed and maintained roads. The solution isn’t public transportation (as that actually exacerbates the problem in other ways), but moving to a less crowded and better designed place to live.
And heart rate? I wonder what the heart rate was of the woman who was literally set on fire on public transportation in Chicago? I’ll pass completely on that “sense of social community” you mentioned! Yikes!
When I lived in a city that had streetcars and a heavily used bus system, I used both daily. They weren’t smelly, cold, hot, or uncomfortable, and I enjoyed being able to read, rest, nap, and use my phone. The commuter trains were even better (this was a city on the east coast). I loved those. Depending on the circumstance, driving your own car can be advantageous. But so can using a streetcar, bus, or train.
Firstly, your personal claim that you experienced these things is extremely anecdotal. I could simply counter you entirely by saying that I have personally experienced the opposite (which I have).
Secondly, your anecdote takes place in a major costal city, per your own admission. As I pointed out in other responses, the terrain and population density of Nebraska is not the same as major costal areas. Hypothetical success in one locale does not imply success in a very different locale.
Thirdly, as other responses to this article have said (from people on both sides of the issue), the streetcar won’t deliver meaningful or useful long-term public transportation. It’s mainly aimed at tourists who may be visiting downtown Omaha in the upcoming baseball games. It won’t actually be helpful to everyday citizens living in the suburbs that would still have to drive their cars to even get near the streetcar in the first place, as the majority of the city will still have spotty or non-existent public transportation options.
Lastly, you can look these up for examples of serious violence taking place on public transportation:
“2025 Chicago train immolation”
“Killing of Debrina Kawam”
“Killing of Iryna Zarutska”
Etc, etc, etc…
I dont believe you. No specifics. Why didn’t you call a rescue squad. Or are they also taboo since they are vehicles also.
It’s easy to say that cars represent freedom, but who do they represent freedom to? On average, it now costs $12,000 per year to own a car in the United States. For a married couple, is having to pay to own 2 cars so they can both work freedom? Furthermore, you have to be able to drive a car, both legally and physically. If your 13 year old can’t go get a gallon of milk while you stay home making dinner with other kids because the only grocery options are accessible by car, is that freedom? If the government is saying, through planning and policy choices, that you must own a car to be able to work or accomplish simple daily tasks, that is not freedom, it is essentially a tax to auto makers and oil companies to exist. Freedom is having multiple choices, not a singular one.
Your reasoning is backwards because you operate on the assumption the the government exists to give you things and/or make decisions for you. It isn’t actually the job of government to interact with you on a personal level at all.
Take for example the 2nd Amendment. By your logic, the government “saying” that I have a right to bear arms means that the government has required me to bear arms and will either tax me for failure to do so and/or subsidize my gun ownership by buying me a gun. Neither of those things actually happen in practice of course, because it isn’t the job of the government to involve itself in my personal decisions other than to protect my right to make those decisions.
Similarly, the government neither has the responsibility or the power to decide if you own a car or not (or at least they SHOULDN’T have such power, even though some people seem to want that). The government doesn’t decide how far away the grocery store is or if your spouse has a job. Those things might influence your decision to own or not own a car, but the government can’t simply wave a magic wand to bestow your ideal world for you. It’s first and foremost your job to solve those problems for yourself.
And this entire line of discussion is really just a whataboutism anyway. You aren’t actually addressing the positive aspects of designing roads primarily for cars, nor doing anything to dissuade me from the negative consequences of public transportation. Instead you just want to quibble that some people are too poor to own a car. You could have at least just said that and saved us both some time.
Without the government giving you streets and highways you wouldn’t have too many useful places to exercise your car-driving freedom.
I see the users of petroleum-using, internal-combustion-engine-propelled personal vehicles, are the most heavily government-subsidized people in US history.
On the other hand, the streetcar has almost nothing to do with advancing pubic transportation. It’s a tourist trolley that most Omahans who ride it will drive to from their homes miles away.
Interesting take, Jimmer. The Roman Empire has been credited as the first road builders. Were the Romans also a bunch of “subsidized” whiny brats, or did they lay the groundwork for most of modern civilization?
As for the trolley, well yes, of course it’s mainly a short lived (but extremely expensive) virtue signal to give the impression that Omaha supports public transportation when in fact we all know that car ownership will still be defacto mandatory in 90% of the city. But I wonder why Flatwater didn’t say that, if it is indeed their mission to “investigate” stores that “matter” as they say?
This is a great read. Thanks for publishing this article. I hope the streetcar will help remove some of the auto traffic and get people walking again.. Tourists and conventioneers will not have to bother with the uber app as much to get from hotel to destination. The surface parking lots sit half empty most of the time and become eyesores after years of neglect. I am encouraged by the infill that is going on and hope the street car will encourage more commercial and residential development. I would love to see the density re established and the downtown streets full of pedestrians and shoppers like I see in the archived pictures from the 1920’s and 30’s. It’s a stretch but we can always dream. The cool factor for the urban core will come back.
Milwaukee spent big money on a downtown street car. Oops.
The number of people who live downtown and have gotten rid of their cars is significant and growing. The majority of the people living in my building no longer have cars. Due to the redevelopment downtown it’s so good to be able to walk or bike to most everything. When we need to go somewhere outside of the area uber and lift or the bus (especially orbt) are great options. Work from home has definitely helped. Most downtown dwellers cannot wait for the streetcar to make getting around even easier.
Honestly, the street car development and prioritizing options like biking will bring me back to Omaha. Despite what the other commentor said, I generally prefer to do my day to day tasks without getting in a car and sitting in traffic or worrying about parking.
This makes me proud to say I’m from Omaha.
The 800 LB Gorilla in the room that no one wants to talk about is the newly found concept of “Remote Work” which has had a dramatic effect upon “urban core”. No where in this article is their mention of the concept. Denver is now referred to as “America’s emptyiest downtown”. How does City Planning look at avoiding that issue.
I admit that I am not sure how to answer you on the remote work situation.
However, as someone originally from Denver who purposefully relocated to Nebraska to get away from that place, I can say that watching homeless men inject likely illegal substances into their bodies on the sidewalk outside the Webb building had something to do with why I left, and it might have something to do with why many people are getting the heck out of that town. Did you know that the founder of Playboy Magazine once referred to a major street in Denver as the “longest, wickedest street in the world” (long before being known as an “empty” place)? I can confirm his assessment from many years of direct personal experience in the matter.
And Omaha isn’t exactly a beacon of safety in this regard either…
This article is steeped in nostalgia, which distracts from present day reality. Portraying the reintroduction of the streetcar as a panacea for downtown Omaha’s complex history is an exercise in oversimplification. Omaha’s new streetcar will have significant hurdles in demonstrating that it can provide genuine utility for a geographically dispersed population, especially when proponents describe it as a “lifestyle enhancement,” and the article’s failure to critically engage with the challenges results in an unbalanced perspective that favors advocacy over objective analysis.
For example, let’s not ignore that KC’s population is 2,270,682, more than double Omaha’s population of 1,009,836.
Job-seekers and college grads relocate for high-paying jobs, low taxes, and cultural amenities, not a streetcar that will drag the city’s economic health.
The following statements in the article are perhaps the most contradictory and misleading: “The city is banking on the idea that the streetcar will allow more land in the urban core to be used for residential and commercial buildings instead of parking,” Jensen said.
Because it will offer an alternative to cars, new apartments and office buildings won’t need to offer quite as many parking spots—a major appeal to developers, said Mike Moylan, CEO of Shamrock Development.”
Those thoughts are rich in contradiction when you look the growing number of parking garages and lots.
1) The first 14 floors of the new MoO tower are a parking garage for 2,000-plus cars owned and operated by the city.
2) The city is buying, building, and operating new parking garages.
3) 16th Street from Dodge to Leavenworth has numerous garages and surface parking facing 16th Street. 16th Street was an iconic downtown street. Historically human-centered and walkable. Those qualities are diminished to say the least.
The retired congressman representing Oregon’s 3rd congressional district provides a mixture of verifiable historical facts and political spin or speculative projection regarding the Omaha Streetcar. ”…streetcars spur the kind of results Omaha’s urban core needs…” What an urban core “needs” is highly subjective. Basic infrastructure and fiscal restraint are actual needs. ”…helped his city reorient its core around people over car traffic.” That’s a favorable interpretation because, in truth, traffic congestion remains high, and attributing the entire shift to the streetcar ignores dozens of other aggressive zoning and biking policies. ”Omaha… is on track to do the same.” This is a predictive opinion. There is no guarantee that Omaha’s geographic layout, commuter culture, or economic climate will mimic Portland’s trajectory.
In addition to spin, the article uses emotional language to position the streetcar as a guaranteed “renaissance” or “catalyst”: “drained the life” to suggest moral or vital decline rather than just a shift in consumer behavior, “sacred memories” to add a sentimental, non-tech justification for the streetcar.
The article is heavy on the perspective of proponents and planners while leaving out or underplaying the total project cost, how it is being financed, or the potential burden on taxpayers if ridership projections are not met. It offers minimal weight to contemporary concerns. There is no in-depth interview with local fiscal conservatives or skeptics who argue that streetcars are inefficient, especially considering the advances in tech today. It omits the risks developers or the city face if specific, speculative, density-dependent commercial/residential projects never materialize.
The article frames “walkability” as an inherent good but does not fully address the logistical reality for residents in the “sprawling” western suburbs for whom the streetcar will provide no direct utility.
Omaha’s specific pattern of low-density development has left the city with an immense physical footprint to maintain per citizen. Omaha has a disproportionately vast amount of public infrastructure relative to its population size. Even though Omaha fits into less than half the land area of Kansas City, it is still highly sprawled when compared to traditional major cities.
While Omaha is denser than Kansas City’s combined urban/rural city limits, it still requires far more infrastructure per person than a truly compact city. Take a moment to research, what is the per capita cost of road maintenance in Omaha compared to other midwestern cities?
Hi, Howard.
“…an exercise in oversimplification…”
Yes, of course it is. All Flatwater articles specialize in this sort of sophistic reasoning. Seriously, I’m not being facetious or just hurling insults, but this is objectively true. Every Flatwater article relies heavily on cherry picked facts, anecdotal personal stories and appeals to emotion in order to deliver a very clearly biased political agenda. And this becomes most obvious when we compare an article from other mainstream news sources to an article covering the exact same topic from Flatwater.
Take immigration for example.
If the Nebraska Examiner were to write an article about immigration, they would probably discuss the detention center in McCook, the larger agenda of the Trump administration and how those things have impacted immigrants in Nebraska. But although Nebraska Examiner would allow their political bias to guide the article toward a conclusion that “orange man bad” and immigrants are innocent angels that have done no wrong, they would at least take the time to provide an overview of the alternate perspective and quote several Republican politicians providing their argument for why immigration enforcement is necessary. The reader has at least a chance to walk away from the article with a better understanding of the topic and having decided to disagree with the author’s conclusions.
No such consideration happens when Flatwater publishes an article about immigration. No Republican will be quoted at all and there will be no indication given that anyone in this nation has the slightest opinion that immigration enforcement is necessary. Instead the entire article will be an amalgamation of anecdotal stories of poor immigrants who are so sad about what is being done to them, ultimately arriving at the conclusion that the government is literally Hitler to deport these innocent people. Any information that could conceivably dispute this conclusion will be entirely omitted from the article (and Flatwater fanboys will dogpile anyone in this comment section who tries to point out those facts).
Oversimplification? Absolutely. But it’s also more than that. Flatwater wants to obfuscate the issues and hurl emotionally manipulative language at the reader, which results in articles that are so obviously biased that they often cross into the realm of outright misinformation and lies. I’m just shocked that more people have not noticed this, because probably about 90% or more of what Flatwater publishes has this problem (and/or is just irrelevant fluff pieces about guys with man buns playing frisbee).
Anyway, I agree with you fully Howard. Public transportation does not make the same sort of sense in the largely suburban cities of the U.S. interior states that it does in tightly urbanized costal states like New York. You need a car to survive here because you WILL eventually need to go somewhere outside walking distance and not connected to public transportation. Therefore it is common sense that designing cities to punish car owners is counter productive in the grand scheme of things. Our culture as Americans is “car-centric” for a reason!
What a waste of money. After the novelty wears off no one will use this outside of college world series week. A bus is cheap, easy and portable. Alot of mutual of omaha employees can work from home.
It’s not city governments job to try and manipulate how I live. They work for me, not the other way around. Omaha is a car city. Figure it out. I really don’t care what a couple of 80 year old long ago city planners think. Likewise, don’t quote oddball from Seattle, Portland and Berkely.
While the delivery was rather brusque, I have to agree with Mike here. Government works for the people, not the other way around. It is not the role of government to tell people how to live, where to live, if they can own a car, if the streets are designed for their car, etc. The people should be telling the government what they are going to do and the government should then exist solely to defend their right to do it.
We live in Bellevue. Tell me what eliminating parking garages in downtown Omaha means for those of us who live in the suburbs? No streetcars out here and busses few and far between. Totally impracti
We live in Bellevue. How will eliminating downtown parking and dependence on streetcars and busses effect those of us living in the suburbs?
If the city decides that “car-centric” design is a sin and that public transportation is the wave of the future, that may work well for people already living in the inner city who stubbornly refuse to own cars.
But this is not an option for anyone outside of the urban core. Owning a car (or truck, etc) and using it to get places is mandatory for 99.9% of Nebraska. If Omaha doesn’t continue to accommodate cars and in fact begins behaving in ways that actually repel car owners, what impact do we all think that might have on the economy of Omaha? Do you think people will still want to visit Omaha tourist attractions if they literally can’t get there because their car isn’t welcome anymore?
While I was against the streetcar project as a waste of money, it is too late to turn back. The cost to the taxpayers of Omaha would be immense.
Adding bike walk trails will be much less expensive and also add to economic development.
There should or could be economic development along the route which would help justify it. I also think this is just a start. There will be routes north and south and going out west over time. There was also some talk about connecting to Council Bluffs and running down the 1st Avenue corridor. That would be very expensive to add a bridge. It would make the $22 million spent on the Bob Kerrey Bridge look like small change.