After reading The Wall Street Journal account of the St. Louis streetcar quoted further below, I googled to learn what has happened in the last five years. As of 3/24/25, Wikipedia reported:
The Loop Trolley shut down in 2019 after ridership and revenue fell far short of projections, but was reopened in 2022 after the federal government threatened to demand the return of funds used to build it.
Apparently sunk costs are not sunk if their source is the federal government. So the poor taxpayer is forced to continue to pay more for the “streetcar named quagmire.” The abject failure of the St. Louis streetcar has inspired the Omaha mayor and city council to build their own streetcar, ignoring Warren Buffett’s sensible misgivings.
(p. A3) St. Louis business leaders looking to boost tourism and development spent years bringing the Loop Trolley to fruition, a $52 million streetcar project that runs for 2.2 miles between a historic park and an entertainment-and-business district on the edge of the city.
But it has been a bumpy ride, and now it may have reached a dead end.
The trolley, after just a year of offering limited service, is out of money. The nonprofit that operates the trolley is seeking $700,000 in local funds to continue, or else the service is set to close this month.
. . .
“They were trying to push dollars out in the street to stimulate the economy,” said Jeffrey Boothe, executive director of the Community Streetcar Coalition, which advocates for streetcars. He said some of the projects approved at the time hadn’t done enough analysis or were being proposed by entities that had never operated a transit system before.
The federal government now requires more rigor in its grant applications, he said. “We can chalk it up to lessons learned,” Mr. Boothe said.
The most successful trolley projects, like those in Seattle and Portland, are fully integrated into the existing transportation infrastructure, generating traffic from more than just tourists, said Jeff Brown, chairman of the department of urban and regional planning at Florida State University.
. . .
Only two cars were ready at the outset, so the system could operate only part-time. A third car was needed to be held in reserve for full-time service to assure reliability.
That has held back cumulative ridership to 15,766 since last November and fare income to $32,500 through September this year—much lower than what had been projected under a full-time schedule. The Loop Trolley has also brought in about $689,320 through a 1% sales-tax on businesses along the route, since it launched service last year.
For the full story see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 1, 2019 [sic], and has the title “St. Louis Streetcar Project Running Out of Juice.”)