Cincinnati Streetcar --- 10 years later

It is September 9, 2026, and this is episode 59 of Citizen Watchdog with Todd Zinsser.

And today we're going to talk about the Cincinnati streetcar.

And oh boy, what a subject.

The Enquirer ran a report about the 10-year milestone of the streetcar.

and was fairly positive about it, although if you really read it and you really digest what's going on here, it seems like the advocates of the streetcar are really intent on convincing everyone that this was worth it.

As far as I can tell, the jury is still out.

They were crowing about the fact that they've reached a million riders a year or something like that, which is probably the first thing I would audit because everybody I talk to say they never see anybody on it.

So I'm sure that that ridership is boosted by some of the special events or the Reds games or the Bengals games or whatever.

And so I'm not sure that's the greatest way to measure the success of the streetcar.

I'm not sure people understand how much it cost the city, both in terms of the dollars, but also in terms of opportunity costs and what could have been done with that money were it not for the streetcar.

But I'm not sure that I've got a whole lot new to add except for one thing.

And that is that I did find a report sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration.

And it was carried out by, I think, the University of Florida or the University of South Florida, but some university transportation department experts.

And the report looked at five different urban circulators and Cincinnati was one of them.

And so they did an analysis using some very, very sophisticated econometric modeling.

And I'm going to talk about the results of that in a minute.