D.C.'s streetcar nightmare: an outdated transit idea that just keeps coming back.

• Author: Epstein, Jim
• Position: Reason TV - John DeFerrari's " Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, D.C." - Book review

"There's not a single redeeming thing that can be said about streetcars," opined the Washington Post editorial board in 1962.Thankfully, this "hopeless anachronism" in America's capital city had just "clunked its last." Streetcars were beset by technical and logistical flaws that made daily commutes invariably unpleasant, so overwhelmingly Washingtonians were happy to see them go. That's according to the new book, Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, D.C., by the local historian John DeFerrari.

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Naturally, the bastion of efficiency that is the District of Columbia decided to bring the streetcars back, introducing a new 2.2-mile surface-level rail line to run along H Street. Plagued by accidents and engineering problems, the project suffered cost overruns that lifted the price tag to more than $200 million. Initially slated to open in 2012, the new streetcar line finally started offering (fairly limited) service this February--a mere four years behind schedule.

As the late former Mayor Marion Barry put it in 2014, the streetcar "was ill-planned, ill-thought-out, ill-engineered, ill-everything."

Had officials paid more attention to the history, they might have foreseen this outcome. For about a century, streetcars crisscrossed Washington. Though they were an important technology in their time, spurring the development of the commuter suburbs in Virginia and Maryland, streetcars involved major engineering headaches and required an enormous amount of capital investment and maintenance.

"They were very expensive to build," DeFerrari says, "and if you had a new suburb just getting started, you would have very few people there to begin with taking the cars, and the streetcar line would tend to not make money."

In the winter, the rail beds were prone to getting jammed with snow and ice. And when a streetcar got stuck, the entire line would grind to a halt until the problem was resolved.

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In 1921, the Washington Rapid Transit Company began running buses alongside the streetcars. Not only were...