Mayoral hopeful Bob O'Connor is unveiling his first major economic development proposal of the young political season, saying he favors building a new streetcar line connecting Downtown and Oakland.

O'Connor said the streetcars would promote development, especially in the Hill District and other neighborhoods along the transit line, spur housing Downtown and make the city more attractive to college students and other young people.

	Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette Mayoral candidate Bob O'Connor describes his proposal for a streetcar line between Downtown and Oakland at a presentation yesterday. At left is Dick Skrinjar, O'Connor's communications director. Click photo for larger image.

The plans are preliminary, but O'Connor said he has met with officials from HDR Inc., a nationwide engineering firm with offices Downtown, to go over general proposals. Neither O'Connor nor an HDR official would put a firm price tag on the plans, but O'Connor estimated the cost at $70 million, which he said could come largely from private investors and federal transportation funds.

"Quality of life is the most powerful economic strategy," the Democratic candidate said yesterday, after a briefing on the streetcar plans. "This adds to quality of life and that's why it really caught my eye, especially as we're trying to retain young people and all these people going to our universities."

O'Connor -- who is facing county Prothonotary Michael Lamb and city Councilman William Peduto in the May 17 Democratic primary -- has been talking about the streetcar proposal lately in meetings with neighborhood groups and party officials.

Until now, promoting public transit has been a major part of only Peduto's campaign: Peduto has long opposed construction of the Mon-Fayette Expressway extension through the city and Allegheny County, saying the money should be spent on other transit needs instead.

O'Connor favors the $2 billion expansion of the toll road while Lamb has said he supports the project generally, but not links into city neighborhoods.

Peduto said there is not enough federal transportation funding available to Western Pennsylvania to support the Mon-Fayette project and a city streetcar line simultaneously.

"This and other transit ideas will never happen as long as we have elected officials who support big-ticket items like the Mon-Fayette Expressway," he said. "To make streetcars or light rail a reality, it must be the next mayor's first priority."

Lamb said a Downtown-Oakland link should be a priority for the next mayor, as long as the city worked with affected neighborhoods on the plan.

"Great cities have great transit. Pittsburgh is a great city and our goal should be to have a world-class transit system," he said in a statement.

The streetcars O'Connor is studying are different from the Light Rail Transit cars already connecting Downtown with the city's southern neighborhoods. They are smaller and their tracks are built into existing streets, sharing the roads with regular auto traffic.

The electric-powered trolleys are typically 8 feet wide -- a couple of feet narrower than street lanes -- with tracks dug 12 inches into the street surface, which does not disturb sewer lines or other utilities during construction. Construction can be completed in three to four weeks per city block.

The streetcars are meant to supplement the LRT and bus routes that bring visitors to the city from outlying suburbs, acting as people "circulators" among city neighborhoods, said Edward E. Reese, a senior vice president at HDR.

They have been most successful in Portland, Ore., where a city-affiliated nonprofit group opened a streetcar line in 2001 after two years of construction.

O'Connor was aware that past plans to build a "spine line" between Oakland and Downtown, most recently in the early 1990s, had failed, and said he plans to meet with the Port Authority and with Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato to discuss the idea.

O'Connor said he envisioned one end of the streetcar line at the Carnegie Mellon University campus, with links to and from Downtown via Fifth and Forbes avenues. Links could also be built through the Strip District, he said.

It is roughly 3.75 miles from Carnegie Mellon to Downtown and O'Connor and Reed said the lines could be built at $11 million per mile. A study HDR performed last year on a 14-mile streetcar system proposed for Atlanta estimated construction costs of up to $335 million, with $23 million in annual operating costs.

There is no way the cash-strapped city could pay for the project, in the short term at least: It has no money to pay for regular capital improvements this year and its poor credit rating is barring it from borrowing money until next year at the earliest.

Funding could be provided by developers owning land along the new transit line, perhaps through a self-imposed "improvement district" tax.

"You'd have to talk to the community. If this is the thing we want -- between the hospitals, the universities and Downtown businesses -- at $11 million a mile you could do the whole thing for $60 or $70 million," O'Connor said.