Our inquiry into the possibility of a streetcar for Annapolis is picking up steam. Building on an extensive research project that began in 2024, the DF, in April 2025, led a delegation from Annapolis and Anne Arundel County to Portland for the annual summit of the Community Streetcar Coalition — a non-profit coalition that, for more than 20 years, has been supporting municipalities that have or are interested in building a downtown streetcar system. Our delegation (funded by a DF grant and costing taxpayers nothing) had representatives from the city and county councils, the offices of the Mayor and County Executive, Annapolis and County Transit, the Resilience Authority, the Annapolis business community and the tourism bureau. That’s a lot of folks wanting to learn about how streetcars promote sustainable urban development!
And learn? Did we ever. The 2025 streetcar summit was a firehose of information provided by transit engineers, policymakers, builders, regulators and 20 different cities, large and small, that have streetcar systems currently in operation. We learned about:
- planning and zoning to make the most of a streetcar system
- designing your transit system to feed a streetcar
- engineering, route planning and design
- maintenance, scheduling and safety
- different models for system governance
- fare vs. fare-free (“open-platform”) systems
- funding instruments like TIFs (Tax Increment Financing) and TDDs (Transportation Development Districts)
- the pros and cons of federal funding
- And so much more!
But the #1 takeaway from this conference for our delegation was that these things WORK — their capacity to stimulate sustainable urban (re)development is tremendous. City after city showed how their streetcar turned surface parking lots and underdeveloped commercial areas — or in many cases, industrial brownfields — into vibrant, healthy, tax-revenue-generating neighborhoods.
It’s not magic. We heard a dozen cautions and caveats: your community needs to have adequate size and density; it needs to have done its planning and zoning homework; construction and funding are challenges that must be met. But there’s a reason that more than two dozen American cities have (re)built these systems over the past 30-odd years: they work. They’re possibly the single most powerful tool at a city’s disposal to spur smart, intentional, sustainable development. And they address a raft of city challenges all at once: they improve traffic and parking problems, they’re environmentally friendly, they help fix affordable housing problems and they generate significant new municipal revenue. They’re expensive, but they generate a commensurately high return, both in literal revenue and in incidental benefits like housing.
Is a streetcar right for Annapolis? We don’t know, of course! That’s the point. At CSC 2025, we learned just how much more we need to learn. But everyone in the delegation came away from the conference knowing one thing: we’re not crazy for looking into this. Considering how positive its impact on the city could be — and the crucial role it would play in linking a Chesapeake ferry at our brand-new City Dock to new express BRT from Parole to Washington — we’d be crazy not to.
To that end, the delegation agreed that our next step is to commission a feasibility study from a transit engineering firm to research the physical possibility and financial practicality of this concept. The Resilience Authority, in consultation with city, county and MDOT officials, will prepare the RFP for the study. And to continue insuring that this inquiry comes at minimal cost to taxpayers, the DF has formally pledged to fund a substantial portion of this study, should it come to pass.
Stay tuned!
The Denker Foundation 