Waterfront Streetcar

The Waterfront Streetcar, officially the George Benson Waterfront Streetcar Line, was a heritage streetcar line run by King County Metro in Seattle, Washington, United States. It traveled for 1.6-mile (2.6 km) along Alaskan Way on the city's waterfront facing Elliott Bay, under the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The Waterfront Streetcar used a fleet of five W2 trams from Melbourne, Australia.

Service began on May 29, 1982, the first streetcars to run in Seattle since the closure of the Seattle Municipal Street Railway on April 13, 1941. It initially terminated at Occidental Park in Pioneer Square until the line was extended to International District/Chinatown station in 1990. Service was officially suspended on November 18, 2005, when the maintenance barn and Broad Street station were demolished to make room for the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park. A large portion of the trackage and four stations were demolished in 2012 as part of the reconstruction of Alaskan Way.

Streetcar service was replaced by King County Metro Route 99, which operated along Alaskan Way until February 2011 when construction forced Metro to reroute the line to 1st Avenue. King County Metro announced in January 2016 that a private venture would launch a fundraising effort to retrofit two of the historic Waterfront Streetcar vehicles to run alongside modern Seattle Streetcar vehicles on the Center City Connector along 1st Avenue.

The original city streetcar system in Seattle ceased operations in April 1941 and was replaced with a network of electric trolleybuses and motor buses. City councilman George Benson first proposed the idea of building a streetcar line along the Seattle waterfront in 1974, a year after he was elected to the council, to be operational in time for the national Bicentennial on July 4, 1976. The line would use vintage streetcars, and the goal was to create an attraction that would bring tourists and local residents to the waterfront, to help rejuvenate the area, which had already begun a slow transition from a purely industrial district to one with shops and cultural attractions such as the (then-planned, later built) Seattle Aquarium. Eventually, the proposal garnered enough support from the public and Benson's fellow council members that funds were allocated for an engineering and design study, ultimately leading to the approval of the project. Some of the funding in the project's final stage came from a temporary Local Improvement District, a special taxing district in which businesses within its boundaries would agree to pay an extra tax for a specific benefit—in this instance the streetcar service. After lobbying by Benson and others, the state legislature approved granting such tax authority in 1981. "More than 70 percent" of the affected business owners endorsed taxing themselves to provide an estimated $1 million to fund completion of the streetcar project.

The line used previously existing freight railroad tracks adjacent to Alaskan Way, and construction for the streetcar project involved adding overhead trolley wires, high-platform stations, and a passing track near the middle of the line, which otherwise was single-track. The line started just north of Broad Street, near Pier 70, and until 1990 ran only as far south as Main Street, terminating at a station next to Alaskan Way, immediately south of Main.

Service began on May 29, 1982, which was the first streetcar run in Seattle since April 13, 1941. The first three streetcars had been brought to Seattle from Melbourne, Australia, by Councilman Benson in 1978. They had been Melbourne & Metropolitan Tramways Board cars 482, 512 and 518, and they kept those numbers in Seattle. Two more Melbourne streetcars entered service in 1990 and 1993. All were W2-class trams that had originally been built between 1925 and 1930.

In 1989, construction began on a quarter-mile extension of the streetcar along Main Street and 5th Avenue to Jackson Street, to connect to the International District/Chinatown Station of the then-new Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. The extension opened for regular service on June 23, 1990. The line's fourth ex-Melbourne streetcar, No. 272, entered service earlier that month. A fifth car of the same type, No. 605, entered service on June 1, 1993. On June 1, 2002, the King County Council approved legislation to rename the line in honor of councilmember Benson, christening it the "George Benson Waterfront Streetcar Line". The streetcar stations were rebranded and repainted in August 2003.

The streetcar ceased operation on November 18, 2005, when the maintenance barn was demolished to make room for the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park. A new maintenance barn was proposed to be built at Occidental Park to allow the resumption of operations as early as summer 2007. However, Metro cancelled involvement after delays made the new facility unlikely to be completed before the demolition of the Alaskan Way Viaduct began. An alternative proposal by the Port of Seattle was to extend the line northward along Myrtle Edwards Park to Smith Cove, where a new maintenance barn would be built on Port property. This proposal was not pursued.