A Private Corporation Working in the Public Realm

People will have the opportunity to ride the St. Charles streetcar line, which services 16,000 passengers a day. “It is very iconic to our city in terms of being recognizable and people in the city of New Orleans love their streetcars,” Augustine says. “We have the Green Line, which is basically the St. Charles Line, then we have the Red Line, which basically services the riverfront and the Canal Street area.” And they’re beginning construction on the Loyola corridor.

In early June, the RTA officially broke ground on the Loyola/Union Passenger Terminal Streetcar Expansion project. The 1.5-mile line will feature four covered stations at Tulane Avenue, Poydras Street, Julia Street and the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal.

Augustine says from the moment they learned they were hosting APTA, they started putting committees together. “We have internal committees, an operations committee, a finance committee, a volunteer committee, that all meet. When we first started, we would all meet probably once a month and then by the advent of 2010, that became twice a month. And now, here we are in 2011, we’re meeting weekly and we’re speaking daily because of all the things we have to do for this event.

“We’re extremely excited about it; we have a story to tell,” Augustine says. “Clearly we are working very closely with APTA to make sure that the 17-plus thousand attendees have the show of a lifetime in the great city of New Orleans.”