Mayor David N. Cicilline and Donna Cupelo, Verizon Communications regional president and chairperson for Transit 2020 working group, announce the results of a year-long study of mass transit needs in the city.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

PROVIDENCE — When Mayor David N. Cicilline looks out his City Hall window, he sees a congested, often dangerous bus station smack in the middle of his reviving — but clogged — downtown.

He dreams of a new and different Providence, where some of the buses jamming downtown’s Kennedy Plaza might be replaced by streetcars on rails, where multiple bus hubs spread traffic through the city, and where automobiles are not the first option for getting around.

Yesterday, Cicilline’s Transit 2020 Working Group delivered its recommendations on how to redefine mass transit in and around Providence, and make that a reality.

The report suggests adding other bus hubs around the city to lessen the burden on Kennedy Plaza, which has reached its limits and lacks close connections to other types of transport, such as Amtrak trains.

It envisions streetcars running on rails on several corridors through the city, perhaps along Valley Street and on Allens Avenue, where some tracks remain from the days when Providence was a streetcar city.

The report also recommends creating disincentives for the use of the automobile, advocating legislation that pressures large public companies to reduce their employees’ reliance on cars.

“We have great momentum in the city with unprecedented economic development, but there’s no question, if we are to continue to prosper as a metropolitan area, we must build a stronger transit system that eases congestion, reduces harmful greenhouse gas emission and encourages people to leave their cars at home,” Cicilline said yesterday.

These are big ideas and will take significant time and money to become reality, but Cicilline saw the unveiling of yesterday’s report as the first step. Now, the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority will use $400,000 in grant money to hire a professional firm to study the feasibility of implementing the report’s recommendations.

Cicilline established the 27-member working group early last year, bringing together representatives from RIPTA, the state Department of Transportation, the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation and community and business leaders from Providence and surrounding communities.

While the study’s larger ideas may be far off, the report does address some quick-fix options for improving transit in Providence.

It suggests “branding” bus routes, as Boston does with its red line or silver line designations, or labeling certain routes for their significant uses, like a “meds and eds” route for hospitals and colleges, or an “arts and entertainment” route.

And Henry Kinch, RIPTA’s deputy general manager, said that the system plans to roll out a number of high-tech improvements in the near future, including computerized signs providing real-time bus arrival estimates, electronic-fare buses, flexible passes, and new security features on its buses.

RIPTA has historically been resistant to de-emphasizing Kennedy Plaza, which was renovated with the help of federal money in 2002. The plaza is the site of significant criminal activity and often has large police details stationed there. It also has a police substation.

But RIPTA’s chairman is now Cicilline’s planning director, Thomas V. Deller, and Deller said that the operator is looking at moving from its hub-and-spoke model to one of multiple bus “nodes” around the city.

“It’ll be the primary among several nodes,” Deller said of Kennedy Plaza in the future.

These new hubs have not been identified, but the report suggests that the Providence Train Station could be the new location for a second downtown hub, one that could potentially combine bus, streetcar, and Amtrak service.

The report also mentions exploring light rail in and around Providence, but light rail is expensive — roughly $30 million for a mile of track, depending on conditions.

But streetcars can accomplish much the same thing, for anywhere from $3 million to $10 million a mile, said Garry Bliss, Cicilline’s policy director.

In addition to their environmental benefits, rail systems are preferable to bus systems, city officials say, because they can serve as a base for urban redevelopment, Bliss said. Their permanence shows a municipal commitment to an area.

“Developers will invest along a streetcar line in much greater amounts than they would along a bus route,” he said.

And some transit systems can actually bring in tourism and be an attraction unto themselves, the report states. A well-maintained streetcar system can help to define a city, and its accessibility and permanence means streetcars are often trusted by visitors and tourists in a way that buses never are.

“They’re clean, they’re quiet, and there’s something very reassuring about seeing that rail in the ground. You know something’s coming, you know you’re in the right place,” Bliss said.

Whether it’s light rail or streetcars or something else, any new mass transit plan will be costly. To generate the capital that would be needed to build and run such a system, the report suggests involving the private sector through master lease agreements, condo fees, and tax increment financing zones, which use future tax revenue to pay for growth projects. The report also assumes that the city would have to borrow large amounts to pay for construction.

Spending all that money could be a waste, however, if residents cannot be convinced to give up their cars and use mass transit. While there are sections of the report that address ways to pressure drivers to give up their cars, there are already plenty of disincentives for drivers not to come to Providence, said Donna Cupelo, chairwoman of the Transit 2020 group.

The difficulty of parking downtown already makes drivers not want to come here, so the city may not have to focus strongly on penalizing people for using automobiles.

“It’s one of the options, but I wouldn’t say it’s one of the primary options,” Cupelo said.

Rather, the focus must be on creating incentives for residents to use existing mass transit, she said.

Providence is not the only entity studying the future of Rhode Island transit. The General Assembly in 2004 created a legislative commission to study the future of mass transit, particularly RIPTA. That commission had planned to deliver a report containing proposals to change the system before the end of the session last summer, but didn’t complete the report in time.

The commission is meeting now and has a scheduled reporting date of May 25.

dbarbari@projo.com