Bombardier, the famous French Canadian transit company, says it can produce a catenary-free streetcar vehicle. If the system proves practical, it could solve the District’s problem – that federal rules prohibit overhead wires in central Washington. The blogsphere is atwitter reporting the news.

This isn’t the first time such a system has been proposed. Of course, Washington’s historic streetcars operated with a third rail power supply, and trams in the French city of Bordeaux use a modern ground level power supply today. The problem is that all the existing options are extremely expensive to both install and maintain. They can be rickety too, but the big thing is expense. If the alternate options didn’t cost so much more than regular catenary, they’d have already caught on.

So if this Bombardier system can reduce the cost significantly, it will be a big deal. If not, it will be much ado about nothing.