This is false, revisionist history. During the war maintenance was deferred and many operators either went bankrupt or dramatically reduced operations. By the time the war ended the tracks and rolling stock were all in need of replacement.
The public did not love streetcars for many reasons. The ride was rough, they were boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another. Insufficient capacity meant it was not unusual for riders to cling to the sides of cars where that was possible.
When freeways and buses were presented as an alternative the public embraced building new infrastructure over rebuilding the old. Part of that is because the downsides had not yet become clear.
Blaming some corporate bogeyman is always tempting but does not change the facts. The streetcars were replaced because they fell out of favor with the public who wanted to try the new and shiny thing.
My father frequently told me the story of mass transit in Detroit. He was a fan of the interurbans which were street cars that travelled between cities, some of them fifty miles from Detroit. Cars and later freeways totally killed off the interurbans. In fact freeways killed off passenger trains as well.
But streetcars still thrived in Detroit. You could get anywhere with them and even in the car capital of the world people went without them. But then in a flash they were gone. My father was a life long believer in the so called conspiracy.
He was regarded as a conspiracy theorist. As a kid I wished he'd just stop talking about it. But then as a young adult the proof started coming out that maybe he was right all along. But now with a big media push it's going the other way. I know one thing in Michigan the politicians go along with whatever GM wants, always.
Michigan has some of the worst roads in America while at the same time having the largest gas taxes. Yet when billions of dollars became available as a result of COVID what did the governor do who ran on the slogan, 'fix the damn roads'? She gave the money to GM for battery plants! This Wikipedia page just looks like more spin to me.
I dunno, I'm starting to see the world as more and more complex (aka many inputs contribute to many outputs) and yet maybe too complex for us as humans so we latch onto one input causing one output.
I see lots of side road construction in the northern Detroit suburbs, the interstates have been under major construction for at least 2-3 years, and overall, it seems as if there's lots of construction. Is it from Whitmer? From the feds? From local cities? I don't know, probably a combination of all three and more.
Same with why the street cars disappeared. I think our anger/fear can make us think it was one and only one group or person who made such things happen, I just think that's probably a subjective perspective more than an objective reality.
Edit: also I hadn't heard of Whitmer giving money to GM, could you share a link about that? All I can find is that she helped GM make their own $7B investment in Michigan.
But they also gave them close to that for an additional plant down by Detroit.
Also we just learned that when GM went bankrupt in 2009 and the federal government bailed them out that the state of Michigan gave them $3.8 billion although the news was never made public. It took 13 years for this to be made public so you have to wonder what other deals are still private.
I've lived in MI for the past 7 years, and MN before that (I still have family there). Construction in MI seems to have ramped up quite a bit lately, but is still not comparable to the amount of rebuilding that goes on in MN.
There's definitely progress, but there's still a long way before I would consider the situation good.
Oh yes, I don't think the roads are in the condition in which I'd like them to be, I also wonder why the roads in Michigan seem so bad and maybe it really is just the lack of construction. Just read an article by Crain's Detroit from earlier this year[0] talking about how it may mostly just be underfunding of road repair, as:
> Michigan's current system at the state level relies solely on fuel consumption and the value of vehicles to generate revenue for roads.
I wonder how Minnesota fares in terms of budget for roads.
Also just read this on r/civilengineering[1]:
> Civil Engineer/Construction PM in Michigan. It’s a combination of three things.
> 1. Money, for both construction and routine maintenance. Our government is trying to fix this but it’s all political
> 2. Climate. Roads in southern states will naturally be nicer because less freeze/thaw & de-icing chemicals on the roads
> 3. Weight limits. Because of the auto industry, Michigan has one of the heaviest loads allowed on our freeways. People will say it’s spread across more axles to counter this but I personally have my doubts.
Michigander here, can confirm the roads are more pothole than road in some places. The rich neighborhoods get re-paved every 10 years. The poor ones every 20. Some places they'll just fill them in with something that breaks up in under a year. Some places, why even bother with that? Citycars that assume relatively flat roads in downtown centers are misguided here. The state highways are smoother than midtown hubs.
>Yet when billions of dollars became available as a result of COVID what did the governor do who ran on the slogan, 'fix the damn roads'? She gave the money to GM for battery plants!
I understand the discontent, but the logic seems to follow. Assuming you have Michiganders working in the battery plants, they get paid producing batteries, and then taxed by the state. The taxes pay for the roads, and workers can buy homes and other things while remaining in Michigan (flight seems to be a bit of a crisis in Detroit, last I read). And the cycle, ideally, repeats year after year.
Except the government math is kind of hazy. Google promised 1000 jobs in Ann Arbor and the deal helped get then Gov. Jennifer Granholm reelected, that's why politicians of both parties do it.
But Google only ever created 500 jobs. Yet rarely if ever do any of these companies have to pay back part of the money if the jobs never get created.
It's interesting that you refer to the interurbans as "streetcars." It has me wondering: at what point do you stop thinking of something as a streetcar and start thinking of it as light rail?
"Light rail" is something of a technical term and a neologism (well, coined in the 70s but still). It was coined specifically to refer to rail systems that are lighter and demand less infrastructure than heavy rail but higher speed, higher capacity, farther reach than traditional trams or streetcars. But I don't think the term has gained very wide use in common vernacular.
One more thing about lightrail, in the US they tend to share right of way alongside freeways (median) for long stretches and can veer off on to local streets when it gets to a dense area. Steetcars I tend to picture as going on local roads as in the "trolley dodgers" kind of way.
And as far as I can tell, a LOT of money has been poured into Michigan's roads in the last few years. Most of the issues that existed when I moved here four years ago have been fixed. Sure there are still some bad areas, but the damn roads do seem to be getting fixed.
> They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another.
I'm convinced this is the root of all animus towards public transport in the USA. Racism plays a huge part, but it's not exclusively racist, it's also classist - my parents for example would never want to be seen on a bus in their midwestern home town.
This view obscures real problems with safety and hygine on buses and trains. It isn't racist or classist to hate meth smoke blown in your face, or teens setting off fireworks and assaulting passengers on the subway:
These days, a much bigger problem for public transit than racism/classism is a general lack of public safety on buses on trains, for all passengers no matter their race or class. Most actual public transit passengers know this. For example, the jury that acquitted Bernie Goetz included two black people; half the jurors had been victims of crime on the subway themselves. A black woman who witnessed the shooting said the teenagers "got what they deserved:"
My public transit experience is mostly DC and New York. The few times I've ridden BART, cleanliness was nonexistent (fabric seats were not the best design choice!) and safety was at best questionable. Some examples from the news:
The chance of an incident on any given day is low, but palpable. When it happens to somenone else, it happens right in your face with no physical separation. Maybe that's why many choose to drive instead, despite the higher actual risk of accident per mile. That in itself is a tragedy, but people want the perception of safety just as much as safety by-the-numbers. Hygiene and comfort matter too.
>cleanliness was nonexistent (fabric seats were not the best design choice!)
I'm a New Yorker and before you say you think I want to do away with cars, I think the ideal is a combination of mass transit and private vehicle ownership if you need it. That being said, my mind is always amazed at how clean and well maintained the DC Metro seems to remain. The cars have cloth seats! But the trains are always clean! New Yorkers were so surprised in 2020 when city subway stations got regular bleachdowns. It humors me to no end.
I love the DC Metro for all the reasons you list. That's what made its recent missteps all the more frustrating. The Yellow Line which serves Reagan National Airport will shut down for maintenance soon for eight (8!) months, even after it was shut down all summer in 2019. Meanwhile, the new 7000 series cars continue to have serious safety problems, which are not well-understood but may be inherent to their design. They've just recently been brought back into service following a serious derailment last year.
This is to say nothing of the dysfunction and alleged racism in the WMATA union, or public safety on the trains, which while generally still good has lately deteriorated. Masking was never enforced during the height of COVID. Buses are and have always been worse. I hate driving in the DC area, but Metro seems like they're doing their very best to keep me on the road.
"Unsuck DC Metro" used to be my go-to source for Metro reporting. Sadly, the man behind that account passed away last week:
"Meth smoke blown in your face, or teens setting off fireworks and assaulting passengers on the subway" is somehow not a problem in parts of the world where public transit is not seen as something for the poor people only.
Lack of investment in metro cops, maybe. By every other metric, American mass transit costs more and underperforms compared to European and Asian systems:
Just like with healthcare and internet service, America often pays a lot more while getting a lot less. Just because America paid more for its mass transit doesn't mean they were better designed, more pleasant to ride on, or that those system are well maintained. It could also mean things like our public transportation had to cover more ground, that unique challenges in geography increased expenses, that politicians were wasting tax payer money in exchange for kickbacks and favors (no-bid contracts), or companies were simply overcharging Americans for the work.
Real, meaningful investment in infrastructure and improvements to the environments people spend their time in can do a hell of a lot more to prevent crime than cops do. There is a lot of research to support this. I don't doubt that if we invested more in making our mass transit systems better and more enjoyable to use crime rates would drop.
Here's a start if you want more information on the impacts of our environments on crime:
Planting trees is not a serious solution to gun violence or mass transit safety.
The correlation between increased, properly-utilized police presence and a decrease in crime is one of the most well-researched, replicable, and best-understood conclusions of social science.
I've been on mass transit in a few countries now, and I saw more police presence in the US than anywhere else, but it never made me feel any safer and somehow other countries with better, cleaner, public transit systems don't have the kinds of crime problems the US has.
You want enough police around so that they can respond when there is a problem, but not so much that the environment becomes oppressive.
I'd rather reduce crime by improving the public transpiration system and surrounding neighborhoods than waste tax payer money on having cops sitting around all day on trains and subway cars.
I sincerely wonder what mechanism makes planting trees reduce crime more effectively than increased policing. If true, that lends credence to Broken Windows Theory, no?
The main problem I have with Broken Windows Theory is that rather than being used to improve the environments (fixing the broken windows) it's often used to justify flooding the streets with police and aggressively harassing people. It identifies the source of the problem (the run down areas of a city), but then ignores it because overaggressive policing is an easier sell than spending that money improving the living environments of "the wrong kinds of people". Making those spaces into more oppressive environments won't tend to do much to solve the crime problem because it was an oppressive environment that caused the problem in the first place.
Cleaning up and maintaining the run down areas communicates to everyone that the area and the people living in it have value. People start to expect more from the area and from each other. It also makes those spaces less attractive to people looking to cause trouble and more attractive to businesses and to people from outside of that community. The health and mental well-being of the community improves and so does their economy. Shooting jaywalkers and setting up stop and frisk checkpoints just makes everyone feel like criminals and sure enough that's what you get.
Broken Windows Theory isn't wrong, but Broken Windows Policing is a problem because what these areas need aren't just police, but rather urban developers, landscapers, and construction crews. Cities that clean up, improve, and maintain the run down parts of town see crime drop. Cities that simply use run down areas to designate "problem populations" and send in the police harass those communities over every possible minor infraction don't get those kinds of results.
True, stop and frisk is just one of many ways broken windows policing can aggressively target the people, when what's actually needed is to target the environment. Policing has a role in cleaning up run down areas, but it's a small one compared to the infrastructure, urban planning, and landscaping improvements needed to reduce crime. Too much/aggressive policing is just another broken window that needs fixing. It signifies that the area is a bad part of town and sets that area apart from the nicer parts of the city.
Counterpoint: Detroit. It's jam-packed with trees and gun violence. Maybe planting trees where they weren't correlates with improvement, but I seriously doubt trees are causal to peace.
Trees sure aren't enough if they're surrounded by vacant lots and abandoned houses. You can't fix everything with landscaping, but improving areas into nice communities that are more in line with the rest of the city goes a long way.
Probably has alot to do with how the cops are trained and what cop culture is embraced as well.
US police are more often a problem then police in other western countries.
I remember the NYC subways in the 1980s (which wasn’t as bad as the 1970s). BART, today’s NYC subways etc are clean and safe by comparison. I love them, where they work.
Melbourne still has a thriving and beloved streetcar system.
I rode the bus every day for 10 years in SF, and I've had less than one bad experience per year. Yes, you may see a drug user on a bus (I once had someone smoke meth next to me, for the length of one stop), but assault isn't very common. Likely the most common issue is theft, when you aren't paying attention to your belongings.
The issue is very much racist/classist, because problems and complaints like this are much less common in places where everyone uses public transportation. The public transportation is better funded, more frequent, and better maintained (and cleaned). Rather than being filled with people who are forced to use public transport, it's filled with everyone, and that helps with the general culture/vibe of the transport too.
Live somewhere where public transport is the norm, rather than exception, and get back to us.
Where I live the classism is reversed, in that arriving by bus means you can afford to live by public transit.
The same goes for showing up to a party with a salad from your backyard garden or fresh baked bread. Having the time and space for these is a luxury now, whereas my mother would prefer to pick something up on the way.
Perhaps if you have the « choice » for public transit.
What we saw in toronto for example during Covid is that ridership dropped in higher income neighborhood (especially the ones that have access to the subway). The highest ridership lines were bus routes in low income neighbourhood, where people still had to go to work as some type of essential workers and did not have a car.
Let’s not make a blanket statement that transit is for the rich, the reality is that the rich takes it when it gets good enough but they always have other choices. Some people just don’t have that choice and transit is their only way to go to work, that’s why it’s essential to the economy.
So the rich people of Toronto first wanted picket fences and built the inner-suburbs, and drove everywhere, plus forced the elimination of transit payment zones.
And now the rich are living more in Old Toronto and the poor(er) folks are forced to the inner-suburbs where the design does not condone efficient transit.
I wouldn't say transit is for the wealthy... Only that that transit should be more ubiquitous within population centers and widespread regionally, with high enough frequency to be a workable option for everyone.
> Where I live the classism is reversed, in that arriving by bus means you can afford to live by public transit.
Interesting thought, I had to think of what kind of places these are. Maybe urbanized bedroom communities or connected suburbs like Naperville in Illinois? Where do you live?
It isn't racist or classist bullshit. It was that people liked cars for the independence they provided. Today's live in their parent's basement generation can't comprehend the concept.
It absolutely is. Often, the determining factor as to whether one rides public transportation or not given its availability is whether driving is an option or not. Driving is never an option when one doesn't have a car. Cars cost money, and money (in the US) is pretty directly linked to both race and class.
What people forget is that during the mid-20th century, cars were progressive, forward looking, and egalitarian. They were seen as ushering in a future where ordinary people could leave overcrowded cities and travel in speed and comfort. Faced with the need for massive investment to bring street car systems into good repair, cities chose to invest in what they saw as the future: roads and highways for personal transit. (Remember these are the same people who thought babies in drawers was progress: https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/our-story/our-history/bab....)
It’s also important to note that southern cities that grew rapidly post-1950, such as Atlanta, uniformly adopted a car-centric approach. These cities were outside the alleged scope of the GM conspiracy, but developed on the same track because everyone back then saw individual car ownership as the future.
Uh, if you actually read the page you linked to it sounds like actual progress? Popular with patients and nurses, increased Breast feeding, cost effective using a standard mass-produced object…
People aren't reading it, but it's amusing that the solution was designed around reducing the workload on the nurses, etc (now they just leave the baby in the room with mom in a rolling bassinet that the nurses check on/can roll out when necessary).
Not so surprising for the time, since things like heart monitors and pulse/ox didn’t exist, so they'd keep all the newborns in a communal nursery with nurses literally watching over them 24 hours a day.
You are telling us how awful streetcars were, as if there was no other choice but to tear them up and convert to a car-based society.
Instead of fixing the problems: fix the track, better cars, more cars, more accessibility, like what was done all over European cities... Instead of doing that, opponents torched it all, invested HEAVILY in car-based infrastructure and helped create the mess we have today. Just like today, dollars were thrown at the car-based solution and the superior mass-transit solutions are left to rot, so that people can make your argument.
That doesn’t really add up. Like many things, wartime deferred maintenance and demand shifts disrupted capital intensive businesses like streetcars and trolleys.
The thing that you’re missing is the multi-trillion dollar investment in free road infrastructure. Streetcars and passenger trains were replaced because you can’t make money selling tickets when your competitors benefit from the unlimited purchasing power of the US government.
The only places that were spared were urban areas like NYC and Boston, but even there the cities were almost destroyed by that massive investment.
I think calling this a conspiracy theory is a way to marginalize and revise reality. It was a strategy that maximized employment and drove a half century of US industrial dominance and prosperity. But it had a cost and fundamental inefficiency that remains difficult to measure.
> This is false, revisionist history. During the war maintenance was deferred and many operators either went bankrupt or dramatically reduced operations. By the time the war ended the tracks and rolling stock were all in need of replacement.
Just to be clear, when you are stating that "This" is "revisionist history," I believe you aren't actually referring to the contents of the article itself, but rather the conspiracy theory mentioned in the article.
Note that there are two conspiracies mentioned in the article. The first is a conspiracy that did in fact occur: conspiracy to create a monopoly. The second is the theory that this was part of an intentional plan to dismantle public transit (which is effectively refuted on the wikipedia article).
I have mostly seen Los Angeles as the epicenter for this conspiracy which has pretty damn ideal streetcar weather. Subways also went away around the same time which leads me more toward believing the conspiracy side of things given that they would not have a lot of these same problems.
The way I see it street cars are a great solution to local traffic and not very good for long distance travel. Within downtown LA for example they would be awesome or within the city of Santa Monica.
Streetcars in the modern "done right" sense - with a dedicated right of way, signal priority, and other similar treatments for efficiency can be great for local getting around.
Streetcars in the sense of what they were at the time - Stuck in ever increasing traffic with everything else and less able to navigate around issues than a bus, boarding in traffic in the middle of the street, sitting at all the lights - are not.
They were convicted of antitrust violations in destroying the streetcars to monopolize transportation, but it was overturned basically on technicalities:
> blaming some corporate bogeyman is always tempting but does not change the facts
The article is well written. It discusses the facts of the antitrust case. And then it goes into detail on the “lingering suspicions” and “urban legend” that you, rightfully, rail against. The Role in decline of the streetcars section practically debunks the conspiracy.
In this case it’s not a paradox: These services could not effectively scale to meet demand without sacrificing comfort. Whatever their other problems, automobiles won out here and continue to do so.
Rush hour in a private car is a very unpleasant experience to most people as well, it doesn't help much that you get sit inside your own metal box. Cars take so much space that vast amounts of taxpayer money has been poured on infrastructure in order to try to keep traffic flowing – and we still have congestion.
if it is running near capacity, its crowded, and therefore unpleasant, which causes people to attempt to adjust their schedule to use it at other times, shifting the load
if its not running near capacity, its wasting a lot of space, and therefore more wasteful than private automobiles
in both cases the scale of the system and the centrally planned nature of the system make its response time lag behind the people using it, causing them to seek alternatives if they are able
> The streetcars were replaced because they fell out of favor with the public who wanted to try the new and shiny thing.
You might be correct, but it is very simplistic view of history to attribute change to the will of the people. Democracy is not such a driving force for change as to become the single factor for it. Historically corporate interests has weight far higher as a driving force (as evidenced by our current global warming crisis; but notable exceptions include e.g. the new deal).
Sometimes the will of the people might align with corporate interest, and that may have been the case here. But I would argue then that is only a bonus for the politician which will reap the returning votes. The main point of the change was first and foremost to serve the interest of the corporation which funded the campaigns.
The streetcars were not around for those other wars though, and the war effort was not nearly as total. The US went through the war unscathed, and even then most goods were highly rationed and citizens were encouraged to make do and use less.
Stopping all maintenance on any kind of complex system for four or five years will almost certainly bring it to a state of ruin.
Except they didn't "stop all maintenance" on the trolley system during those years, as it was too important. It's what got all the new migrants to LA to all those new factory jobs in aviation in defense to support the war effort. This is sometimes referred to as the "Second Great Migration" in LA history [1]. There was also fuel and rubber rationing which forced people onto the trolley, making it all the more important.
Rationing did affect streetcars as well; steel was for the navy, air force and army, and so basically no regular fleet renewals or construction/repair happened during this time. Then after the years of good profits, the legacy of deferred maintenance had to be dealt with; all that heavy usage took its toll.
All those resources were still obtainable for a price and readily available in stores with no limits on purchase. The US has not experienced war based rationing since the end of WWII. And I am talking about things as basic as even large conglomerates like Pepsi being unable to buy sugar.
It's odd that you assert this to be "revisionist history" and then go on to make a statement that is itself false.
No other event has shaped Los Angeles like World War II. During the war years Los Angeles experienced a population boom as people moved there to work in defense and aviation. These job opportunities were plentiful in order support the war efforts. The people who came to work in those factories depended on the Red Cars and Yellow Cars as did the factories for getting their worker there. In fact Red Car and Yellow Car ridership peaked during the war years. They were most certainly not allowed to go derelict due to lack of maintenance as they were far too important. In fact there was rubber and fuel rationing at that time which only served to make their operations that much more important.
>"The public did not love streetcars for many reasons. The ride was rough, they were boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another. Insufficient capacity meant it was not unusual for riders to cling to the sides of cars where that was possible"
There's a lot wrong with this. Southern California has mild winters and cars were also enclosed with windows that could open and close depending on the weather. There's pictures here which clearly document that [1]. Saying that people had to cling to the sides of the cars is also a complete fabrication. There was nothing on the outside of the cars to cling to.
>"When freeways and buses were presented as an alternative the public embraced building new infrastructure over rebuilding the old."
This is also untrue. The bus began competing with the electric trolleys as early as the 1920s.[2]
>"Blaming some corporate bogeyman is always tempting but does not change the facts."
And yet it's well established fact that National City Lines bought up these mass transit assets and were sued by the DoJ on antitrust grounds for conspiring to monopolize urban transit(they had purchased many other cities transit assets as well.) [3][4]. Conspiracy theory notwithstanding, I don't think it's a stretch to say Detroit and other automotive special interests certainly hastened the decline of the electric trolley.
Zoning is a big problem. Right now, there is really no place to live but the city if you want to walk to places. In the suburbs, municipalities demand things like cul-de-sacs, mandatory front yard / back yard sizes, etc. This decreases density to the point where walking simply isn't viable. It's kind of a positive feedback loop too; nobody can walk anywhere, so stores need giant parking lots so people can drive. The giant parking lots make walking even more difficult, which means that people who don't even want a car have to have one.
The question is what will the forcing function be to make things better here. Climate change is one option. I think people feel a little far removed from the consequences, nobody thinks "wow, because I drive to the grocery store twice a week, the UK is having their hottest summer on record". So I don't think it's really changing people's behavior. (Electric cars are hailed as the answer to climate change, but they aren't going to help ancillary concerns like giant roads separating people from businesses that make walking impossible, being stuck in traffic for an hour during rush hour, etc.)
I think the forcing function will be running out of resources that support the suburban lifestyle. Stores and shopping are moving online, reducing city tax revenues. No income means that homeowners will have to pay for parks, roads, sewers, etc. instead of businesses. This will price some people out of their suburban lifestyle, they won't be able to afford the things they get by default (giant yards, living on a quiet cul-de-sac, etc.) I have no idea where these people will go (cities are somehow even more expensive), but at least a market of people that want to buy something more sustainable will develop (to save their own pocketbook, not because they hate cars or love the Earth).
Overall, I see it as a very slow burn, and that not much will change in my lifetime. The incentives aren't there yet. What makes me sad is that financial incentives hurt the most vulnerable people first. When property taxes go up, it just means someone has to uproot their kids, force them to make new friends, and waste an extra hour per day commuting. When I see gas prices go way up because of a war, my first thought is "great, now nobody can afford to drive. RIP, cars." But these people already can't afford to drive, now they just suffer, best case work overtime to be able to afford both gas to get to work and food.
Not sure where I'm going with this but we're basically doomed. The American suburb might be the greatest mistake we've ever made, because it's so hard to undo. A lot of people are going to get hurt as more dire forcing functions uproot their lives.
Changing federal funding rules for suburban infrastructure would be a big head start. Right now, there is a permanent pressure for local governments to "expand". The Federal government doesn't fund maintenance, and new-urbanist expansion is not prioritized enough. If the federal government prioritizes funding for projects which increase density rather than lower it, then there would be some degree of shift.
Incentivizing dense(r) suburbs is something that could be messaged in a few different ways. In the US, low-density suburbs are only supported by federal funds for infrastructure expansion. If the federal government simply chose to not fund expansions that decreased density then local governments might take on the political burden of selling density increasing investments.
Changing the rules so that federal funding can more easily be used to fix/revitalize existing suburban infrastructure and not just make new suburbs should be popular in the existing suburbs, I would imagine. Or at least, should be popular if sold well.
How many of you have lived on a street with an active street car line? Probably not many of you, not many Americans here anyway, but I have. I lived on Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia for years, with a street car (there called a trolley) running right in front of my house.
Nobody in this thread has mentioned it yet, but the noise was awful! Every time it went past the whole house would shake. Every wall in the building turned into a sub-wuffer as that thing rumbled down the street. Was it at least useful? No, not really. I rode it maybe 30 or 40 times total in those years, usually when grocery shopping and sometimes just as a novelty with guests visiting town.
In principle the trolley would have been useful for my commute, which entailed going to 30th street station to get onto the SEPTA regional rail (which I loved, and still miss.) But in practice, it was always more reliable to walk the ~1.5 miles / 30 minutes to 30th street myself. Street cars are subject to street traffic, which makes them unreliable. To reliably catch a trolley would have required me to leave the house much earlier every day.
How old are the tracks and the cars? Anecdotally, the streetcars in Dublin are quiet and don't make any sort of racket. Same for the (single, sad) streetcar in Atlanta.
Streetcars (and buses) work best on dedicated or semi-dedicated routes. The problem with their reliability, in the case you describe, is the cars that are creating the traffic.
I'm sure poor track condition probably had a lot to do with it. With respect to reliability, I think buses and even trolley-buses have an advantage over streetcars in traffic because they can go around obstructions in the street, while streetcars really can't. Trolley-buses have to stay on roads with overhead lines of course, but they still have more lateral freedom than trolleys on rails.
Modern trolley-buses has a battery on board, which allows them to cover some sections without overhead lines. Automatic connection/disconnection of pantograph is the real problem.
I have lived on a street with a street car for the past 3 years and I disagree with your perspective. I live in a different city, so variables are probably very different in a lot of ways. I find large trucks and motorcycles as the largest disturbances in my daily life (I work from home mostly). The train absolutely makes noise and shakes the house, but it's predictable. I no longer set alarms and I can use it to run my errands. And it is way better for the air around me than cars.
Most of the US lives in a mono-culture for transportation and cars are pretty expensive.
In my case, the street car noise was roughly comparable to a garbage truck, but much more frequent. Significantly louder than a diesel bus though, and not as flexible. Better than diesel buses are trolley-buses; electric buses that use overhead power lines like the trolley, but with rubber road tires instead of train rails. Those are really quite, but aren't as flexible with rerouting as diesel buses. But between the trolley-buses and diesel buses, I think streetcars don't have much of a niche. I just don't see why a city today would opt to install streetcars if they could use trolley-buses instead.
Motorcycles are definitely the worst offenders though. Not all motorcycles are loud, but the loud ones are really loud.
Trams scale to higher capacities than buses, given the same vehicle width a dedicated transit lane takes up less space for trams (and can be built with green track) than a comparative busway, a highly used dedicated busway isn't that cheap to build either because buses with their high axle loads do pound the pavement just like trucks/HGVs, all the more so in the case of a guided-bus way in case you try to reduce the width requirements and built some sort of "rubber-tyred tram system", steel wheels on steel rails are more energy efficient, …
I was sorry to read that. I lived for 3 years on an alley, directly connected to street where the street car line was in Moscow, Russia (we were calling them "trams"). I was able to see and hear trams from my windows on a third floor (which literally means third, we didn't call first floor "ground" or "0" in Moscow). Hearing a tram was a bit troubling for a first week, but then I think I just got used to it and my brain filtered that out. There was no significant vibration, even with older cars, new ones were almost silent.
Commute from my home to the office was about 12 minutes, and the schedule was almost always to the minute, except several days in a year when failures or traffic jams messed things up (in Moscow trams has their own lane most of the time).
Streetcars have made a comeback in many places around the world.
I don't know exactly what has led to this comeback, but one factor may be low-floor trams,[0] where the floor is just a few inches above the street level, which makes boarding much easier.
Trams tend to have smoother rides than buses. For short distances (a few kilometers), they're a pretty nice way to get around.
Low-floor trams make a huge difference, because the ADA also attacked many potential streetcar/tram designs, since the tram floor was higher you either needed to raise station platforms so high as to not be a curb anymore, or you had to otherwise add wheelchair lifts, etc - not just simple ramps.
It was done (the old San Diego high-floor trollies had them) but it was a significant stop/delay when it had to be used. The newer ones are barely noticed at all.
I worked at GM during the EV-1 timeframe. Although some of the people who leased an EV-1 wanted to keep their car, the general economics of mass producing cars is that you need about 50,000 people per year that want to buy a specific car model to break even. At that time, a time of all time low gas prices, there weren't 50k people/year who wanted an EV. Too few people saw the benefits and the environmental need at that time. Maybe GM could have done a better job trying to sell it. But, it's not like they didn't try, they even built a huge ride at EPCOT to promote it.
It's unfortunate that it wasn't a success, but GM didn't have some secret agreement with the oil companies (they sued them a couple years later). GM killed the EV-1 because they couldn't make money selling it. The EV game is hard. Tesla has been at it almost 20 years and they just became profitable a couple years ago. GM wouldn't sell the left over EV-1s because if they sold them, they would be legally required to stock parts for years to come, which doesn't make sense when you only have a couple hundred cars.
Look at the timeline for Lithium-Ion batteries for the reason and where they were in the 1990's. Using very heavy lead acid batteries that you could only really use the top 50% of capacity were not economical, which is mostly what they had back then. It was practical in a low speed golf cart that had very few daily miles driven and spent most of its time plugged in and charging, but not much bigger. They also couldn't deliver very high amps compared with what the newer cathodes in LIon and LiFePO4 batteries can generate. Also, none of these technologies were being built at scale in the 90's - they were still mostly inventing the tech and changing rapidly between '90 and 2010ish.
There were alternative options between Li and lead acid. And even so, the car was liked by the people, pushing the technology from there would have been viable in a number of markets.
Actually one of the reasons Tesla got started. Elon has often mentioned the EV1 “death marches” as having convinced him that electric cars can be a superior product that customers will love.
They don't have to be crushed per se, but yes... that is what is routinely done with prototypes and pilots and yes they can't be sold (and the OEM wouldn't want to sell them due to some other laws that would come into play if they did).
Pilots are the vehicles that come off the line while the line is being developed or retooled for a new model. Some of them go back to engineering for various reasons, some go to suppliers, but most of those eventually get crushed too.
I realize everyone wants to see this as some conspiracy run by a big business in Detroit. They were certainly part of it. But I think it's important to realize that all of the consumers were making their own choices and their choices were usually to buy their own personal transportation machine, aka car.
Public transportation believers hate to admit it but systems like the streetcar are just slower and more inconvenient. Unless you're lucky enough to live near a stop, they don't go to your doorstep. They're much slower because they're always stopping to pick up or drop off someone else.
I realize that some cities are now so dense that public transport may be the only choice. The roads can't handle too many individual cars. But when this so-called conspiracy went down, many people embraced the idea of owning their own car. It wasn't just some crazy scheme cooked up by a few oligarchs in a smoke-filled backroom.
If you track population growth and the number of people without cars you find street cars died out way too soon in any kind of car transition to be the root cause.
Instead they where largely replaced with busses which where initially more expensive, but also more flexible.
The busses ran a few times a day the trolley was every 5-10 minutes. GM had to buy the trolley lines and force them to use their buses in order to sell their unpopular buses.
I think that’s overly critical of busses. You could use the same number of busses at the same frequency as a trolly network, but they are optimized differently.
Trolley’s had fewer routes because laying track was expensive, busses on the other hand ended up with vastly more routes but fewer busses on most routes. This meant that even with significantly more total busses people would on average wait longer but conversely they walk less.
The biggest downside to complex bus routs is they tend to be more difficult to understand and use efficiently. However, apps can really pick up the slack and let people leverage complex systems.
It is true, that it's not only due to a car make conspiracy and it is also true, that contemporary structure of American cities isn't good for public transport. However where city structure is built around public transport and public transport is operated well, I claim you get a way better quality of live. (Less noise, more efficient transport, city structure with reachable shops, ability to use commuting times for rest or reading or something, ... especially, but not only, for the younger, elder or others who can't drive on their own)
Far more busses operated in Chicago/NYC etc in 1970 than streetcars in 1920.
What happened is busses took over and street traffic increased. On otherwise empty streets a buss network could be far more convenient than subways, but that’s not the world we live in.
It’s mostly stoplights and the need for them that makes streetcars and busses suck relative to subways.
Subways will always tend to be faster, just because they don't have cross traffic enforced by cycling traffic lights. Traffic lights are just a reality of street-based transportation, because the light length needs to be long enough that someone like a grandma with mobility issues needs enough time to cross the street.
Traffic lights can be tied to bus traffic - if a bus approaches give it way (both by letting other traffic flow away as well as keeping green till the bus crossed) Doesn't work for all situations but can give 80% green wave, even where bus lines cross.
However then bus is still slower than a subway on long distance. A subway can take a more or less straight line, while busses have to follow roads. Also passengers typically expect denser stops with busses. Also by being alone on the track a subway can go faster as max speed.
But even with subway on long distance, bus can connect with high density to subway, so that more people can reach the station.
> On otherwise empty streets a buss network could be far more convenient than subways, but that’s not the world we live in.
I live in a world with relatively good subway system for travelling across the city and a relatively dense bus system to solve "the last mile" thus quite a good combination. (While the system is close to collapse due to missing investment over also few decades and new projects being too slow in completion)
> Far more busses operated in Chicago/NYC etc in 1970 than streetcars in 1920.
Different times, the system now evolved from a state where streetcars were removed so they can't be compared in that way. Chicago/NYC was a very different place than it was in 1920, itself would change in ways because of a bus system vs streetcars.
> Public transportation believers hate to admit it but systems like the streetcar are just slower and more inconvenient.
Car lovers hate to admit that public transportation is the not fiction but preferred by many all over the world. This sentence is completely impossible for me to relate to. I even don't have a drivers license! My girlfriend and many of my friends also. I want to live urban and don't want to drive or own a car, I consider it inconvenient. I am also not a "public transportation believer", it's not something I care much about, I just use it. I live in a small student-city in germany, nobody uses a car (I literally know nobody driving to university and I know a lot of people here!). I would say more people bike to university than take the car, by far. Nearly my friends from where I grew up (munich, city of 1.5 million people) also don't drive, many don't own a car and many also don't have a drivers license. The only few I know that use a car live quite suburban, bordering rural.
Many may prefer a car, but that doesn't mean that streetcars are only used because you are forced to.
I live in a city/state where public transportation is actively inconvenient and even then I made a considerable effort to take it and avoid driving when I could. The waste of time and brain capacity sitting behind a steering wheel like a frikking dummy is insane - I was able to get so much reading and work done on a train/bus while the best I could do while driving was listen to an audiobook, assuming it didn't take away too much attention from the waste of time that was driving.
I see this as a kind of Stockholm syndrome. Your time is being held hostage by your commute, so you cope with ways to use that time. I was the same way. At first, I was stuck commuting for 75+ minutes to and from work on public transit. Most of this was spent walking, because it was actually faster to bee-line on foot for the office downtown than trying to jump between inner city transit options. I read books on the train or did crosswords when able, but the train ride altogether was maybe 20 minutes long, with maybe 5 minutes spent waiting at the stop (if it wasn't late). So about 25 minutes I could spend "productively" by reading on the way in, and another 25 on the way back. Assuming the train wasn't jam packed by the time it arrived, leaving me hardly any room to even hold a handrail let alone do anything else, which was not a rare occurrence.
Then my employer finally got me a free parking pass for the building (there was a waiting list) and I said goodbye to public transport. My 75+ minute commute became a 25 minute drive, saving me 100 minutes a day I could spend on leisure instead of commuting. What undercuts this happy turn of events is that Covid came in a few months later and my prized parking pass became irrelevant as I was working from home.
And this made me realize enjoying ANY kind of commute is essentially Stockholm syndrome. What's better than a short drive OR reading on the train? Reading at home, in my big comfy chair with a cup of coffee, right up until it's time to start work, never having to take off my slippers.
I agree with you there - commuting, especially in the form of "everyone needs to be in the office by 9am", which leads to gridlock on the transport mechanisms and a completely avoidable collective waste of time, is a pretty cruel farce imposed on the workforce. For most jobs, a no-commute situation is pretty great and staggered work start times would be very helpful for those jobs that require (edited) in-office presence.
Munich has been working on its density for 864 years, and back then there weren't many cars. Its pretty different comparing to a lot of the US which literally wasn't built until after cars existed and widely available to most families. Practically all of the city I live in was built after 1950, easily 75% of it was built post 1970, almost half of it built post 1985. I live in a neighborhood in a somewhat "older" part of town, and my house was built in 1988. The road I drive to work wasn't even really paved until the 90s.
When you're building a city at a time when most families can easily own a car and the average family wants to own a car, you build your cities around cars. When you build your city >700 years before cars even exist, you design around other concerns. I do agree building the city around the car was a shortsighted decision, but its kind of a hard genie to put back in the bottle.
The big part though is the urban core existed hundreds before many US cities even had a name. Sure, Munich's borders looked very different 800 years ago, but the rest of the city largely continued to expand and rebuild around that core central idea. Dallas literally didn't exist until the 1850s, and at that point it was essentially just a train stop and a place to load and unload small barges on the small river. By 1850 Munich was definitely a large city with an obvious urban area. Dallas wouldn't even approach something like Munich until well into the 1900s, well into the oil boom and it grew further from just oil fields.
Also it's practically always been cheaper to own and operate an automobile in the US compared to most of Europe. We're really only starting to get to the point where US people are actually evaluating if driving a car is really worth it, if the US had high oil prices since the 1970s oil shocks I imagine our current cities would look a lot different.
My preferences and your preferences are irrelevant in terms of how our cities are constructed. Many areas on this side of the Atlantic were built after cars become common, and many people who bought new homes in those neighborhoods during post WWII expansion preferred driving their new cars.
I don’t get to change that now, unless we tear my entire neighborhood down.
I suspect the area you live in was settled prior to the ubiquity of cars, and thus, was designed for people without them.
I think those systems are undergoing continuous change, so change is always possible. I also don't think that the area I lived in grew up in fact designed before the ubiquity of cars (I grew up suburban but not rural), although I currently live in the old-city of a small student town, since I want to live more urban. But yeah, it's easier if there's a structure suited to public transit (if the suburban towns have a "core" that's connected by rail to the city and nut just evenly spread out, or enough density anyway etc.).
But I originally just wanted to get at that public transportation not a myth, not forced on people, but preferred by many all over the world.
They’re under continuous incremental change. The problem is that infrastructure has momentum that lasts centuries. The infrastructure that works well is the infrastructure that people want to use and it’s the infrastructure that people want to invest in, and people make their living decisions around the current state.
US suburbs are often sprawled out enough that they aren’t really walkable. There’s a millennia of incremental changes that you’d have to make to an area like Phoenix to make it look anything like a walkable dense city.
This isn't the take away from the page nor the documentary linked below.
> It wasn't just some crazy scheme cooked up by a few oligarchs in a smoke-filled backroom.
It was literally this.
GM, Firestone and Standard Oil literally colluded to buy up streetcars and burn them down and then use their profits to sell a car fueled suburban future of the good life.
Macroscale effects are systemic, projecting individual choice into is mostly always a smoke screen. It is the same tactic that the plastics industry used to shift blame onto the individual "litter bug" and not the prevalence of single use plastic packaging.
Your comment history is littered with similar reinforcing tropes.
It was real, but it's not sufficient to explain the mass movement away from streetcars in general. They didn't even purchase a majority of streetcars in the US, and this movement away from streetcars happened in most of the Western world.
US streetcars had real systemic disadvantages mostly stemming from when they showed up in our society; at the turn of the century in uncongested roads when the dollar was strongly tied to gold. This had a couple effects:
* they showed up at the turn of the century, so just in the '40s and '50s as investment started in highways they needed expensive lifecycle replacement. Buses were seen as more flexible and could use this new infrastructure being built with no additional work, so many municipalities willingly switched to buses to take advantage.
* they showed up at the turn of the century, when having a paved road in a city was not a norm, and so contracts allowing for the construction of streetcar lines also expected the streetcar companies to pay maintenance on the paving. Gas taxes usually only pay for major interstate and state roads, but streetcars paid for local streets. Undoing this was not popular since it would require cities to raise new taxes, and would relieve evil streetcar monopolies of a burden.
* they showed up when roads were not terribly congested, so they weren't built with the expectation of needing to be separated from heavy traffic. Cars changed this equation, but dedicating road space to streetcars was just either not on the radar or seen as a giveaway to evil companies.
* they showed up when the dollar was very strong and tied to gold. Laws authorizing streetcar operation also usually involved explicitly tying their operation to a specified flat fare (usually a nickel). This fare was not tied to inflation, and raising the fare or eliminating limits on fares was politically DOA, a tax on the working man and a giveaway to the evil streetcar monopolies.
I am not making any statement about streetcars in general. You also don't have to purchase the majority of something to then show it as a PR piece, "LA is modernizing its transportation system with the fast and flexible bus" ...
The commons then as now had a bunch of selfish people pushing their own agendas and mass transportation is one of those things that suffers under capitalism, it doesn't extract the most profit from the system. It maximizes efficiency, which isn't the same thing.
> GM, Firestone and Standard Oil literally colluded to buy up streetcars and burn them down and then use their profits to sell a car fueled suburban future of the good life.
No. They colluded to monopolize supply of buses--this is what the court case that involved the conspiracy held. The streetcars were already failing when they were acquired.
Then why were the streetcar lines being bought by what effectively was a shell company owned by the corporations that would profit the most from the sale of those buses?
It is a conspiracy story that tells itself. There is good and bad.
However, I think the demise of streetcars needs to be seen in the light of the demise of trams in the UK. We got rid of trams in the UK but General Motors were not to blame. However, the costs of rails in the road instead of rubber wheels and then diesel sealed the deal. The trams went to trolleybus services and they became bus services, that were not necessarily as frequent but had route flexibility that the trams and trolleybus never had.
People overwhelmingly chose the car over the tram in the UK, regardless of lobbying, people worked out that they wanted a car. The outcome was inevitable.
But would the outcome have been inevitable in the US where towns developed along streetcar routes? Would American towns have kept the streetcars where British cities, with wiggly roads, would opt for the trolleybus?
The conspiracy never gave us a chance to find out.
The outcome was not inevitable. If the same level of spending on federal and local level was invested in improved street cars the outcome could have been quite difference.
Its not like this would have been a zero car world, but a more even split of investment would have yielded better results.
Ask any elder boomer who is an LA native about this, and be prepared for a looong discussion.
I think that as with so many things the red cars in LA both better and worse than cars. I think they were especially better for younger people. But I think they were inseparable from a pre-car culture, ultimately.
LA was not a product of a "pre-car culture", quite the opposite. In fact everything about "car culture" could rightly be considered in colonialist framing: immediately after arriving as a common mode of transportation, they shut off streets to anyone else except cars, using up the resources that the people already there had painstakingly refined for their needs and criminalizing their built-up patterns of behavior (jaywalking). LA was the product of an intense need for justification of cars-as-way-of-life by designing a city to be bad for everything except cars. And it worked!
I would advise you, Sam Atman, to review the city limits and landscape as they changed over time, rather than eliminating all context from trite tidbits of information to make an underdeveloped and irrelevant point.
City design doesn't stop the moment someone puts a flagpole in the ground.
I'm only responding in kind. People ought to recognize how they come across in discourse, for the purposes of good faith discussion all around. What better way than to hold up a mirror? Or do we expect egos to be so domineering that they cannot recognize their own behavior in the reflection?
I don't think it's imperative to disguise contempt for those who are so obviously not engaging in good faith. Doing so only provides cover for that same bad faith actor to abuse the culture of respectability politics and antagonize others.
>"What better way than to hold up a mirror? Or do we expect egos to be so domineering that they cannot recognize their own behavior in the reflection?"
Good advice, yet I'm sensing a lack of self reflection. Good-faith discussion is incumbent on all participants. You are quick to assume offense and once you perceive that you have been slighted you do nothing to try and steer the conversation back into the kind of discourse you desire. Indeed, you react with "contempt" - your words. There is a time and place for such reaction, but I feel like de-escalation and disengagement should be the go-to strategy most of the time.
Wikipedia article lists Pittsburgh as having streetcars. In the 30 or so years that I've been here, I've never seen a streetcar. We do have light rail, however.
The distinction between light rail and streetcars gets confusing - is the San Diego Trolley a "street car" when it runs down the street? Or because cars aren't supposed to drive in its "lane" is it still light rail?
The T runs mostly on a separate rail, but there are a number of places in city limits where it runs with cars on the street. Check out Arlington Avenue in Allentown (the Pittsburgh neighborhood, not the city).
This theory conveniently ignores that streetcar companies also have lobbying power, and lobbying to stay the status quo is much more successful than lobbying for radical change.
Streetcar companies were universally reviled (as most effective monopolies tend to be, like US cable or power companies), and their status quo actually was worse than what was being introduced for cars, because they pretty much all had flat price caps and were expected to pay maintenance for city streets they operated on.
It also doesn't help that a fair amount of streetcars were just land speculation plays (let's sell all this land that's newly accessible!). When they needed full replacement and renewal, they no longer had anything to finance it with.
I mean you are also ignoring the externalities that had effects on lobbying power like not being able to set their own fares, might have effected the amount of money they had to lobby?
I wonder what the difference is compared to subway trains. Similar local lobbying vs national auto lobbying dynamics, and subways didn't suffer the same extinction.
Is it just switching costs being lower for streetcars? Or maybe the fact subways are underground means they don't battle in a zero sum pavement game with cars, so they were more immune to tides of public opinion and city administration?
Streetcars were pretty awful though. It should not be a conspiracy that they needed to be modernized and replaced with buses.
They were slow, had very low capacity numbers, costly to maintain, and were fairly dangerous.
I know people want to draw a direct comparison to modern light rail, but even today surface streetcars have proven to be expensive and inflexible larks for most cities that have developed them.
(I get that whether the automotive special interests should have be the ones to do it is its own issue).
as awful as they were they allowed all sorts of people the ability to get around without owning a personal car. Interurbans[0] allowed people to get from city to city.
All of this has been thrown out and there are all sorts of negative externalities imposed by massive use of automobiles and automobile-centered planning.
I don't see how they're better than a bus though. Both need to travel by road. Buses are just easier to swap out and replace as far as I can tell. Also you probably don't need a platform to board a bus.
It does seem to be almost some kind of stigma or classism with buses rather than an actual functional difference in technology. We have electric overhead-line buses and they're just the same as streetcars except you don't need dedicated lanes or putting in rails in the road (which are expensive, limit expansion, and present a real hazard to biking).
Have you ridden the bus in a major US city lately? Safety and hygiene are serious issues, depending on the city and sometimes the specific line. Despite owning a car, I used to ride buses whenever remotely feasible as a point of civic pride. That stopped after a number of encounters with other agressive, combative, smelly, and/or visibly ill passengers. This is all tied up with homelessness, drug abuse, and high crime in urban communities which political polarization has prevented the US from addressing. It's disheartening, as the economic and environmental advantages of public transit are numerous.
Okay but this is as fixable on buses as it is on street cars. Street cars may seem cleaner but I think it's because they are generally just kind of impractical for daily commuting and are sort of kept around as a tourist activity in some cities.
Yes, I agree that the problem is fundamental to both modes of transit. If street cars were more common, the same stigma would apply for the same reasons.
> does seem to be almost some kind of stigma or classism with buses rather than an actual functional difference in technology
I attended a talk on the effects of new bus versus light rail routes on property values. The fact that rail is fixed increases them much more. The switching cost is a feature. Nobody moves to a neighbourhood because the city opened a new bus route to it.
Something similar might occur with citizens’ give-a-shit factors. I get furious when my local subway station gets messy. I have no idea which bus routes go by. If a bus route became problematic, I imagine my neighbours would petition to move or cancel it before considering cleaning it up. You can’t do that with laid track.
You can look at it like this: a light rail line is a promise that transit will serve that area for decades to come.
And so when a light rail line comes through, the areas around the stations begin to develop, and quite rapidly, too. An example can be found here: https://goo.gl/maps/kEkn615bp5nUGVmv6 - that trolley stop was literally in the middle of an empty field when it was built, and there wasn't much around on the nearby roads, either.
A bus line gets added to where people already are, and can disappear as quickly as it came; there's no permanency.
The infrastructure necessary for streetcars naturally assigns priority to them on roads, demoting motor vehicles to waiting for streetcar signals and not the other way around. This grants efficiency guarantees assuming no sabotage.
Again, this is about the replacement of streetcars with buses. Anything streetcars did, buses did better and for more people.
The idea that an interurban was superior to a humble Greyhound bus is a bit of wishful historical fiction.
I grew up riding the bus. I still ride the bus. Buses are the unsung hero of public transit. We don't need them reinvented by people who refuse to ride them.
The nugget of my reply you're moving past concerns automobile-centric planning and its extreme toll on the built environment, and those external costs.
I don't really have time right now but I'm sure you could dive pretty deeply into things like racial prejudices in destroying neighborhoods to build freeways, or in how people who live near busy roads have increased rates of asthma or other health related issues. I really don't have time to do this but I'll leave the convo open for others to jump in if they'd like.
I like buses too but I'm pretty pissed off how short-minded planners were in the early to mid-20th century when they decided to trash some really valuable infra.
I live in Portland, a city famous for having more of a neighborhood feel than similar cities its size. There are a variety of highly desirable turn of the century neighborhoods. Nearly every single one of these neighborhoods centers on one of the old street car routes. A century after they were torn down, these street car lines had such an impact that these streets are among the most desirable properties on the west coast.
Modern light rail in the US suffers from a different distortion: it tends to be used as a tool to force development projects rather than being implemented in a way optimal for transit.
I live in PDX too! You could actually ride streetcars all the way from Milwaukee to Vancouver at the turn of the century (if you didn't mind taking the whole day to do it).
But ironically, MAX is a good example of the negatives of trying to modernize the streetcar concept. The length of a train is limited by the length of the smallest city block served. So there are severe capacity limitations inherent in the system. And you are still slowed down to some extent by street traffic. It boggles my mind how slow the yellow line is.
Eh, I hear ya but there's also multiple ripple on effects. Like, the stop density on MAX is just too high. It needs to be more arterial between transit centers, rather than trying to move people 4 blocks between stops through most of downtown. But making that workable means some sort of more high density connector fanning out from it than our system currently handles. Too much of the city core has these redundant routes of multiple modes each trying to have the same stop density.
I've never heard anyone express this. Both only exist as tourist experiences.
The cable car in particular is a bit of fancy - it can only carry a dozen-ish people, and requires tons of training and equipment. There's a reason it costs so much to ride such a small distance.
Fun, but not a good model for modern public transit.
True for Powell/Hyde street route, but the California line is a straight shot from the tendernob to financial district, plenty of regulars on that route going to work
>SF's cable car system and historic F trains both work fine as public transit.
SF's cable car system is quaint and fun and all that but it hardly works fine as public transit. There are often lines, it's $8/ride, and I think you may have to pre-pay at the popular end spots. Does any local take the cable car as day-to-day public transit?
I used to live in north beach and used the cable car for transit a decent amount - the busses through Chinatown were so slow and often so crowded it was almost faster to walk, but the cable car I could usually just step on and then step off downtown.
Muni monthly passes include the cable car, and I would assume many intra-SF commuters would have one of these passes (I certainly did when I worked there)
Yes, people do, one line goes through a major population corridor and ends right in the center of the financial district. Thats't the east/west line. North/south line is more tourist-oriented.
The public did not love streetcars for many reasons. The ride was rough, they were boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another. Insufficient capacity meant it was not unusual for riders to cling to the sides of cars where that was possible.
When freeways and buses were presented as an alternative the public embraced building new infrastructure over rebuilding the old. Part of that is because the downsides had not yet become clear.
Blaming some corporate bogeyman is always tempting but does not change the facts. The streetcars were replaced because they fell out of favor with the public who wanted to try the new and shiny thing.