7 ms·

The Bay Area's lost streetcars

106 points by rmason 4y ago

hadlock 4y ago
What a lot of pro-transit (full disclosure, I am full transit) folks fail to mention, is that most streetcars were initially built, in particular, those out towards the sunset, big chunks of LA, were actually built by property developers, as an incentive, "look! see! don't need a car! just like urban living, but look at all this extra space you get! just take the street car into town". Street cars were run at break even, or even at a loss, to sell property, and once they hit X saturation rate, the street car prices were raised to make it pay for itself, or simply sold off to the city to maintain, out of property taxes. With barely break-even rates, and no maintenance budget these lines quickly fell into disrepair, and no suprise, the city and local citizens decided to buy private cars, rather than eat a tax hike to pay for the maintenance of a rail line that only went downtown. Yes, absolutely Big Business bought up/bought out a lot of small-time public transit, but you need to look at how and why these lines were built in the first place. They did not spring up out of the goodness of the hearts of property developers. Street cars for many years existed as a perk to sell farmland to urban expats, and once they had served their propose, were rapidly dismantled due to lack of service and maintenance costs. Nothing comes without a price.
- melony 4y ago
  The reason they are failing is because they are slow ass and never modernized. Now they are primarily tourist traps. SF is a bad example of a city with street cars, there are many countries with much better implementations of street cars. You need to give street cars priority and make sure they don't get overly slowed down by city traffic. If you want people to take streetcars, overhaul the entire infrastructure. You can keep the outer decoration and layout but the insides should be replaced with the latest tech from Siemens/the Japanese.
  - defrost 4y ago
    eg: Melbourne, Australia > Trams are a major form of public transport in Melbourne, the capital city of the state of Victoria, Australia. > As of May 2017, the Melbourne tramway network consists of 250 kilometres of double track, 493 trams, 24 routes, and 1,763 tram stops. > The system is the largest operational urban tram network in the world. As featured in the engineering nerd cult classic film Malcolm (1986) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wffDBsSgS5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wffDBsSgS5Q
    - spacehunt 4y ago
      Melbourne is not a great example of a modern fast system though. The trams are far too slow in the inner suburbs, with the exception of parts of 96/119.
    - deepdriver 4y ago
      You don't even need to be a wealthy country. Tram service is excellent in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, where they've had electrics trams for more than a century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Zagreb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Zagreb To someone from a place with modern, well-maintained light rail, I imagine Bay Area streetcars seem as quaint and outdated as old Ford cars in Cuba look to Americans.
      - Symbiote 4y ago
        > To someone from a place with modern, well-maintained light rail, I imagine Bay Area streetcars seem as quaint and outdated as old Ford cars in Cuba look to Americans. This is why San Francisco's streetcars are a tourist attraction. Few people go to Edinburgh just to ride on a modern tram, but some people visit Scotland and take a trip on a steam train (with or without the Harry Potter theme).
        quesera 4y ago
        > This is why San Francisco's streetcars are a tourist attraction San Francisco's Cable Cars are a tourist transaction. They do also move thousands of officeworkers to downtown daily, though. But the streetcar system is much larger than the cable car system, and it is definitely not a tourist attraction.
        Taniwha 4y ago
        I think that what confuses people is that they run historic street cars down the surface Market St for the tourists, and more modern street cars underground (under Market St, above ground in the suburbs) for the locals
  - m-ee 4y ago
    The N Judah actually managed to get slower. Having trouble finding the photo but someone posted an N Judah schedule on reddit from the early 1900s and it was actually faster to get to downtown than it is now. EDIT- Article about it https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/san-francisco-muni-strives-to-recapture-streetcar-speeds-of-1912.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/san-francisco-muni-str...
    - flomo 4y ago
      The T-Third is also slower than the bus it replaced, and that was only like 20 years ago.
- NoToP 4y ago
  Hold up. Why would people who weren't willing to accept the taxes to maintain the street car willing to instead pay all the tax which subsidizes car infrastructure. This narrative doesn't quite add up because everything you said about why the street car existed and the commuter pattern that fed into the economics of developers applies equally well to why cars and suburb development exists. So once suburban homes were sold, why didnt the roads collapse into a state of disrepair which no one was willing to pay for?
  - csours 4y ago
    Haha. It's absolutely beautiful when someone asks the good question. Related - why are people willing to subsidize someone else's road, but not willing to pay tolls -- or -- why are people willing to subsidize someone else's road, but not someone else's bus or subway fair.
  - floren 4y ago
    > So once suburban homes were sold, why didnt the roads collapse into a state of disrepair which no one was willing to pay for? This is currently playing out in older subdivisions all across America.
  - toast0 4y ago
    > why didnt the roads collapse into a state of disrepair which no one was willing to pay for? A street in disrepair is still usable, a street car line in disrepair becomes unusable much faster. Only one part of the rail needs to fall apart when nobody will pay to fix it and you can't use it anymore. Potholes and washouts and lots more problems are solved by driving slowly and carefully. Especially with earlier automobiles which were more likely to run on dirt roads.
    - NoToP 4y ago
      This is a plausible hypothesis, but the thing that's missing is how many times can rail be traversed before being unusable and how many times can a road be traversed by the same measure. Intuitively, I would imagine the net tonnage passed before wearing out asphalt is far lower than it is for a chunk of steel welded to the ground. Maybe the cost of maintaining rail feels worse / is a harder political sell because the full price is acutely concentrated in time, whereas each individual pothole is a mere budgetary papercut?
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  To make this happen, first, East Bay needs to make streets safer. It is ridiculous how crime ridden Oakland and Berkeley are to the point where it is probably wise to avoid public transportation all together. We need a national guard deployed here 24/7, that's how I feel walking around in downtown Oakland. With NYCSPA vs Bruen ruling, I am planning to obtain a handgun and a CCW license from Alameda sheriff with a shall issue reason as "Self Defense". You can go here and see how many people feel unsafe in California, particularly LA, SF and East Bay. https://old.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/vlnrrw/the_rcaguns_firearms_carry_megathread/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/vlnrrw/the_rcaguns_...
  - melony 4y ago
    Is it really that bad? Seems to be mostly just homeless people and drug users.
    - sammalloy 4y ago
      It’s a good question. Whenever this discussion comes up, my take on it is that people are concerned about being random victims. In other words, some aspects of this have to do with being in the wrong place at the wrong time and not feeling safe in your environment. I think it would be helpful to change the frame of the discussion and ask what we can do to make people more safe and comfortable. The BBC recently had a discussion about this in the UK, and they came up with all sorts of specific and targeted solutions. We rarely see that happen over here on this side of the pond.
      - uoaei 4y ago
        Another question worth asking is: what is the rate of randomly directed violent crime? I suspect it's small enough to be a rounding error vs violent crimes between people with pre-existing relationships. Still, I agree with your point about the rhetorical focus. Simply reciting the statistics isn't going to alleviate anxieties.
        sammalloy 4y ago
- mc32 4y ago
  It’s a classical conspiracy theory. There are truths interspersed with assumptions and fabrications sustained by a fantastical desire -in this case halcyon of dependable public transit everywhere which was razed by greedy bus manufacturing companies in cahoots with petrochemical companies. When in reality it’s closer to the story of the ferries that ferried cars across the bay before the bridges were built. Or the story of railroads before the interstate system displaced nearly all interstate passenger rail.
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    Interesting that you mentioned the decline of ferries. Streetcar systems depended on ferries to bring riders their way. If you are making a trip by ferry you’ll need a way to get around when you get off on the other shore. The Atlantic Avenue line in Boston is a good example of a ferry dependent line. Once they opened the East Boston and Sumner tunnels and people could drive through the Bay, taking the train became much less attractive.
  - NoToP 4y ago
    The interstate system was a massive subsidy to cars and car dependant lifestyles. To compare it to tech disruption like what happened to ferries makes the death of interstate passenger rail seem natural. In reality, no industry could survive their competitor being so heavily subsidized. If we threw that amount of money at high speed rail, we could probably choke out a good portion of the airline and car industry combined.
- opo 4y ago
  The podcast 99% Invisible did a good podcast covering the Red Car. From their overview article on the episode: >...Henry Huntington took his money and headed for Los Angeles. He purchased the biggest transportation system in the city, the Los Angeles Railway (LARy), and then incorporated it into a new company called Pacific Electric. Huntington also started building hundreds of subdivisions on the periphery of Los Angeles and used Pacific Electric trains—bright red trolleys—to connect the subdivisions to downtown Los Angeles. >Over time, though, Huntington had built so many subdivisions that his Red Car couldn’t do a good enough job connecting the city’s disparate areas. The Red Car was never designed to be a comprehensive system like the New York City Subway; rather, it existed primarily to get people in and out of Huntington’s subdivisions. Angelenos who could afford cars found it was easier to get around by driving. The Red Car fell into disrepair, and was mocked as a “slum on wheels.” https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-red-car-conspiracy/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-... A book that covers this in more depth is: https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/24015/HENRY_E_HUNTINGTON_AND_THE_CREATION_OF_SOUTHERN_CALIFORNIA.pdf https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/24015/HENRY_E_HUNTI...
- dionidium 4y ago
  I can't remember where I read this, but somebody once said something like, "If there were a conspiracy to kill the streetcars in favor of automobiles, then it was a conspiracy conducted with the enthusiastic support of the American public." Transit enthusiasts and urbanists -- I'm both -- love any narrative that says that suburbanites have been tricked into their living arrangements by nefarious outside interests, but in fact this is what Americans have more or less demanded.
toast0 4y ago
Hmmm no mention of the interurban street car from Los Gatos to San Jose, ran on San Carlos ave. Was marked on the turn of the century (1900) subdivision maps for my house in the Burbank neighborhood. https://www.santacruztrains.com/2021/07/streetcars-san-jose-and-los-gatos.html https://www.santacruztrains.com/2021/07/streetcars-san-jose-...
washbrain 4y ago
Many cities had "streetcar suburbs", developments on the fringes of town serviced by street cars that took people to work. Sadly, they were largely decommissioned and replaced with buses or nothing. We badly need to get more trains moving through American cities. I'd prefer grade separated, but honestly even if we had streetcars running in from all the suburbs that'd be pretty great. It's also worth mentioning the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con... There's pretty good incentive to see streetcars removed if you are a car company...
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  My town is famous for being a city that feels like a bunch of neighborhoods. Nearly all of those iconic neighborhoods are along the historic street car routes, that were dismantled in the 30s and 40s. I won't claim the street cars were perfect, but there is a lot of merit to the idea that they were replaced by an inferior solution due to the prevailing winds of the moment. What I find more interesting is the street car lines had such a dramatic impact that now 100 years later they're still defining the shape of the city.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    > My town is famous for being a city that feels like a bunch of neighborhoods. Ha, I think everywhere I've lived has described itself like this. Maybe it's less common in the US because you don't have cities swallowing up villages.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
      Yeah, US city planning is unfortunately pretty dismal. My town has a reputation for being better than most, but truth is we've grown so fast the last 2 decades our transit system is overwhelmed now too. Most US cities are dominated by suburban sprawl, and where there's pretty much nothing like a walkable neighborhood high street.
- throw0101a 4y ago
gregoriol 4y ago
It may be controversial, but I think all transportation that requires fixed infrastructure is designed to fail. The future is to light and flexible, composable and fast.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Europe, Japan and China and many other countries beg to differ and are running and/or building plenty of railways.
  - gregoriol 4y ago
    Railways are practical to go fast from a transportation hub to another transportation hub, without much stops in the middle. Local railways are fading away because last miles transportation needs to be more flexible that what railways can offer.
    - woweoe 4y ago
      This assumes that the people are living far away from the railway, which is obviously the opposite situation in much of Europe and Asia.
      - newaccount2021 4y ago
    - danhor 4y ago
      France and Germany have been expanding local tram & Stadtbahn networks, even opening new ones since the ~1990s. Tram-Trains have also become popular in Germany, due to offering more stops in the middle. Not sure if you mean trams or branch lines by local railways, but at least Germany has also been keen on reactivating old branch lines, often to resounding success and exceeding expectations (and few failures, although there are many hurdles that reactivation projects much pass to avoid that fate). S-Bahn networks with many infill stops are also popular. Many S-Bahn stops also rely on walking for the last mile, which works well. There are also of-course people that come by bus or bike, but both seem like a smaller portion to me. There are efforts to try to get more bike&ride traffic to expand the station reach, but it's doesn't seem to me like it has increased a huge amount. There are also always efforts to expand park&ride, but the share of passengers using it is tiny [1]. The portion of people using E-Scooters and taking them into the train has noticeably increased, but not (yet) enough to be a significant portion (I'd guess 1-2% at most). In places where E-Scooter rentals are available, the trams, subways, busses, walking and personal bikes are usually cheaper (30ct/min) and guaranteed to be available. I'd guess few people use rentals for their daily routine, but more for fun and rare trips. A few german transport associations have tried implementing on-demand ridepooling, but I haven't heard of any large success stories yet. It's more of a complement for off-peak service due to the waiting times (if it takes 20 min for the vehicle to get to you, that's 20 minutes of waiting and you can't rely on a timetable), hassle (having to use an app and ordering it) and price. [1]: Park&Ride is very limited anyways. You can't retrofit a lot of parking to existing stations, because they're in the middle of (sometimes small) towns and would discourage denser development. If you want enough ridership to sustain an additional stop, there'd have to be a huge amount of parking (necessitating expensive parking garages) and enough demand to take the train for part of the trip and not a car for the whole trip. There usually isn't (with some exceptions, like greenfield HSR stations that the french like).
SLWW 4y ago
I miss seeing the Streetcars in San Fran.
WalterBright 4y ago
The funny thing is nobody thinks of taking pictures of ordinary street scenes at the time, so there aren't many. The ones that do get taken are treasures.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  People were not walking with cameras like they are now. A camera was a big object and you had to buy film for it.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    I would walk around with a camera many times before iphones. I still didn't take pictures of ordinary street life, because it seemed completely uninteresting. My parents were also amateur photographers, and rarely took street pictures. I had a camera in college, but rarely took pictures of ordinary things. When I look at the pictures I took, it seems they are of all the wrong things.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      In a lot of cities and city neighborhoods it would be fascinating to have a "StreetView" of at least more interesting neighborhoods over time. But, as you say, even with relatively cheap B&W film, that would still have cost a fair bit of money and time and very few people systematically did such things. In a somewhat similar vein, I unearthed a book a long ago company did in the 80s called "A Year in Development" which had all these photos and random detail about what was going on during a year--with a mostly engineering slant. Especially at the time, that sort of quotidian detail was rarely documented at all.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      Yeah. A photograph was expensive in terms of your time (and money). Especially if it meant you had to change the film. So many lost opportunities. When I was writing [1] I absolutely could not find any photos of the golf place, which is now gone. You'd think the family would have some (I'm sure they do), but they completely ghosted me. No one from the old 'hood has any. [1] https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/no-compliments-at-the-miniature-golf https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/no-compliments-at-the-mi...
WalterBright 4y ago
I'm wondering what the cowcatchers attached to the front are for. Did cows used to roam the streets of SF? Or are they to push the pedestrians out of the way? flip the bicycles over the top and away?
morsch 4y ago
Street level light rail is fantastic. My city replaced most of it with subways. Which, don't get me wrong, are preferable to almost everything else. But it does mean getting to and from the train requires an additional walk and stair/escalator/lift ride, in addition to whatever distance you already had to walk. This easily triples the time it takes to get to the train for many trips. Of course, there are advantages, as well, principally a better separation from traffic.
beowulfey 4y ago
Really great site! Would love to see something like this for other cities. LA is an obvious one, but recently I was thinking about how many lesser known street car networks were built and destroyed. For example, most medium to large towns in CT were once serviced by extensive interconnected streetcar networks, but few maps of those networks still exist.
Cupertino95014 4y ago
There's a line in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" where Bob Hoskins says (this was early 20th Century LA): "Who's going to ride on your freeway when the Red Car costs a nickel?"
radiojasper 4y ago
I'm a bit sad you can't navigate through the photos with arrow keys on the keyboard. There is also no way to interact with the 3 year buttons with keyboard (1941, 1956, 2020) because when using tab, the buttons are completely skipped. Lastly, when I click an external link (eg. the link to Chris Arvin's website [0] and then click Back in my browser, I'm back at the homepage and not on the map I had previously selected. This is because the selected map does not change the URL and therefore loads nothing in the browser's navigation history. All in all, this makes this website unusuable for people with certain disabilities, because it always requires a mouse to use the website. [0] http://chrisarv.in/ http://chrisarv.in/
62951413 4y ago
For those in the East Bay, https://www.eastbayhillsproject.org/ https://www.eastbayhillsproject.org/ is such a mesmerizing place to read about the old times. And see the pictures of the places you know which looked so different just a couple generations ago. Electric trains, forgotten tunnels under the Berkeley Hills, much simpler times.

106 points by rmason 4y ago

What a lot of pro-transit (full disclosure, I am full transit) folks fail to mention, is that most streetcars were initially built, in particular, those out towards the sunset, big chunks of LA, were actually built by property developers, as an incentive, "look! see! don't need a car! just like urban living, but look at all this extra space you get! just take the street car into town". Street cars were run at break even, or even at a loss, to sell property, and once they hit X saturation rate, the street car prices were raised to make it pay for itself, or simply sold off to the city to maintain, out of property taxes. With barely break-even rates, and no maintenance budget these lines quickly fell into disrepair, and no suprise, the city and local citizens decided to buy private cars, rather than eat a tax hike to pay for the maintenance of a rail line that only went downtown. Yes, absolutely Big Business bought up/bought out a lot of small-time public transit, but you need to look at how and why these lines were built in the first place. They did not spring up out of the goodness of the hearts of property developers. Street cars for many years existed as a perk to sell farmland to urban expats, and once they had served their propose, were rapidly dismantled due to lack of service and maintenance costs. Nothing comes without a price.

melony 4y ago
The reason they are failing is because they are slow ass and never modernized. Now they are primarily tourist traps. SF is a bad example of a city with street cars, there are many countries with much better implementations of street cars. You need to give street cars priority and make sure they don't get overly slowed down by city traffic. If you want people to take streetcars, overhaul the entire infrastructure. You can keep the outer decoration and layout but the insides should be replaced with the latest tech from Siemens/the Japanese.
- defrost 4y ago
  eg: Melbourne, Australia > Trams are a major form of public transport in Melbourne, the capital city of the state of Victoria, Australia. > As of May 2017, the Melbourne tramway network consists of 250 kilometres of double track, 493 trams, 24 routes, and 1,763 tram stops. > The system is the largest operational urban tram network in the world. As featured in the engineering nerd cult classic film Malcolm (1986) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wffDBsSgS5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wffDBsSgS5Q
  - spacehunt 4y ago
    Melbourne is not a great example of a modern fast system though. The trams are far too slow in the inner suburbs, with the exception of parts of 96/119.
  - deepdriver 4y ago
    You don't even need to be a wealthy country. Tram service is excellent in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, where they've had electrics trams for more than a century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Zagreb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Zagreb To someone from a place with modern, well-maintained light rail, I imagine Bay Area streetcars seem as quaint and outdated as old Ford cars in Cuba look to Americans.
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      > To someone from a place with modern, well-maintained light rail, I imagine Bay Area streetcars seem as quaint and outdated as old Ford cars in Cuba look to Americans. This is why San Francisco's streetcars are a tourist attraction. Few people go to Edinburgh just to ride on a modern tram, but some people visit Scotland and take a trip on a steam train (with or without the Harry Potter theme).
      - quesera 4y ago
        > This is why San Francisco's streetcars are a tourist attraction San Francisco's Cable Cars are a tourist transaction. They do also move thousands of officeworkers to downtown daily, though. But the streetcar system is much larger than the cable car system, and it is definitely not a tourist attraction.
        Taniwha 4y ago
        I think that what confuses people is that they run historic street cars down the surface Market St for the tourists, and more modern street cars underground (under Market St, above ground in the suburbs) for the locals
- m-ee 4y ago
  The N Judah actually managed to get slower. Having trouble finding the photo but someone posted an N Judah schedule on reddit from the early 1900s and it was actually faster to get to downtown than it is now. EDIT- Article about it https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/san-francisco-muni-strives-to-recapture-streetcar-speeds-of-1912.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/san-francisco-muni-str...
  - flomo 4y ago
    The T-Third is also slower than the bus it replaced, and that was only like 20 years ago.
NoToP 4y ago
Hold up. Why would people who weren't willing to accept the taxes to maintain the street car willing to instead pay all the tax which subsidizes car infrastructure. This narrative doesn't quite add up because everything you said about why the street car existed and the commuter pattern that fed into the economics of developers applies equally well to why cars and suburb development exists. So once suburban homes were sold, why didnt the roads collapse into a state of disrepair which no one was willing to pay for?
- csours 4y ago
  Haha. It's absolutely beautiful when someone asks the good question. Related - why are people willing to subsidize someone else's road, but not willing to pay tolls -- or -- why are people willing to subsidize someone else's road, but not someone else's bus or subway fair.
- floren 4y ago
  > So once suburban homes were sold, why didnt the roads collapse into a state of disrepair which no one was willing to pay for? This is currently playing out in older subdivisions all across America.
- toast0 4y ago
  > why didnt the roads collapse into a state of disrepair which no one was willing to pay for? A street in disrepair is still usable, a street car line in disrepair becomes unusable much faster. Only one part of the rail needs to fall apart when nobody will pay to fix it and you can't use it anymore. Potholes and washouts and lots more problems are solved by driving slowly and carefully. Especially with earlier automobiles which were more likely to run on dirt roads.
  - NoToP 4y ago
    This is a plausible hypothesis, but the thing that's missing is how many times can rail be traversed before being unusable and how many times can a road be traversed by the same measure. Intuitively, I would imagine the net tonnage passed before wearing out asphalt is far lower than it is for a chunk of steel welded to the ground. Maybe the cost of maintaining rail feels worse / is a harder political sell because the full price is acutely concentrated in time, whereas each individual pothole is a mere budgetary papercut?
systemvoltage 4y ago
To make this happen, first, East Bay needs to make streets safer. It is ridiculous how crime ridden Oakland and Berkeley are to the point where it is probably wise to avoid public transportation all together. We need a national guard deployed here 24/7, that's how I feel walking around in downtown Oakland. With NYCSPA vs Bruen ruling, I am planning to obtain a handgun and a CCW license from Alameda sheriff with a shall issue reason as "Self Defense". You can go here and see how many people feel unsafe in California, particularly LA, SF and East Bay. https://old.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/vlnrrw/the_rcaguns_firearms_carry_megathread/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/vlnrrw/the_rcaguns_...
- melony 4y ago
  Is it really that bad? Seems to be mostly just homeless people and drug users.
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    It’s a good question. Whenever this discussion comes up, my take on it is that people are concerned about being random victims. In other words, some aspects of this have to do with being in the wrong place at the wrong time and not feeling safe in your environment. I think it would be helpful to change the frame of the discussion and ask what we can do to make people more safe and comfortable. The BBC recently had a discussion about this in the UK, and they came up with all sorts of specific and targeted solutions. We rarely see that happen over here on this side of the pond.
    - uoaei 4y ago
      Another question worth asking is: what is the rate of randomly directed violent crime? I suspect it's small enough to be a rounding error vs violent crimes between people with pre-existing relationships. Still, I agree with your point about the rhetorical focus. Simply reciting the statistics isn't going to alleviate anxieties.
      - sammalloy 4y ago
mc32 4y ago
It’s a classical conspiracy theory. There are truths interspersed with assumptions and fabrications sustained by a fantastical desire -in this case halcyon of dependable public transit everywhere which was razed by greedy bus manufacturing companies in cahoots with petrochemical companies. When in reality it’s closer to the story of the ferries that ferried cars across the bay before the bridges were built. Or the story of railroads before the interstate system displaced nearly all interstate passenger rail.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  Interesting that you mentioned the decline of ferries. Streetcar systems depended on ferries to bring riders their way. If you are making a trip by ferry you’ll need a way to get around when you get off on the other shore. The Atlantic Avenue line in Boston is a good example of a ferry dependent line. Once they opened the East Boston and Sumner tunnels and people could drive through the Bay, taking the train became much less attractive.
- NoToP 4y ago
  The interstate system was a massive subsidy to cars and car dependant lifestyles. To compare it to tech disruption like what happened to ferries makes the death of interstate passenger rail seem natural. In reality, no industry could survive their competitor being so heavily subsidized. If we threw that amount of money at high speed rail, we could probably choke out a good portion of the airline and car industry combined.
opo 4y ago
The podcast 99% Invisible did a good podcast covering the Red Car. From their overview article on the episode: >...Henry Huntington took his money and headed for Los Angeles. He purchased the biggest transportation system in the city, the Los Angeles Railway (LARy), and then incorporated it into a new company called Pacific Electric. Huntington also started building hundreds of subdivisions on the periphery of Los Angeles and used Pacific Electric trains—bright red trolleys—to connect the subdivisions to downtown Los Angeles. >Over time, though, Huntington had built so many subdivisions that his Red Car couldn’t do a good enough job connecting the city’s disparate areas. The Red Car was never designed to be a comprehensive system like the New York City Subway; rather, it existed primarily to get people in and out of Huntington’s subdivisions. Angelenos who could afford cars found it was easier to get around by driving. The Red Car fell into disrepair, and was mocked as a “slum on wheels.” https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-red-car-conspiracy/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-... A book that covers this in more depth is: https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/24015/HENRY_E_HUNTINGTON_AND_THE_CREATION_OF_SOUTHERN_CALIFORNIA.pdf https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/24015/HENRY_E_HUNTI...
dionidium 4y ago
I can't remember where I read this, but somebody once said something like, "If there were a conspiracy to kill the streetcars in favor of automobiles, then it was a conspiracy conducted with the enthusiastic support of the American public." Transit enthusiasts and urbanists -- I'm both -- love any narrative that says that suburbanites have been tricked into their living arrangements by nefarious outside interests, but in fact this is what Americans have more or less demanded.

toast0 4y ago

Hmmm no mention of the interurban street car from Los Gatos to San Jose, ran on San Carlos ave. Was marked on the turn of the century (1900) subdivision maps for my house in the Burbank neighborhood. https://www.santacruztrains.com/2021/07/streetcars-san-jose-and-los-gatos.html https://www.santacruztrains.com/2021/07/streetcars-san-jose-...

washbrain 4y ago

Many cities had "streetcar suburbs", developments on the fringes of town serviced by street cars that took people to work. Sadly, they were largely decommissioned and replaced with buses or nothing. We badly need to get more trains moving through American cities. I'd prefer grade separated, but honestly even if we had streetcars running in from all the suburbs that'd be pretty great. It's also worth mentioning the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con... There's pretty good incentive to see streetcars removed if you are a car company...

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
My town is famous for being a city that feels like a bunch of neighborhoods. Nearly all of those iconic neighborhoods are along the historic street car routes, that were dismantled in the 30s and 40s. I won't claim the street cars were perfect, but there is a lot of merit to the idea that they were replaced by an inferior solution due to the prevailing winds of the moment. What I find more interesting is the street car lines had such a dramatic impact that now 100 years later they're still defining the shape of the city.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  > My town is famous for being a city that feels like a bunch of neighborhoods. Ha, I think everywhere I've lived has described itself like this. Maybe it's less common in the US because you don't have cities swallowing up villages.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
    Yeah, US city planning is unfortunately pretty dismal. My town has a reputation for being better than most, but truth is we've grown so fast the last 2 decades our transit system is overwhelmed now too. Most US cities are dominated by suburban sprawl, and where there's pretty much nothing like a walkable neighborhood high street.
throw0101a 4y ago

gregoriol 4y ago

It may be controversial, but I think all transportation that requires fixed infrastructure is designed to fail. The future is to light and flexible, composable and fast.

goodpoint 4y ago
Europe, Japan and China and many other countries beg to differ and are running and/or building plenty of railways.
- gregoriol 4y ago
  Railways are practical to go fast from a transportation hub to another transportation hub, without much stops in the middle. Local railways are fading away because last miles transportation needs to be more flexible that what railways can offer.
  - woweoe 4y ago
    This assumes that the people are living far away from the railway, which is obviously the opposite situation in much of Europe and Asia.
    - newaccount2021 4y ago
  - danhor 4y ago
    France and Germany have been expanding local tram & Stadtbahn networks, even opening new ones since the ~1990s. Tram-Trains have also become popular in Germany, due to offering more stops in the middle. Not sure if you mean trams or branch lines by local railways, but at least Germany has also been keen on reactivating old branch lines, often to resounding success and exceeding expectations (and few failures, although there are many hurdles that reactivation projects much pass to avoid that fate). S-Bahn networks with many infill stops are also popular. Many S-Bahn stops also rely on walking for the last mile, which works well. There are also of-course people that come by bus or bike, but both seem like a smaller portion to me. There are efforts to try to get more bike&ride traffic to expand the station reach, but it's doesn't seem to me like it has increased a huge amount. There are also always efforts to expand park&ride, but the share of passengers using it is tiny [1]. The portion of people using E-Scooters and taking them into the train has noticeably increased, but not (yet) enough to be a significant portion (I'd guess 1-2% at most). In places where E-Scooter rentals are available, the trams, subways, busses, walking and personal bikes are usually cheaper (30ct/min) and guaranteed to be available. I'd guess few people use rentals for their daily routine, but more for fun and rare trips. A few german transport associations have tried implementing on-demand ridepooling, but I haven't heard of any large success stories yet. It's more of a complement for off-peak service due to the waiting times (if it takes 20 min for the vehicle to get to you, that's 20 minutes of waiting and you can't rely on a timetable), hassle (having to use an app and ordering it) and price. [1]: Park&Ride is very limited anyways. You can't retrofit a lot of parking to existing stations, because they're in the middle of (sometimes small) towns and would discourage denser development. If you want enough ridership to sustain an additional stop, there'd have to be a huge amount of parking (necessitating expensive parking garages) and enough demand to take the train for part of the trip and not a car for the whole trip. There usually isn't (with some exceptions, like greenfield HSR stations that the french like).

SLWW 4y ago

I miss seeing the Streetcars in San Fran.

WalterBright 4y ago

The funny thing is nobody thinks of taking pictures of ordinary street scenes at the time, so there aren't many. The ones that do get taken are treasures.

AlbertCory 4y ago
People were not walking with cameras like they are now. A camera was a big object and you had to buy film for it.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  I would walk around with a camera many times before iphones. I still didn't take pictures of ordinary street life, because it seemed completely uninteresting. My parents were also amateur photographers, and rarely took street pictures. I had a camera in college, but rarely took pictures of ordinary things. When I look at the pictures I took, it seems they are of all the wrong things.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    In a lot of cities and city neighborhoods it would be fascinating to have a "StreetView" of at least more interesting neighborhoods over time. But, as you say, even with relatively cheap B&W film, that would still have cost a fair bit of money and time and very few people systematically did such things. In a somewhat similar vein, I unearthed a book a long ago company did in the 80s called "A Year in Development" which had all these photos and random detail about what was going on during a year--with a mostly engineering slant. Especially at the time, that sort of quotidian detail was rarely documented at all.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Yeah. A photograph was expensive in terms of your time (and money). Especially if it meant you had to change the film. So many lost opportunities. When I was writing [1] I absolutely could not find any photos of the golf place, which is now gone. You'd think the family would have some (I'm sure they do), but they completely ghosted me. No one from the old 'hood has any. [1] https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/no-compliments-at-the-miniature-golf https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/no-compliments-at-the-mi...

WalterBright 4y ago

I'm wondering what the cowcatchers attached to the front are for. Did cows used to roam the streets of SF? Or are they to push the pedestrians out of the way? flip the bicycles over the top and away?

morsch 4y ago

Street level light rail is fantastic. My city replaced most of it with subways. Which, don't get me wrong, are preferable to almost everything else. But it does mean getting to and from the train requires an additional walk and stair/escalator/lift ride, in addition to whatever distance you already had to walk. This easily triples the time it takes to get to the train for many trips. Of course, there are advantages, as well, principally a better separation from traffic.

beowulfey 4y ago

Really great site! Would love to see something like this for other cities. LA is an obvious one, but recently I was thinking about how many lesser known street car networks were built and destroyed. For example, most medium to large towns in CT were once serviced by extensive interconnected streetcar networks, but few maps of those networks still exist.

Cupertino95014 4y ago

There's a line in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" where Bob Hoskins says (this was early 20th Century LA): "Who's going to ride on your freeway when the Red Car costs a nickel?"

radiojasper 4y ago

I'm a bit sad you can't navigate through the photos with arrow keys on the keyboard. There is also no way to interact with the 3 year buttons with keyboard (1941, 1956, 2020) because when using tab, the buttons are completely skipped. Lastly, when I click an external link (eg. the link to Chris Arvin's website [0] and then click Back in my browser, I'm back at the homepage and not on the map I had previously selected. This is because the selected map does not change the URL and therefore loads nothing in the browser's navigation history. All in all, this makes this website unusuable for people with certain disabilities, because it always requires a mouse to use the website. [0] http://chrisarv.in/ http://chrisarv.in/

62951413 4y ago

For those in the East Bay, https://www.eastbayhillsproject.org/ https://www.eastbayhillsproject.org/ is such a mesmerizing place to read about the old times. And see the pictures of the places you know which looked so different just a couple generations ago. Electric trains, forgotten tunnels under the Berkeley Hills, much simpler times.