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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

[0] Interurbans were rad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interurban

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.

This sort of thing is the problem:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220214165552/https://www.seatt...

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.

https://www.planetizen.com/definition/car-centric-planning

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.

You are quite mistaken.

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.

SF's cable car system and historic F trains both work fine as public transit.

And people hate buses.

>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.

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.

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)

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.

"Both only exist as tourist experiences."

That's simply false.

My point is that even shitty little streetcar systems like the ones in SF get used and are much preferable to cars and buses.

The cable cars do not function as public transit. The long lines of tourists at the stations are notorious. Visible on Google Street View:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8069998,-122.4212914,3a,75y,...

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

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