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.