The Bay Area's lost streetcars
sfstreetcars.co
sfstreetcars.co
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.
> 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)
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To someone from a place with modern, well-maintained light rail, I imagine Bay Area streetcars seem as quaint and outdated as old Ford cars in Cuba look to Americans.
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).
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.
EDIT- Article about it
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/san-francisco-muni-str...
This is currently playing out in older subdivisions all across America.
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.
Suburbs are slowing falling into a state of disrepair, or at least more and more budget being taken away form other things:
* https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
Have you ever been to Michigan? We have the 48th or 49th worst roads in America. They weren't like that when I was growing up or first got a drivers license in the sixties. Our auto insurance rates are higher and we have higher repairs than average.
We have the fifth or sixth highest gas taxes in the nation. Our Governor ran on a campaign slogan that she would "fix the damn roads". Her secret plan was to raise the gas taxes by forty cents which was rejected by the legislature. It's election year so a little bit of the COVID money is going to a small increase in road repair. How are Ohio and Indiana with lower state taxes able to keep their roads so good?
Who says they aren't?
> As small towns across the country confront rapidly deteriorating roads and shrinking maintenance budgets, more and more of them are opting for gravel roads over pavement.
* https://blog.midwestind.com/counties-municipalities-gravel-r...
Or it could be road maintenance is being paid for by money taken from other programs.
Edit: Wikipedia says that the first line of the Los Angeles Railway opened in 1897 [1]. The Ford Model T was introduced in 1908 [2].
I just loaded up my Toyota 4Runner and dumped a bunch of junk at the town dump. I didn’t plan this in advance, I didn’t have to rent a truck (how do I get there anyway?) I just did it on a whim. To compete with the convenience of point to point private transit, public transit would have to be vastly cheaper and it isn’t.
I junked a sectional for $50, I think?
The city dump, even if you bring your own car, will charge a minimum of $33. They don’t offer curbside pickup themselves.
The movers/haulers charge $50 for a sectional, and there isn’t a separate line item for the dump fee. I consider this to generally be a decent price, since then I don’t have to pay for a car.
How it works here is that you get charged for labor time and space taken up in a truck, and just plain junking requires very little of the former compared to moving where packing, unpacking, and possibly dismantling and reassembly come into play.
The company I used has a rate for using an eighth of a truck, which is what I was charged for a couch.
Places like Tokyo prove there was an alternative path, and places like New York prove that it's not inherently impossible in America. So that brings us back where we started. Why did people vote / spend one way and not the other?
Your comparison is invalid: building minimal road infrastructure is vastly cheaper than building rail. You need economies of scale to justify the expense of rail construction. It makes no sense to build rail past my wife’s grandma’s house in rural Oregon. At the same time, even when my wife was growing up in the city (Eugene, where the University of Oregon is), they were going to grandma’s house or somewhere similarly low density regularly enough where they needed a car anyway. And once they had incurred the expense of a car, it makes sense to vote for more car infrastructure in the city rather than the capital expense of rail infrastructure.
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.
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_...
Still, I agree with your point about the rhetorical focus. Simply reciting the statistics isn't going to alleviate anxieties.
Here is the case study the BBC was discussing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sarah_Everard
The proposed solutions under discussion are included in the "Women’s safety" section in the above link.
There is violent crime in Berkeley that is above average for the USA as a whole. However, it has a significantly lower violent crime rate than, say, Dallas. (520 vs 814 per 100k)
The comment above you is confusing how they feel about violence with the actual facts about violence.
Pepper spray doesn't always work, nor is it always the appropriate tool for the job.
And if you are carrying a firearm, carrying an IFAK is highly recommended.
For anyone and everyone, taking a "stop the bleed" class is highly recommended.
It really isn't. In the class for a concealed and carry permit, they told us not to carry anything other than a gun. The rationale being that if you have something less lethal than a gun on you and you shoot someone, you'll get raked over the coals about why you didn't use the less lethal option. This doesn't happen if you aren't carrying anything else, it was your only option.
This might be different for those with police/military training, but even then thinking clearly with a full adrenaline dump in your system is hit or miss at best.
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.
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-...
A book that covers this in more depth is: https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/24015/HENRY_E_HUNTI...
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.
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_con...
There's pretty good incentive to see streetcars removed if you are a car company...
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.
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.
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.
Cars were popular post war, so were suburbs. But surely GM had no incentive to make them so.
I'm not saying they personally went out and sabotaged the streetcars, but they absolutely put their thumb on every scale they could.
It also didn't really help that the US made a "standard" streetcar that was such a lemon that they were starting to get scrapped only 11 years after entering service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Standard_Light_Rail_Vehicle
Most of our modern improvements to modern light rail vehicles came from manufacturing designs either straight from or derivatives of successful European ones. But that wasn't an option in the less globalized mid-century.
Oh it wasn’t less global, the Republican administration forced government entities to buy (or in this case build) American instead of European in an attempt to fight inflation.
Yes, it was; trade globalization progressively advanced under the GATT regime shortly after Ww2 through the formation of (and further after and by expansion of both the membership and scope of rules of) the WTO to replace the GATT in 1997.
> the Republican administration forced government entities to buy (or in this case build) American instead of European in an attempt to fight inflation.
The Buy America Act was not a unilateral partisan or executive actions, but was a bipartisan law passed by a Democratic-majority House and Republican-majority Senate under a lame-duck Republican Administration, and it was more motivated by stimulating the domestic economy during the Depression (it was signed on the last day of the Hoover Administration) than fighting inflation, which had been negative and getting more negative for the three years preceding the passage of the bill.
Effectiveness of heating and cooling is considerably diminished when a vehicle opens all its doors every few minutes.
The transport authority of the city I grew up in tried to solve this problem by setting the temperature to a cool 18°C - you could catch a cold from taking a longer trip via tram in the middle of summer.
As for ride comfort: there isn't much you can do against people drinking alcohol, having their phone on speaker or just urinating in the middle.
Yes there is. You eject them from the vehicle.
What? Nothing about public transit is different from libraries, restaurants, cabs, or any other public space. You wouldn't say, "well, you can't go book shopping because you know book stores - people just urinating in the middle!"
The places you mentioned aren't necessary for anyone on a daily basis. Transport, on the other hand, is.
Of course, there are advantages, as well, principally a better separation from traffic.
https://www.santacruztrains.com/2021/07/streetcars-san-jose-...
"Who's going to ride on your freeway when the Red Car costs a nickel?"
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.
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.
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-mi...
The future is to light and flexible, composable and fast.
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).
To me that doesn't look dystopian, it looks practical :shrug:
There's definately shades of gray, but any time you get high density or high throughput you're going to want infrastructure that leans more towards the "fixed" end of things. But with battery vehicles (from skateboards up) and automonous driving coming in, it'll make less sense in the middle areas.