Usually packed, by the way
Tourists like to idle through a city.
Commuters want to groove through it.
Perhaps that idealization of the perky tourist hub is the reason so many cities have become expensively enamored of streetcars, trolleys, or light rail (pick your expression, they’re all the same concept). They’re making a comeback, even though they’re almost never the right answer for a modern city, as explored in a lengthy article by Samuel L. Scheib in Reason (October, 2012):
It’s time to rethink America’s retrograde love affair with trolley technology
Once upon a happier time
Streetcars are historical – a century ago, they were the dominant mode of urban transport. And they’re charming. But that’s all they do for a city.
I don’t want realism, I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.
– Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire
I have always relied on the kindness of Federal subsidies
Tourists are few in number, and tend to congregate in a small portion of the city. Commuters are many in number, and pulse through the city twice a day. Naturally enough, the modes of transport the two groups prefer are so diametrically opposed that one mode can seldom effectively serve both of them.
There are currently 16 streetcar lines operating as public transit in the United States, but depending on how you count there are as many as 80 cities with streetcars in the planning or development phase. Far from the dominant form of urban transport they once were, streetcars have become prestige projects celebrated for their history, beauty, and alleged ability to promote development.
Where streetcars came from and why they disappeared forms a useful backdrop to proving why they shouldn’t be making a comeback now.
“The father of American traction”: Frank J. Sprague
person born in Tampa, Florida, in 1888—the year Frank J. Sprague produced the first successful electric streetcar—would live his youth knowing only Sprague’s invention as a regular means of mechanized transport. He would marry in a church within earshot of the streetcar clang and take his own young children on trolley trips downtown.
Just as highway coaches a century and a half earlier were the world’s first intercity public transport, streetcars were the world’s first urban public transport, emerging at the same time America was building its first subways (Boston and New York), and for the same reason: it was more efficient than the horse, cleaner, and cheaper.
A halfway technology
The horse gave way to the horseless carriage, and that technology leapfrogged over the streetcar’s.
By the man’s 40th birthday in 1928 he would almost certainly have stopped riding the streetcar, perhaps even cursing it from behind the wheel of his automobile for holding up traffic. By the time he retired most of those old machines would have been sold for scrap. Yet if he lived to be 100, near the end of his life the man would have heard the first stirrings of regret from a nostalgic nation longing for those pokey old trolleys to return.
When you’re on vacation and traveling off-peak hours, streetcars are fun to ride – the combination of airy access (you only ride them on sunny days) and charming retro style make them a natural for idlers who want to be trundled about a city to sightsee. When you’re in a hurry, a streetcar is a humid, crowded, stutter-traveling vehicle that takes two or three times as long to get you where you want to go, and delivers an unpleasant experience for its length.
Not so much fun
Streetcar systems flourished in the window which opened with America’s dramatic urbanization after the Civil War and closed with the proliferation of the automobile.
The streetcar—typically a vehicle on rails, powered by overhead wires, and comprised of a single car, although that car may be elongated with accordion-like hinges—arrived as perhaps the second greatest revolution in transport.
Before the car’s electric motor, the preferred engine of urban vehicles was the horse, which needed food, water, and rest, and whose tailpipe emissions stood in piles between the tracks. Horses were expensive and brought bad publicity when they died en route.
The first streetcars were horse-drawn, and I am highly confident that they were laid on rails not for route determinism but to reduce the coefficients of static friction. Rails, in short, were the compromise for low-horsepower engines.
Once they got moving, you wanted them to coast a long distance
As I wrote a while back:
I’ve previously documented the extraordinary quantities of horse manure that had to be shoveled out of cities – 600,000 tons of manure in Chicago annually, which led to the 1898 international urban-planning conference:
It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.
Manhattan, 1900: imagine the carbon emissions!
As historian Sam Bass Warner showed in his terrific book about Boston, Streetcar Suburbs, this mode of transport changes the nature of cities.
A seminal work, well worth a careful reading
Once Sprague broke with the horse, urban transport could carry people quickly, cleanly, and inexpensively from the crowded and polluted city center to the virgin lands of the nearby countryside. You would have to go all the way back to the invention of the wheel, when stone and timber could first be moved relatively long distances, to find a transport technology that made a more significant impact on the lives of regular folk.
Mr. Scheib is right; streetcars revolutionized the urban commute, and hence they, as much as anything, ‘invented’ the suburb, and they had a half-century’s heyday (1875 to 1925).
Changing technology: horses are gone, streetcars have dominance, personal cars are appearing
Washington, DC, outside Treasury, roughly 1905
By 1910 American cities had emptied into the surrounding countryside. Urban areas were segmented into warehouse and factory districts around rail yards, with a fashionable central business district for shopping and professional work, and suburbs that were homogeneous enclaves of class and ethnicity, all of them interconnected by networks of streetcar routes.
For a nickel people could commute into the city for work, shopping, or entertainment on vehicles that traveled as fast as 30 miles per hour but averaged about twelve.
As Mr. Scheib paraphrased without attribution, Gregory Thompson in Trip Planner observed that:
Such relationships stimulated a huge demand for suburban living, and to meet it, traction lines expanded outward in all directions. The center cities from which the middle and working classes fled changed as well, as department stores, specialized shops, corporate offices, financial firms, hotels, theaters, concert halls, and other less reputable types of entertainment rushed in to fill the voids left by the departing middle and working classes.
Every day the middle and working class populations surged into the center on electric cars and surged outward in the evenings. Wives and children filled the cars during the middle of the days, and in the evenings and Sundays families used the cars for recreation. For the middle and working classes, the streetcar revolutionized the American city and the way in which they experienced it.
For their times, streetcar systems were a fantastic urban-transport system: egalitarian, omnipresent, efficient, inexpensive, and ecologically sound. Of course, like other monopolies sustained by network effects, they apparently became complacent (again, Scheib indirectly quotes Thompson):
The so-called “traction trusts” that owned the systems were widely considered corrupt and greedy.
The apotheosis of that thinking was expressed with great relish by Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, whose newspaper published exposes with titles like TRACTION TRUST SMASHED BY INQUIRER:
Owner of 82,634 shares of public transit
As Charles Foster Kane who owns eighty-two thousand, six hundred and thirty-four shares of public transit – you see, I do have a general idea of my holdings – I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel. His paper should be run out of town. A committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of one thousand dollars.
On the other hand, I am the published of the Inquirer, and as such it’s my duty, and I’ll let you in on a little secret, it’s also my pleasure, to see to it that decent, hard-working people in this community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates just because they haven’t anybody to look after their interests.
What crusading newspapers did not do, technology did: it broke up the traction trusts.
A northeastern trolley (note double-decker): an urban monopoly
My, but you have an impressive, judicial air.
– Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire
Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable
While I haven’t delved into it, I suspect that the urban trolley trusts were much like the railroads – big capital-intensive cartels gobbled up by moneyed interests. Infrastructure, as we’ve seen before, naturally tends toward monopoly because of network-scaling efficiencies, and as a result infrastructure tends to migrate from purely private ownership to a regulated public utility.
New York’s IRT in 1906: purely private, purely profit-oriented
Riders were eager for new ways to get around. The costs of labor and materials more than doubled during World War I, while fares, written into city-granted charters in the 1890s, were locked at a nickel. Tracks and rolling stock entering the fourth decade of use in many cities needed upgrades and repairs at a time when the traction trusts were broke yet remained on the hook for their own track, rolling stock, and operating expenses. Meanwhile, the faster and more individualized automobile was beginning to take off, helped by federal and state governments that funded road building.
In 1936 GM, Firestone, Standard Oil, Philips Petroleum, and other companies pooled their resources to form National City Lines, which purchased more than 100 streetcar systems and replaced them with bus routes.
I hadn’t realized that streetcars were on their way out that early, though I knew, from Bob Bruegmann’s great book Sprawl, that buses superseded streetcars through natural economic selection:
The streetcar has yielded to the less expensive and more flexible bus in virtually every city in the developed world, and most affluent cities, European and American, abandoned their streetcar systems with or without any intervention by General Motors.
Yield to buses, Eddie, with or without general Motors
Despite later claims of conspiracy, the trolley lines were a bargain because they were failing, and buying them was simply good business for bus companies.
Striking here is that the trolley route network was valuable whereas the fixed-rail trolley was not. The network enabled scalable rapid transit, and the means of propulsion didn’t need to be fixed-in-place overhead wires, it could be the good old internal combustion engine.
By the mid-1920s developers were no longer concerned about getting rail extended to their subdivisions, and after World War II transit use fell off a cliff.
Is this a comedy, Mr. Tennessee?
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]