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.
The Bay Area's lost streetcars
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Re: The Bay Area's lost streetcars
#22I'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?
Re: The Bay Area's lost streetcars
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]…
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 To someone from a place with modern, well-maintained light rail, I imagine Bay Area streetcars seem as quaint and outdated as old Ford cars in Cuba look to Americans.
> To someone from a place with modern, well-maintained light rail, I imagine Bay Area streetcars seem as quaint and outdated as old Ford cars in Cuba look to Americans.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).
Re: The Bay Area's lost streetcars
#24It 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.
Europe, Japan and China and many other countries beg to differ and are running and/or building plenty of railways.
Re: The Bay Area's lost streetcars
#25What 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 e…
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…
> […] why didnt the roads collapse into a state of disrepair which no one was willing to pay for?
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
Re: The Bay Area's lost streetcars
#26Many 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 Ge…
Re: The Bay Area's lost streetcars
#27It 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.
No one is going to build high density development that is not near reliable, dependable, fast, frequent, comfortable, and appropriately scalable transportation infrastructure. Buses and Ubers are not scalable to the target density.
Re: The Bay Area's lost streetcars
#28Street 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.
Re: The Bay Area's lost streetcars
#29What 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 e…
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…
The part of the story that’s missing is that at the time these streetcar lines were built, the mass adoption of automobiles was about to start. Within a decade or two cars were everywhere, and the streetcars were no longer needed.
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].
Re: The Bay Area's lost streetcars
#30It 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.
Europe, Japan and China and many other countries beg to differ and are running and/or building plenty of railways.
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.