41–50 of 91 posts
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.
"Who's going to ride on your freeway when the Red Car costs a nickel?"
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.
People were not walking with cameras like they are now. A camera was a big object and you had to buy film for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To make this happen, first, East Bay needs to make streets safer. It is ridiculous how crime ridden Oakland and Berkeley are to the point where it is probably wise to avoid public transportation all together. We need a national guard deployed here 24/7, that's how I feel walking around in downtown Oakland. With NYCSPA vs Bruen ruling, I am planning to obtain a handgun and a CCW license from Alameda sheriff with a sha…
Is it really that bad? Seems to be mostly just homeless people and drug users.
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.
What 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…
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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really that bad? Seems to be mostly just homeless people and drug users.
Compared to what? 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This assumes that the people are living far away from the railway, which is obviously the opposite situation in much of Europe and Asia.
Many 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…
This always comes up, but is not accurate. Streetcars were never greatly loved. They were boiling hot in the summer, freezing in winter, the ride was jarring, and they were crowded with all manner of people. During the war maintenance was deferred to the point that at the end of the war most such lines needed to be rebuilt in order to stay in operation. Ripping them out to build roads for cars was not a conspiracy bu…
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.
What 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…
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.
What 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…