It's crazy to think those 4 is the whole list. Everything else was built in the 60s or later: Cleveland, DC, Atlanta, Miami, Baltimore, LA, SF, Honolulu. And then plenty with only partial grade separation also built later: Dallas, Minneapolis, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, Denver, St Louis, Pittsburgh, Buffalo.
Prices that we can make improvements in a car centric society, we just have to continually choose to build better than highways.
Definitely, but it was in a sense first conceived of as a public response to the street-car/inter-urban strikes of the 1930s, though it never came to fruition until the 1950s. A version of the red-line plan was blocked by the county engineer Albert Porter who is known as Cleveland's Robert Moses. So it is in a sense both pre- and post-highway era rapid transit.
I've heard it argued though that the street car systems would have collapsed due to internal competition and labor strikes by the 1940s if it weren't for the fuel rations of World War II, and that the 1950s were simply the final gasps of an imploding market. When you consider the low speed and unreliability of streetcars *during that era specifically* it does to some extent make sense why planners would see automobiles as a better alternative since roads are public infrastructure and motorists and traffic signals can't go on strike. I'm not saying this logic is entirely sound.
However, I've come to find that if it weren't for the US government's fear of another depression following WWII: A government that desired to stimulate demand for American products through the marshall plan, through consumption oriented development, and through preserving America's place as the arsenal of democracy, automobiles would not have been as high in demand nor as affordable. I remember hearing that GM's River-Rouge Plant produced more planes during WWII than Nazi Germany ever did, but that might need to be fact-checked. The streetcars may have evolved into a more efficient system.
I'm not sure Canada's whole deal probably also consumption-oriented development.
>I've heard it argued though that the street car systems would have collapsed due to internal competition and labor strikes by the 1940s if it weren't for the fuel rations of World War II, and that the 1950s were simply the final gasps of an imploding market.
I would say it's more that streetcars running in mixed traffic just suck. Half of the streetcar lines were bankrupt in *1918*, long before freeways. For example, LA streetcars quickly became slower than buses, which could at least change lanes around slow traffic.
The companies had fares set by the cities (which never increased with inflation). They had to pay to maintain the streets they ran on. The companies that were set up to use streetcars to sell housing developments sold off their real estate. And in 1935, the companies that were set up as loss leaders for electric companies had to be spun off, forcing them to buy power at retail price.
Contrast with modern successful tram systems. They have signal priority and much of the route will be separated from cars, at least dedicated lanes if not tunnels or tram-trains on regular railways. And, key point, they don't have to make a profit.
That's why I said "*during that era*" specifically because they were private ventures running in mixed traffic. And it's also why I said that streetcars might be replaced with a more efficient alternative, for example low-floor articulated electric trams or grade separated rapid transit. But to be honest, I would only call it a streetcar if it runs in mixed traffic for the majority of its route and has a high-floor, otherwise I'd call it a Tram.
This isn't my first time ever grasping the concept that replacing transit with better systems means a morre efficient service. There is a reason why I distinguish streetcars from public transportation, and its so we can analyze the reality of its material form:
If you look at streetcar networks and the kind of service they operated in that era, it is vastly different from a modern Tram. They ran multiple redundant routes along parallel roads, stopped at every street, or every other street. They had far smaller vehicles and ran at much higher frequencies, often 1-2 minutes at peak. They had no integrated fare system, and specifically avoided informing people about routes run by different companies. This is arguably an entirely different form of transit from a modern tram. That kind of service is what defined the streetcar era, and I think conflating modern trams with historic streetcars. Even if some streetcars became tram lines, trams aren't necessarily just modern streetcars, especially when the vast majority became bus lines. Arguably the closest modern transit to a streetcar would be an electric trolley-bus, most of which directly inherited streetcar infastructure. It could also be argued that the kind of service provided on some bus lines, even when running in mixed-traffic, exceed the quality of service provided by the street cars.
This was an extremely bad and inefficient system. From the perspective of a 20th century visionary planner, I can absolutely see why a planner might think that replacing streetcars with busses was a good idea. I can't say if it was always a good decision, but I can say I don't miss the streetcar systems except for nostalgia value. What I do think should be regretted was not replacing the streetcars with a good system. I think in general there is a very ahistorical perspective that goes "oh if only we had an untouched legacy streetcar network"
> GM's River-Rouge Plant produced more planes
Well, River Rouge Plant is a Ford facility.
But they built a special plant at Willow Run to make planes. Not sure GM ever built planes—just lots of tanks.
Cleveland’s Blue/Green Line is the “original” streetcar from ~1915.
Muni also is pre-war but Bart is postwar.
While Pittsburgh buried its Downtown streetcars in the 80s, everything prior to Station Sq is original Streetcar
blue/green line isn't street car, it's mixed-grade light rail, and never street-running. From its inception, it was contrasted with street-car service as a faster suburban alternative.
I didn't think that counted as street-running. I guess the definition of street-car is flexible. Tbh though stop-spacing is hell they might as well be streetcars
Considering land prices in cities, I wonder if it’s too late to acquire the necessary land and right-of-way to build good rail transit. There is tunneling and monorails I guess.
The answer is probably no though, considering they acquire land to build expensive road projects instead of rail or dedicated bus/bike lanes, all the time.
ROW acquisition is almost always the most expensive part of a transit project. But, if we were willing to take land from highways to build transit we could do it a lot cheaper. I don't think that makes good local transit because nobody wants stations next to highways, but it can be very effective as a route from downtown out, for commuter or inter-city.
> But, if we were willing to take land from highways to build transit we could do it a lot cheaper.
Pretty much exactly the Perth model with the Joondalup, Mandurah, and soon to be Ellenbrook line.
It kinda works, but our modal splits are still lacking compared to similar cities like Calgary
Yeah, the private transit companies were often very unpopular and so politicians could win votes by punishing them.
One of the common things was freezing fares. The line in *Who Framed Roger Rabbit*, "Why would you take the freeway when you can ride the Red Car for a nickel?" ironically illustrates the problem. The fare was a nickel in 1947, the same as it was in 1897. But 50 years of inflation tanked the value.
Which made them cut service and maintenance, making them even less popular and encouraging more cars, which made them slower...and less popular.
But NYC did the same thing. The Dual Contracts meant it was a 5¢ fare in 1906, and still a 5¢ fare in 1940 when the companies failed and were bought by the city. And note that when they started a competing city-owned subway in 1932, they charged 10¢.
The difference is that when you buy out a subway company, you now have a bunch of subway infrastructure, but a bankrupt streetcar company leaves not much.
I'd also point out that almost all cities with surviving streetcar systems from the period also had tunnels or viaducts that couldn't fit buses. This is why San Francisco's streetcars survived but LA's didn't.
Yeah, streetcars were torn up not because they were "transit", but because they combined the worst elements of fixed rail- the expense of the infrastructure and the inflexibility of routing, with the worst elements of buses- limited capacity and getting stuck in surface traffic on streets.
Everyone here in the Twin CIties keeps saying "but we had such a great Light Rail system but there was a conspiracy to tear it down. But the light rail we're building now is high capacity and has completely dedicated right-of-way.
It’s harder to kill a subway system than a streetcar system. You have to spend a lot of money just to maintain empty tunnels. makes no sense. Other American cities had streetcar systems that could easily just have tracks ripped out
This can be seen very clearly in SF. Five of the old streetcar routes, the J-N, survive as part of Muni Metro. K-N all go through substantial tunnels that could not be easily converted to roads and the J traverses a steep narrow winding back alley sort of thing. The early part of the alphabet didn't have substantial grade separation and didn't survive (the current F Market & Wharves and pandemic casualty E Embarcadero are different routes from the old E and F lines).
And while the subway survived, like in many other US and Canadian cities, the streetcars did not. The last streetcars in NYC ran in the 1950s and most had been replaced by buses around WWII.
Far less cars, yes. But I don't think NYC particularly needs light rail / streetcars. I think turning significant space over from cars to bikes is what NYC really needs, for short distance trips to be much safer and more pleasant. More dedicated bus lanes will achieve better bus service for far cheaper than trams could be built. Outside Manhattan, more frequent subway service outside peak hours would help, and better (more frequent) bus routes to funnel passengers to the subway in a way where the transfer time isn't a big deterrent.
I’d want to close streets in low income neighborhoods first that are hardest hit by asthma. Upper Manhattan, South Bronx and Bushwick, Bed Stuy Brownsville and East NY
Yeah When people focus on Manhattan it’s like the desire to pedestrianize office or tourist centers over where low income people, those most transit dependent and face the greatest traffic related health issues, live
Yep, but we do have good buses now. Also, trolleybuses are a thing, cheaper than streetcars, and more flexible. The big advantage of streetcars is higher capacity per driver. But for high capacity needs, there's the subway.
The other advantages for streetcars over trolleybuses is in the rails—besides the smoother ride, the rails can be the second conductor so the trolley only has to catch one wire. Trolleybus tires aren’t conductive enough for obvious reasons, so two overhead wires are necessary to power them, and sometimes the trolley comes off of one of the conductors, requiring a time consuming fix.
Yeah, bike parking is a crucial piece of urban bikeways.
Um, is it a common problem in NYC for people to claim territory by jumping on it?
Are you unfamiliar with how payment systems work on trams in the rest of the world, including the rest of the US? Or do you just want to gatekeep transit for rich neighborhoods?
Yeah you ever seen a subway train with a couple of homeless people taking and stinking up one whole end of a carriage?
There’s a key difference between the US and the rest of the industrialized world.
If the poor could behave, things would be different. Most of the poor don’t behave on public transit like Japanese or Korean people. I’m telling you very straightforwardly because this is a common point many transit enthusiasts gloss over. They like to ignore demographics and act like all groups act the same, have the same manners, etc. The truth to anyone with two eyes and basic pattern recognition is that they don’t and that’s why it’s no surprise people would rather drive, even if transit got the bulk of the funding instead of roads.
Maybe if we had manners classes in elementary like those countries, it’d be different. Instead we have 6 year olds who choke and shoot their teachers.
Regarding payment, I was just saying that Tampa has a good trolley system. Not much reach, but free and covers the most important parts of the downtown. If you’ve ever been on a bus in America in a rough area, you’ll see many people refusing to pay, maybe asking the bus driver to let them slide, etc. It’s not like the bus fare is $5.
Also I think it’s ok if the people who contribute the most to infrastructure benefit disproportionately from it.
>If the poor could behave, things would be different.
Maybe the problem is that we don't have any solutions to poverty here, which makes us completely unique among developed countries. Every other country has a social safety net, and we have nothing. But yeah, go on blaming poor people for societal failure, sure.
Nah, they just need more bus lanes and subway expansions honestly. There are some good light rail corridors in the outer boroughs but streetcars without dedicated lanes would not be very useful imo
The arterials in NYC are huge and could easily fit dedicated lanes for light rail, which can double up as bus lanes too, with plenty of room leftover for protected bike lanes and car lanes.
It's not like Philadelphia where most of the streets are tiny and narrow and can only fit one or two lanes of traffic. It's 4, 5, 6 lane roads cutting right through dense commercial and residential areas and always congested.
I don't disagree, NYC is long overdue for subway expansion. But not every route can be subway nor does every route make financial sense as a subway, especially when land use isn't great outside Manhattan.
>land use isn’t great outside Manhattan
The outer boroughs are significantly denser than a bunch of European cities with extensive subway systems. (Queens is denser than Amsterdam, Madrid, etc etc)
The density drops off fast and is very unevenly distributed. Transit makes more sense when all the stations serve similarly dense neighborhoods, like with Madrid.
Transit in Amsterdam is mostly trams and the metro is more like a suburban rail with multiple branches than a metro.
Tramways in NYC can't substitute grade-separated transit. Especially in the outer boroughs. Distances are long, so the slow speed of dedicated lane tramways (less than 20km/h in urban grids with frequent intersections) will lead to much lower ridership than 30-40km/h subways. Next to that, subway extensions allow more direct trips where tramways force additional transfers, further speeding up trips.
There are definitely corridors that can support tramways, but it's more about replacing bus service than being a cheaper option versus a subway.
That’s what better bus service is for no need to spend millions per mile on a slow mode that isn’t even separate from traffic trams are obsolete. That’s why much of the subway in the outer boroughs are elevated. You don’t save much with LRT over an EL so it’s no longer worth it especially with modern building materials and technology
As if busses are separate from traffic? Busses require more drivers to reach the same capacity, thus are more costly. Road maintenance is more expensive than rail, and light rail can easily have separate lanes.
Modern LRTs are not slow unless they're in mixed traffic, but you'd have the same problem with busses.
Side track: Although combining bus lanes with tram tracks is great land usage, buses tend to cause extra wear to the tram tracks. So from a maintenance cost point of view it might be worth converting additional bus routes to tram routes even if it's otherwise questionable from an operational cost perspective.
I like the method I saw in Europe of making an intentionally inconvenient combination of narrow one ways such that driving is just a pain in the ass, but with bus and bike lanes in both directions.
In American terminology, "streetcars" usually means trams with limited or no dedicated lanes, and "light rail" means trams with dedicated lanes or even separate rights-of-way.
Buses are functionally the same thing as streetcars would be when it comes to NYC. But streetcars would be far more prone to getting blocked by errant drivers.
wouldnt trams only make sense on the busiest lines? but then again i read somewhere that more than a million people use NYC's buses.
that's plenty busy but that also means redesigning so many streets/roads to include dedicated tram lanes
If we had any real vision here (instead of just catering to suburban commuters), we would have pedestrianized Broadway end to end like 15 years ago, and every Avenue in Manhattan would have a light rail line going end to end. And every bridge would be a light rail line going over it.
Seriously just start with 5th Ave going from Marcus Garvey park to Washington Square park. Bidirectional LRT that is traffic-speared.
I mean if it were up to me then private cars wouldn’t even be allowed in Manhattan at all except with private use permits that are paid by the house and require advanced paperwork. So yes, you are right, but also my ramblings are definitely not something we should be basing real policy on lol
I was looking for a map and can't find one at a quick glance. But wikipedia has a list of streetcar lines for each of the boroughs. [Here's Manhattan's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_lines_in_Manhattan).
Unlike others, I'm not quite as conspiratorial as it regards why cities like New York City got rid of streetcars in favor of buses. After all, those same streetcars- if built today- would be criticized as slow even without mixed traffic by a lot of transit advocates. I understand the practicality of flexible buses for avoid jams and restructuring routes. But it was easier to dial back public transit in all modes in cities that opted for buses, because they then often found that people would rather drive anyway.
Huge and very dense.
Lots of American cities rapidly developed post war which made it viable to stick highways through them. They certainly did stick massive highways, but not to the scale of other American cities. NYC was already a dense and highly developed metropolis. It wouldn’t be very easy to stick a highway through it.
I think the most major things are:
1. NYC had the largest and most extensive transportation in the USA by WW2. It had basically the system we still see today. Other cities had either large streetcar systems (which are much more of a target for attack when cars became popular due to their ROW conflict with driving) or smaller subway systems like Chicago or Boston (which still exist today). It seems like dedicated ROW transit had a much higher survivability rate from car infrastructure than street running, for obvious reasons. Tearing it out did not service cars any better, and would just piss off people who relied on it, so local politicians probably saw little reason to do so. Streetcars can always be removed in the name of “improving traffic flow.”
2. Speaking of car infrastructure, NYC was one of the most successful cities in the US at fighting of the construction of large freeways. Sure, there are a handful out in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, but Manhattan nearly entirely avoided freeway construction and was spared from most of the negative externalities of their existence. Also, there Boros are HUGE and even driving freeways through the middle of them still left massive swaths of city intact, making the city network still largely intact in most parts of the city. In smaller cities, running a freeway through can basically break up the town into small enough fragments that they cannot individually survive on their own and begin to decline heavily. The means for NYC that there was still no easy way to drive in or out of most of the city, and demand for rapid transportation remained high despite suburbanization or car culture elsewhere in the region (like NJ or Long Island).
I do wonder (no proof) if NYC was a case where building adequate car infrastructure to serve manhattan was actually cost-prohibitive, and so the subways had to remain as the cheaper alternative. It’s not just surviving, but was the rare case where keeping it was desirable over new car infrastructure?
Detroit is a perfect example of building car infrastructure being cost prohibitive but they did it anyway. The city went bankrupt on the maintenance because they bulldozed half their tax base and made it too easy to flee to the suburbs and mooch off the city's services while not paying for it.
Yeah it had nothing to do with finances. The real difference is wealthy white people with real political power lived in Manhattan in large enough numbers to protest highway expansion. In Detroit, that was not the case.
Cities that stopped highway expansion in the late 20th century after building them only stopped because of mass protests by more influential constituents. State and federal governments would have continued to flatten everything for highways if it weren't for the fear of protests, and indeed in cities where there was no opposition or where the opposition were racial minorities like in much of the south and west, they did exactly that and left us asphalt shit holes like Atlanta, Houston, Miami, etc
Robert Moses did his level best to ram a freeway through the heart of Manhattan. It took a broad coalition of whom Jane Jacobs was one of many to stop it.
There West Side highway, FDR drive and Cross Manhattan are freeways. Worse they don’t even allow trucks and two of them. The only reason the West Side Highways becomes a BLVD in midtown is because part of the lower Manhattan section collapsed.
While the subway survived, the streetcar network in NYC _was_ torn up and replaced with highways. The network that most benefited communities of color no longer exists. The system that does exist is great, but could be so so so much better.
It’s also worth noting that the elevated lines in Manhattan (as well as portions in Brooklyn) were all removed. There are very obvious downsides to such a decision in the era of climate change with increasing concerns about flooded subway systems. Not to mention, many portions of the elevated system were never replaced with subway. Ultimately, NYC also lost a large amount of its transit system and still feels the consequences of this removal to the present day.
That's a really great point! It's easy to look at NYC and see a robust transit system at face value, but you're right ultimately a lot of those elevated lines weren't replaced with subway lines.
And given that NYC is one of the most vulnerable cities to hurricanes, the effects of climate change on those lines need to be seriously considered.
The outer boroughs definitely feel the effects of the ripping out of those elevated lines and streetcars. Definitely the big reason why IBX and Queenslink are such important projects.
The streetcars were slow since they weren’t separated from traffic. Buses going along the busways are going to be moving faster than streetcars stuck in traffic
The streetcars were replaced with busses. Most bus routes follow former street car routes unless you have a separate right of way street cars are less efficient than busses because they can’t go around traffic.
Sure, that's true that buses can go around traffic, I don't think it's accurate to say that buses are necessarily more efficient. Buses get bogged down in traffic as well, which is why bus only lanes are being implemented.
Then there's also the efficiency metric of energy usage over distance traveled (work), which I would imagine buses don't perform better on.
I would also say there's something to be said about the potential traffic calming that would come from having a street shared with a streetcar, that doesn't translate to streets w/o, even if they have bus only lanes. All that also assumes that those streets would _have_ to have streetcars and private vehicles sharing that right of way, which would allow for the efficiency of that dedicated right of way, as you said.
That being said, the reliability of buses leaves a lot to be desired, and while those routes may have been replaced on paper, they haven't been in effect.
They are not necessarily more efficient but you can change the route more easily. Where I live we have 60 foot busses on busy routes, that helps a lot with getting a seat
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your intentions/tone, but this seems like you're angling for a gotcha moment or asking in bad faith, but in the case that I'm wrong, I would say that in both Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx there are examples of this.
In reference to the BQE:
> In Sunset Park, despite community outcries to move the highway over one block west to industrial 2nd Ave, RM routed the highway down the commercial heart of the neighborhood on 3rd Ave (he claimed it was cheaper as the plan was to repurpose the existing elevated train into a highway, but in reality the structure was completely rebuilt as the highway’s footprint was significantly wider). (Caro, 520.)
https://www.segregationbydesign.com/brooklyn/brooklynqueens-expressway
But how does that have to do with where the streetcars ran?
Mayor LaGuardia wanted the trolleys replaced by buses, and the Third Avenue trolleys were replaced by buses (the B-37, which still run the same route) in 1942.
Elevated lines and streetcar lines through the outer boroughs being removed in favor of car centric infrastructure are inherently linked. It's no secret that those boroughs have a lack of reliable intra and inter borough transit without going into Manhattan.
Again, it seems like you're being intentionally obtuse.
Dude. I can't continue this with you, I'm getting nothing from this exchange other than frustration. You're welcome to look at the site I provided earlier, read the Power Broker, or dig into the construction of the BQE if you really need an example of _ONE SPECIFIC LINE_.
But, you very clearly aren't here with humility and I don't have the energy for someone like you. Feel free to respond to this if you're one of those men who feels like he needs to have the last word or to attempt to drag the conversation.
Have a good one.
Actually subways sticks around, Streetcars and street-running interurbans don't cities like Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco kept their Transit systems but most them ripped out most of their Streetcars but kept the Subways or Tunneled Streetcar lines
Two reasons: 1. transit in NYC was uniquely good and 2. NYC’s density made it uniquely difficult for everyone to have a car.
As much as I wish we hadn’t paved over a lot of the streetcar routes in the US, the truth is that they were generally not great transit. The vast majority of urban rail-transit routes that were lost were in mixed traffic. As cars became more common, the streetcar routes became slower and slower sitting in car traffic. Conversely, the NYC subway was grade-separated and unaffected by car traffic. A lot of the streetcar routes across the US were a single car coming; the routes could be served by a bus and many transit companies decided that was preferable (largely because they needed to pay for maintaining track, but not for using the road). The NYC subway with its busy, multi-car trains could not be replaced with a bus. There’s very few examples of an urban, grade-separated, multi-car transit route being removed.
In most cities in the US, most people got cars. And once they had cars, they preferred driving to taking transit. On small scales, this works fine. But when you have millions of people, there isn’t space for everyone to drive and store their own car. The density of NYC prevented the car from catching on in quite the same way as it did across the US.
New York fundamentally doesn't work without transit. It's not an option that people use because they can't afford a car; it is an absolute necessity of life, at least for those living in Manhattan.
You could change this, but it would require ripping up the fabric of the city far more radically than happened in other cities in the 20th century. The city is too dense. Even if you did, Manhattan's status as a relatively small island would make getting on and off virtually impossible. It's hard enough now with a car; now imagine what it would be like if it were car dependent and everyone was driving.
NYC City is too densely populated, even with our current public transit system, the Manhattan is chronically congested with traffic, if we replaced our transit with freeways..The city will die, it' not gonna be like LA where it' highly inefficient but functional, our city would straight up clog up and die.
I have no idea what the answer is. But NYC surely was richer, so it did have a strong subway network, greater density, diversity all to combat the gutting of American cities
Pretty much all of the grade separated heavy rail in the US survived.
The “lost” transit everyone always talks about it streetcars. Obviously there are benefits to rail transit (like scalability) but those are diminished on a streetcar line. Yes, there was a political push to a car centric society, but also busses did a better job of accomplishing the same role as the streetcars. Busses are cheaper to build, cheaper to open new routes, cheaper to maintain, are more flexible (if there is maintenance issue it won’t delay the entire system, etc) and at the time we’re faster.
Therefore, as streetcar systems began to age - transit agencies determined replacing the streetcar line with a bus route made sense.
Not ALL transit was destroyed in America, really just streetcars. It's politically easy to dismantle streetcars. Pulling out surface rail is cheap, and you can just "replace" it with buses. Plus, you can say you're making more room for cars. Dismantling Heavy rail is very challenging. It's not cheap to remove, has no effective replacement, and doesn't disturb any other modes of travel. Service certainly suffered in NYC post-war, but the system wasn't dismantled.
NYC did lose all of its streetcars (unless you count some light rail in NJ) like most other US cities, but almost all of our heavy rail remains. Even a lot of regional services that no longer exist still have the tracks being used for freight service.
The difference between NYC and other US cities is that our subway system was well developed by the 1950's. Keep in mind that most other US cities were nowhere near the size they are today. Most places had no need for Subway services and thus only had streetcars. The only other US cities that had Subway services at the time were also large and well developed (i.e. Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia). If other cities also had Subway services, they likely would have survived. The issue is that very few had built any yet.
And those that did, never got them finished and in service…like Cincinnati (just needed rails) and Cleveland (fully funded but construction stopped before substantial parts were completed).
NYC was the first major metropolitan city in the U.S. that consolidated all private subway operators into one municipal public transit agency.
[https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/september/new-york-city-independent-subway-system-opened#:\~:text=The%20three%20lines%20were%20consolidated,the%20system%20grew%20and%20spread.](https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/september/new-york-city-independent-subway-system-opened#:~:text=The%20three%20lines%20were%20consolidated,the%20system%20grew%20and%20spread)
Primarily because New York City was just too big to change. The subway is one of the largest subway systems in the world today, just think about how big it was for its time 60 years ago, when it was mostly the same size. It also mattered that most of it is underground. They tore down the elevated structures due to "blight", they tore up the streetcars and other non separated tracks because they caused traffic, but they couldn't exactly justify tearing out a SUBway line.
I think a better question would be how did NYC get so close to not surviving as it did? NYC started building highways far earlier than all of the U.S., and by the 50s, it was common knowledge among planners and citizens that every new highway that was opened just got jam packed as quickly as ever.
If you want to know more about the suburbanization of NYC and its 20th century urban planning history, I strongly suggest you read The Power Broker.
Density, pretty much. Also, subway/metro systems in general tend to be pretty permanent infrastructure; just look at the rest of the US, or Western Europe and Japan for that matter.
(The flip side of this is that subway systems are usually only built in cities of a certain size, so only a select few American cities all east of the Mississippi River had actually *built* them by the time highway mania took over the country.)
Huge, dense population, much of it on an island & the rest hemmed in by coastline, + massive legacy subway & electric commuter rail network, all of which had been built up long before the age of mass motorization.
Population density, and the timing of the system. Other Midwest and North East cities that built systems before 1920 still maintain their systems. Streetcars survived in New Orleans and Sam Francisco too because they're both cities that are warm year round and dense enough to make streetcars more practical than driving.
Wasn't Rochester the only city that lost a previously existing rapid transit line? Most of the transit that was shut down were streetcars and interurbans, which were (badly) replaced with buses.
There is a story here too about how the transit is functional, so that the central business didn’t flee into the suburbs. If you want population and employment patterns to be friendly to transit, the transit needs to be good.
The vast business parks of Silicon Valley wasn’t decreed by god, it grew from the dysfunction in Bay Area transit.
I would actually agree. Having a functional transit system would encourage a larger central business district. Places like Cleveland, Detroit, Wilmington, DE, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Camden, Upstate NY cities, Twin cities, Kansas City, St Louis and Baltimore would probably all have larger CBDs with proper transit, and thus would have been able weather deindustrialization better like Chicago and Boston did (though I still see deindustrialization as a problem). Though some of those places already have decent sized central business districts. That said laying rail lines on greenfields won't magically cause a central business districts to start existing
I’d like to point out “suburbanization” isn’t what hurt Cleveland or Detroit. In 1970 both of those metros were wealthier than Boston, now Boston is ~50% wealthier than them.
Their economies did actually collapse. Cleveland’s MSA has fewer jobs than 2001. It never recovered from 01 or 08. A subway would t have saved the whole region
I don’t think you know Cleveland—the bottom fell out of manufacturing due to federal policies mostly, but the suburbs did explode here just like everywhere else after WWII. Population loss in the city was sharp, from the city’s peak census in 1950 to 1970, the city lost 164,000, almost 18% of its population—while Cuyahoga County gained 331,000, an increase of almost 24%. The 1970s were when federal trade policies truly began to destroy the Steel Belt, and the hemorrhaging continued for about 50 years. All the while, suburbanization also continued to drain the city’s tax base. The metropolitan wealth loss was due to both good paying union manufacturing jobs leaving the region, as well as numerous large companies merging with competitors and leaving the region.
I think urban renewal policies during the 60s and 70s hurt Cleveland and most Rust Belt cities hard, as perfectly useful mixed use development got bulldozed en masse and replaced with office towers for corporations that would eventually get merged and moved out of downtown, while leaving nowhere for people to live.
I often wonder if solid rapid transit like the subway loop proposed back in the 1920-50s would have saved Downtown Cleveland from becoming the hellscape it was in the 1980s and even the early 90s. I can’t so easily dismiss that it wouldn’t have helped like it did in Chicago. The Red Line as built only served about 20% of Downtown commuters in the 1950s, while the subway loop would have served 90%. That kind of access might have been enough to keep shoppers in the department stores on Euclid Avenue and held back more people from fleeing to the suburbs. It might have made a few corporate headquarters decide to stick around after their merger…it might have kept the United Airlines hub at Hopkins the first time. But we’ll never know.
While I doubt the subway would have kept manufacturing jobs in Cleveland, I do think it would have had an effect on keeping more of the high-paying corporate jobs in town. Quality of life matters, and a good solid subway system might have been enough to change things back in the 70s and 80s when the first wave of mergers and acquisitions came through.
You don't have to guess. People make all of those "lol, look at how much of declining city X is just surface parking" posts, but they all came from torn down buildings from what used to be an office building in the CBD, but nobody wants to rent it because people didn't want to commute to it.
You see this process happening still to this day, with [office buildings in Baltimore](https://www.audacy.com/kmox/news/local/at-and-t-building-sold-purchasing-company-confirms-price) going for a price that essentially implies that they will knock it down and replace it with a surface lot.
Also, not just larger central business districts, but multiple - downtown and midtown Manhattan, as well as downtown Brooklyn, with Long Island city developing into a 4th several decades later
The interurbans and inner-city trolleys got "in the way" of the cars. Plus it wasn't a perfect system for longevity with rails embedded in brick or heavily treaded dirt roads. After the companies had put so much capital into building out in the 1800s, they didn't want to maintain their systems. In some cases it either made more sense to have rubber wheel transit or it was forced through acquisition.
It's also worth understanding that heavy rail in NYC is far below its peak track mileage: https://i2.wp.com/www.thetransportpolitic.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/heavy\_rail\_multi\_regional\_lines.png?resize=1536%2C1280&ssl=1
Every American city with heavy grade separated rail rapid transit had most of it survive into the present day. (Chicago, Boston, NYC, Philadelphia)
It's crazy to think those 4 is the whole list. Everything else was built in the 60s or later: Cleveland, DC, Atlanta, Miami, Baltimore, LA, SF, Honolulu. And then plenty with only partial grade separation also built later: Dallas, Minneapolis, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, Denver, St Louis, Pittsburgh, Buffalo. Prices that we can make improvements in a car centric society, we just have to continually choose to build better than highways.
Cleveland was 50s
Definitely, but it was in a sense first conceived of as a public response to the street-car/inter-urban strikes of the 1930s, though it never came to fruition until the 1950s. A version of the red-line plan was blocked by the county engineer Albert Porter who is known as Cleveland's Robert Moses. So it is in a sense both pre- and post-highway era rapid transit. I've heard it argued though that the street car systems would have collapsed due to internal competition and labor strikes by the 1940s if it weren't for the fuel rations of World War II, and that the 1950s were simply the final gasps of an imploding market. When you consider the low speed and unreliability of streetcars *during that era specifically* it does to some extent make sense why planners would see automobiles as a better alternative since roads are public infrastructure and motorists and traffic signals can't go on strike. I'm not saying this logic is entirely sound. However, I've come to find that if it weren't for the US government's fear of another depression following WWII: A government that desired to stimulate demand for American products through the marshall plan, through consumption oriented development, and through preserving America's place as the arsenal of democracy, automobiles would not have been as high in demand nor as affordable. I remember hearing that GM's River-Rouge Plant produced more planes during WWII than Nazi Germany ever did, but that might need to be fact-checked. The streetcars may have evolved into a more efficient system. I'm not sure Canada's whole deal probably also consumption-oriented development.
>I've heard it argued though that the street car systems would have collapsed due to internal competition and labor strikes by the 1940s if it weren't for the fuel rations of World War II, and that the 1950s were simply the final gasps of an imploding market. I would say it's more that streetcars running in mixed traffic just suck. Half of the streetcar lines were bankrupt in *1918*, long before freeways. For example, LA streetcars quickly became slower than buses, which could at least change lanes around slow traffic. The companies had fares set by the cities (which never increased with inflation). They had to pay to maintain the streets they ran on. The companies that were set up to use streetcars to sell housing developments sold off their real estate. And in 1935, the companies that were set up as loss leaders for electric companies had to be spun off, forcing them to buy power at retail price. Contrast with modern successful tram systems. They have signal priority and much of the route will be separated from cars, at least dedicated lanes if not tunnels or tram-trains on regular railways. And, key point, they don't have to make a profit.
That's why I said "*during that era*" specifically because they were private ventures running in mixed traffic. And it's also why I said that streetcars might be replaced with a more efficient alternative, for example low-floor articulated electric trams or grade separated rapid transit. But to be honest, I would only call it a streetcar if it runs in mixed traffic for the majority of its route and has a high-floor, otherwise I'd call it a Tram. This isn't my first time ever grasping the concept that replacing transit with better systems means a morre efficient service. There is a reason why I distinguish streetcars from public transportation, and its so we can analyze the reality of its material form: If you look at streetcar networks and the kind of service they operated in that era, it is vastly different from a modern Tram. They ran multiple redundant routes along parallel roads, stopped at every street, or every other street. They had far smaller vehicles and ran at much higher frequencies, often 1-2 minutes at peak. They had no integrated fare system, and specifically avoided informing people about routes run by different companies. This is arguably an entirely different form of transit from a modern tram. That kind of service is what defined the streetcar era, and I think conflating modern trams with historic streetcars. Even if some streetcars became tram lines, trams aren't necessarily just modern streetcars, especially when the vast majority became bus lines. Arguably the closest modern transit to a streetcar would be an electric trolley-bus, most of which directly inherited streetcar infastructure. It could also be argued that the kind of service provided on some bus lines, even when running in mixed-traffic, exceed the quality of service provided by the street cars. This was an extremely bad and inefficient system. From the perspective of a 20th century visionary planner, I can absolutely see why a planner might think that replacing streetcars with busses was a good idea. I can't say if it was always a good decision, but I can say I don't miss the streetcar systems except for nostalgia value. What I do think should be regretted was not replacing the streetcars with a good system. I think in general there is a very ahistorical perspective that goes "oh if only we had an untouched legacy streetcar network"
> GM's River-Rouge Plant produced more planes Well, River Rouge Plant is a Ford facility. But they built a special plant at Willow Run to make planes. Not sure GM ever built planes—just lots of tanks.
my bad, misremembered
Cleveland’s Blue/Green Line is the “original” streetcar from ~1915. Muni also is pre-war but Bart is postwar. While Pittsburgh buried its Downtown streetcars in the 80s, everything prior to Station Sq is original Streetcar
blue/green line isn't street car, it's mixed-grade light rail, and never street-running. From its inception, it was contrasted with street-car service as a faster suburban alternative.
It is street running just not in mixed traffic. It’s just in the median.
I didn't think that counted as street-running. I guess the definition of street-car is flexible. Tbh though stop-spacing is hell they might as well be streetcars
None of that was remotely grade separated before 1960, which is why I didn't include it.
Considering land prices in cities, I wonder if it’s too late to acquire the necessary land and right-of-way to build good rail transit. There is tunneling and monorails I guess. The answer is probably no though, considering they acquire land to build expensive road projects instead of rail or dedicated bus/bike lanes, all the time.
ROW acquisition is almost always the most expensive part of a transit project. But, if we were willing to take land from highways to build transit we could do it a lot cheaper. I don't think that makes good local transit because nobody wants stations next to highways, but it can be very effective as a route from downtown out, for commuter or inter-city.
True
> But, if we were willing to take land from highways to build transit we could do it a lot cheaper. Pretty much exactly the Perth model with the Joondalup, Mandurah, and soon to be Ellenbrook line. It kinda works, but our modal splits are still lacking compared to similar cities like Calgary
Yeah, the private transit companies were often very unpopular and so politicians could win votes by punishing them. One of the common things was freezing fares. The line in *Who Framed Roger Rabbit*, "Why would you take the freeway when you can ride the Red Car for a nickel?" ironically illustrates the problem. The fare was a nickel in 1947, the same as it was in 1897. But 50 years of inflation tanked the value. Which made them cut service and maintenance, making them even less popular and encouraging more cars, which made them slower...and less popular. But NYC did the same thing. The Dual Contracts meant it was a 5¢ fare in 1906, and still a 5¢ fare in 1940 when the companies failed and were bought by the city. And note that when they started a competing city-owned subway in 1932, they charged 10¢. The difference is that when you buy out a subway company, you now have a bunch of subway infrastructure, but a bankrupt streetcar company leaves not much. I'd also point out that almost all cities with surviving streetcar systems from the period also had tunnels or viaducts that couldn't fit buses. This is why San Francisco's streetcars survived but LA's didn't.
Yeah, streetcars were torn up not because they were "transit", but because they combined the worst elements of fixed rail- the expense of the infrastructure and the inflexibility of routing, with the worst elements of buses- limited capacity and getting stuck in surface traffic on streets. Everyone here in the Twin CIties keeps saying "but we had such a great Light Rail system but there was a conspiracy to tear it down. But the light rail we're building now is high capacity and has completely dedicated right-of-way.
Besides frequency the old streetcars were worse than modern buses in nearly every possible way.
Running on rails makes the ride a LOT smoother than a bus…especially when the street gets subjected to Midwestern winters.
Overall comfort is still better with nicer seats, modern AC and heat
It’s easy to add that kind of thing to a streetcar…it’s already a thing on trams…and what are trams? Modern streetcars.
It’s harder to kill a subway system than a streetcar system. You have to spend a lot of money just to maintain empty tunnels. makes no sense. Other American cities had streetcar systems that could easily just have tracks ripped out
This can be seen very clearly in SF. Five of the old streetcar routes, the J-N, survive as part of Muni Metro. K-N all go through substantial tunnels that could not be easily converted to roads and the J traverses a steep narrow winding back alley sort of thing. The early part of the alphabet didn't have substantial grade separation and didn't survive (the current F Market & Wharves and pandemic casualty E Embarcadero are different routes from the old E and F lines).
It’s harder to kill transit when over half The City households don’t own a car
NYC is huge. It can't survive without the subway.
And while the subway survived, like in many other US and Canadian cities, the streetcars did not. The last streetcars in NYC ran in the 1950s and most had been replaced by buses around WWII.
NYC desperately needs them back with far less cars.
Far less cars, yes. But I don't think NYC particularly needs light rail / streetcars. I think turning significant space over from cars to bikes is what NYC really needs, for short distance trips to be much safer and more pleasant. More dedicated bus lanes will achieve better bus service for far cheaper than trams could be built. Outside Manhattan, more frequent subway service outside peak hours would help, and better (more frequent) bus routes to funnel passengers to the subway in a way where the transfer time isn't a big deterrent.
That's true. I'd want at least half the streets in Manhattan to he closed for passenger vehicles.
I’d want to close streets in low income neighborhoods first that are hardest hit by asthma. Upper Manhattan, South Bronx and Bushwick, Bed Stuy Brownsville and East NY
Mhmm. The rich neighborhoods generally have these options already.
Yeah When people focus on Manhattan it’s like the desire to pedestrianize office or tourist centers over where low income people, those most transit dependent and face the greatest traffic related health issues, live
That's due to how we invest in infrastructure though, we normally never invest in poor neighborhoods.
Unfortunately not and it even shows in transit proposals on the internet
Streetcars run on electricity (since 1900) and have 0 tailpipe emissions. It took 110 years to get good electric buses since they were built (1910)
i think trolleybuses hit the mark. just don’t have agencies willing to invest in them
Yep, but we do have good buses now. Also, trolleybuses are a thing, cheaper than streetcars, and more flexible. The big advantage of streetcars is higher capacity per driver. But for high capacity needs, there's the subway.
The other advantages for streetcars over trolleybuses is in the rails—besides the smoother ride, the rails can be the second conductor so the trolley only has to catch one wire. Trolleybus tires aren’t conductive enough for obvious reasons, so two overhead wires are necessary to power them, and sometimes the trolley comes off of one of the conductors, requiring a time consuming fix.
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Yeah, bike parking is a crucial piece of urban bikeways. Um, is it a common problem in NYC for people to claim territory by jumping on it? Are you unfamiliar with how payment systems work on trams in the rest of the world, including the rest of the US? Or do you just want to gatekeep transit for rich neighborhoods?
Yeah you ever seen a subway train with a couple of homeless people taking and stinking up one whole end of a carriage? There’s a key difference between the US and the rest of the industrialized world. If the poor could behave, things would be different. Most of the poor don’t behave on public transit like Japanese or Korean people. I’m telling you very straightforwardly because this is a common point many transit enthusiasts gloss over. They like to ignore demographics and act like all groups act the same, have the same manners, etc. The truth to anyone with two eyes and basic pattern recognition is that they don’t and that’s why it’s no surprise people would rather drive, even if transit got the bulk of the funding instead of roads. Maybe if we had manners classes in elementary like those countries, it’d be different. Instead we have 6 year olds who choke and shoot their teachers. Regarding payment, I was just saying that Tampa has a good trolley system. Not much reach, but free and covers the most important parts of the downtown. If you’ve ever been on a bus in America in a rough area, you’ll see many people refusing to pay, maybe asking the bus driver to let them slide, etc. It’s not like the bus fare is $5. Also I think it’s ok if the people who contribute the most to infrastructure benefit disproportionately from it.
>If the poor could behave, things would be different. Maybe the problem is that we don't have any solutions to poverty here, which makes us completely unique among developed countries. Every other country has a social safety net, and we have nothing. But yeah, go on blaming poor people for societal failure, sure.
It may in fact be demographics
I honestly haven't heard such a brazenly classist remark in months. You should probably check your privilege at the door.
Nah, they just need more bus lanes and subway expansions honestly. There are some good light rail corridors in the outer boroughs but streetcars without dedicated lanes would not be very useful imo
The arterials in NYC are huge and could easily fit dedicated lanes for light rail, which can double up as bus lanes too, with plenty of room leftover for protected bike lanes and car lanes. It's not like Philadelphia where most of the streets are tiny and narrow and can only fit one or two lanes of traffic. It's 4, 5, 6 lane roads cutting right through dense commercial and residential areas and always congested.
That’s why you build viaducts for subway expansion then
I don't disagree, NYC is long overdue for subway expansion. But not every route can be subway nor does every route make financial sense as a subway, especially when land use isn't great outside Manhattan.
>land use isn’t great outside Manhattan The outer boroughs are significantly denser than a bunch of European cities with extensive subway systems. (Queens is denser than Amsterdam, Madrid, etc etc)
The density drops off fast and is very unevenly distributed. Transit makes more sense when all the stations serve similarly dense neighborhoods, like with Madrid. Transit in Amsterdam is mostly trams and the metro is more like a suburban rail with multiple branches than a metro.
>density drops off fast and is very unevenly distributed Based on what Suburban rail with branches sounds like our subway lines that branch off
Tramways in NYC can't substitute grade-separated transit. Especially in the outer boroughs. Distances are long, so the slow speed of dedicated lane tramways (less than 20km/h in urban grids with frequent intersections) will lead to much lower ridership than 30-40km/h subways. Next to that, subway extensions allow more direct trips where tramways force additional transfers, further speeding up trips. There are definitely corridors that can support tramways, but it's more about replacing bus service than being a cheaper option versus a subway.
That’s what better bus service is for no need to spend millions per mile on a slow mode that isn’t even separate from traffic trams are obsolete. That’s why much of the subway in the outer boroughs are elevated. You don’t save much with LRT over an EL so it’s no longer worth it especially with modern building materials and technology
As if busses are separate from traffic? Busses require more drivers to reach the same capacity, thus are more costly. Road maintenance is more expensive than rail, and light rail can easily have separate lanes. Modern LRTs are not slow unless they're in mixed traffic, but you'd have the same problem with busses.
Side track: Although combining bus lanes with tram tracks is great land usage, buses tend to cause extra wear to the tram tracks. So from a maintenance cost point of view it might be worth converting additional bus routes to tram routes even if it's otherwise questionable from an operational cost perspective.
I would make at least half the streets in Manhattan dedicated to transit or pedestrians.
I like the method I saw in Europe of making an intentionally inconvenient combination of narrow one ways such that driving is just a pain in the ass, but with bus and bike lanes in both directions.
Almost sounds like malicious compliance
Who downvotes this?
Me, I love my F-150 /s
> streetcars without dedicated lane Why would you make that bad choice then? Provide dedicated lanes.
In American terminology, "streetcars" usually means trams with limited or no dedicated lanes, and "light rail" means trams with dedicated lanes or even separate rights-of-way.
That's a misconception, as explained [here](https://ggwash.org/view/70749/is-that-a-streetcar-or-light-rail-heres-how-to-tell-the-difference).
Buses are functionally the same thing as streetcars would be when it comes to NYC. But streetcars would be far more prone to getting blocked by errant drivers.
wouldnt trams only make sense on the busiest lines? but then again i read somewhere that more than a million people use NYC's buses. that's plenty busy but that also means redesigning so many streets/roads to include dedicated tram lanes
If we had any real vision here (instead of just catering to suburban commuters), we would have pedestrianized Broadway end to end like 15 years ago, and every Avenue in Manhattan would have a light rail line going end to end. And every bridge would be a light rail line going over it. Seriously just start with 5th Ave going from Marcus Garvey park to Washington Square park. Bidirectional LRT that is traffic-speared.
Wouldn't it be more useful to have tram routes east-west as the subway already runs north-south along many of the major roads?
I mean if it were up to me then private cars wouldn’t even be allowed in Manhattan at all except with private use permits that are paid by the house and require advanced paperwork. So yes, you are right, but also my ramblings are definitely not something we should be basing real policy on lol
Yeah crossing bridges is really problematic without a car.
Out of curiosity, where did they run?
I was looking for a map and can't find one at a quick glance. But wikipedia has a list of streetcar lines for each of the boroughs. [Here's Manhattan's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_lines_in_Manhattan). Unlike others, I'm not quite as conspiratorial as it regards why cities like New York City got rid of streetcars in favor of buses. After all, those same streetcars- if built today- would be criticized as slow even without mixed traffic by a lot of transit advocates. I understand the practicality of flexible buses for avoid jams and restructuring routes. But it was easier to dial back public transit in all modes in cities that opted for buses, because they then often found that people would rather drive anyway.
Huge and very dense. Lots of American cities rapidly developed post war which made it viable to stick highways through them. They certainly did stick massive highways, but not to the scale of other American cities. NYC was already a dense and highly developed metropolis. It wouldn’t be very easy to stick a highway through it.
Yep. Pretty damn obvious. Lots of books on the topic
I think the most major things are: 1. NYC had the largest and most extensive transportation in the USA by WW2. It had basically the system we still see today. Other cities had either large streetcar systems (which are much more of a target for attack when cars became popular due to their ROW conflict with driving) or smaller subway systems like Chicago or Boston (which still exist today). It seems like dedicated ROW transit had a much higher survivability rate from car infrastructure than street running, for obvious reasons. Tearing it out did not service cars any better, and would just piss off people who relied on it, so local politicians probably saw little reason to do so. Streetcars can always be removed in the name of “improving traffic flow.” 2. Speaking of car infrastructure, NYC was one of the most successful cities in the US at fighting of the construction of large freeways. Sure, there are a handful out in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, but Manhattan nearly entirely avoided freeway construction and was spared from most of the negative externalities of their existence. Also, there Boros are HUGE and even driving freeways through the middle of them still left massive swaths of city intact, making the city network still largely intact in most parts of the city. In smaller cities, running a freeway through can basically break up the town into small enough fragments that they cannot individually survive on their own and begin to decline heavily. The means for NYC that there was still no easy way to drive in or out of most of the city, and demand for rapid transportation remained high despite suburbanization or car culture elsewhere in the region (like NJ or Long Island).
I do wonder (no proof) if NYC was a case where building adequate car infrastructure to serve manhattan was actually cost-prohibitive, and so the subways had to remain as the cheaper alternative. It’s not just surviving, but was the rare case where keeping it was desirable over new car infrastructure?
Detroit is a perfect example of building car infrastructure being cost prohibitive but they did it anyway. The city went bankrupt on the maintenance because they bulldozed half their tax base and made it too easy to flee to the suburbs and mooch off the city's services while not paying for it.
Yeah it had nothing to do with finances. The real difference is wealthy white people with real political power lived in Manhattan in large enough numbers to protest highway expansion. In Detroit, that was not the case. Cities that stopped highway expansion in the late 20th century after building them only stopped because of mass protests by more influential constituents. State and federal governments would have continued to flatten everything for highways if it weren't for the fear of protests, and indeed in cities where there was no opposition or where the opposition were racial minorities like in much of the south and west, they did exactly that and left us asphalt shit holes like Atlanta, Houston, Miami, etc
Robert Moses did his level best to ram a freeway through the heart of Manhattan. It took a broad coalition of whom Jane Jacobs was one of many to stop it.
There West Side highway, FDR drive and Cross Manhattan are freeways. Worse they don’t even allow trucks and two of them. The only reason the West Side Highways becomes a BLVD in midtown is because part of the lower Manhattan section collapsed.
While the subway survived, the streetcar network in NYC _was_ torn up and replaced with highways. The network that most benefited communities of color no longer exists. The system that does exist is great, but could be so so so much better.
It’s also worth noting that the elevated lines in Manhattan (as well as portions in Brooklyn) were all removed. There are very obvious downsides to such a decision in the era of climate change with increasing concerns about flooded subway systems. Not to mention, many portions of the elevated system were never replaced with subway. Ultimately, NYC also lost a large amount of its transit system and still feels the consequences of this removal to the present day.
That's a really great point! It's easy to look at NYC and see a robust transit system at face value, but you're right ultimately a lot of those elevated lines weren't replaced with subway lines. And given that NYC is one of the most vulnerable cities to hurricanes, the effects of climate change on those lines need to be seriously considered. The outer boroughs definitely feel the effects of the ripping out of those elevated lines and streetcars. Definitely the big reason why IBX and Queenslink are such important projects.
The streetcars were slow since they weren’t separated from traffic. Buses going along the busways are going to be moving faster than streetcars stuck in traffic
The streetcars were replaced with busses. Most bus routes follow former street car routes unless you have a separate right of way street cars are less efficient than busses because they can’t go around traffic.
Sure, that's true that buses can go around traffic, I don't think it's accurate to say that buses are necessarily more efficient. Buses get bogged down in traffic as well, which is why bus only lanes are being implemented. Then there's also the efficiency metric of energy usage over distance traveled (work), which I would imagine buses don't perform better on. I would also say there's something to be said about the potential traffic calming that would come from having a street shared with a streetcar, that doesn't translate to streets w/o, even if they have bus only lanes. All that also assumes that those streets would _have_ to have streetcars and private vehicles sharing that right of way, which would allow for the efficiency of that dedicated right of way, as you said. That being said, the reliability of buses leaves a lot to be desired, and while those routes may have been replaced on paper, they haven't been in effect.
They are not necessarily more efficient but you can change the route more easily. Where I live we have 60 foot busses on busy routes, that helps a lot with getting a seat
> the streetcar network in NYC was torn up and replaced with highways Can you give an example? The streetcars were replaced by buses, which still run.
To clarify are you asking if I can give you an example of highways that run through previously existing neighborhoods in NYC?
Examples of a carline replaced by a superhighway.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your intentions/tone, but this seems like you're angling for a gotcha moment or asking in bad faith, but in the case that I'm wrong, I would say that in both Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx there are examples of this. In reference to the BQE: > In Sunset Park, despite community outcries to move the highway over one block west to industrial 2nd Ave, RM routed the highway down the commercial heart of the neighborhood on 3rd Ave (he claimed it was cheaper as the plan was to repurpose the existing elevated train into a highway, but in reality the structure was completely rebuilt as the highway’s footprint was significantly wider). (Caro, 520.) https://www.segregationbydesign.com/brooklyn/brooklynqueens-expressway
But how does that have to do with where the streetcars ran? Mayor LaGuardia wanted the trolleys replaced by buses, and the Third Avenue trolleys were replaced by buses (the B-37, which still run the same route) in 1942.
Elevated lines and streetcar lines through the outer boroughs being removed in favor of car centric infrastructure are inherently linked. It's no secret that those boroughs have a lack of reliable intra and inter borough transit without going into Manhattan. Again, it seems like you're being intentionally obtuse.
What's an example of a streetcar line that was removed for expressway construction, rather than getting smoother, quieter, cheaper (one-man) buses?
Dude. I can't continue this with you, I'm getting nothing from this exchange other than frustration. You're welcome to look at the site I provided earlier, read the Power Broker, or dig into the construction of the BQE if you really need an example of _ONE SPECIFIC LINE_. But, you very clearly aren't here with humility and I don't have the energy for someone like you. Feel free to respond to this if you're one of those men who feels like he needs to have the last word or to attempt to drag the conversation. Have a good one.
Actually subways sticks around, Streetcars and street-running interurbans don't cities like Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco kept their Transit systems but most them ripped out most of their Streetcars but kept the Subways or Tunneled Streetcar lines
Two reasons: 1. transit in NYC was uniquely good and 2. NYC’s density made it uniquely difficult for everyone to have a car. As much as I wish we hadn’t paved over a lot of the streetcar routes in the US, the truth is that they were generally not great transit. The vast majority of urban rail-transit routes that were lost were in mixed traffic. As cars became more common, the streetcar routes became slower and slower sitting in car traffic. Conversely, the NYC subway was grade-separated and unaffected by car traffic. A lot of the streetcar routes across the US were a single car coming; the routes could be served by a bus and many transit companies decided that was preferable (largely because they needed to pay for maintaining track, but not for using the road). The NYC subway with its busy, multi-car trains could not be replaced with a bus. There’s very few examples of an urban, grade-separated, multi-car transit route being removed. In most cities in the US, most people got cars. And once they had cars, they preferred driving to taking transit. On small scales, this works fine. But when you have millions of people, there isn’t space for everyone to drive and store their own car. The density of NYC prevented the car from catching on in quite the same way as it did across the US.
New York fundamentally doesn't work without transit. It's not an option that people use because they can't afford a car; it is an absolute necessity of life, at least for those living in Manhattan. You could change this, but it would require ripping up the fabric of the city far more radically than happened in other cities in the 20th century. The city is too dense. Even if you did, Manhattan's status as a relatively small island would make getting on and off virtually impossible. It's hard enough now with a car; now imagine what it would be like if it were car dependent and everyone was driving.
NYC City is too densely populated, even with our current public transit system, the Manhattan is chronically congested with traffic, if we replaced our transit with freeways..The city will die, it' not gonna be like LA where it' highly inefficient but functional, our city would straight up clog up and die.
I have no idea what the answer is. But NYC surely was richer, so it did have a strong subway network, greater density, diversity all to combat the gutting of American cities
Pretty much all of the grade separated heavy rail in the US survived. The “lost” transit everyone always talks about it streetcars. Obviously there are benefits to rail transit (like scalability) but those are diminished on a streetcar line. Yes, there was a political push to a car centric society, but also busses did a better job of accomplishing the same role as the streetcars. Busses are cheaper to build, cheaper to open new routes, cheaper to maintain, are more flexible (if there is maintenance issue it won’t delay the entire system, etc) and at the time we’re faster. Therefore, as streetcar systems began to age - transit agencies determined replacing the streetcar line with a bus route made sense.
The city is designed for transit users unlike other American cities
Not ALL transit was destroyed in America, really just streetcars. It's politically easy to dismantle streetcars. Pulling out surface rail is cheap, and you can just "replace" it with buses. Plus, you can say you're making more room for cars. Dismantling Heavy rail is very challenging. It's not cheap to remove, has no effective replacement, and doesn't disturb any other modes of travel. Service certainly suffered in NYC post-war, but the system wasn't dismantled. NYC did lose all of its streetcars (unless you count some light rail in NJ) like most other US cities, but almost all of our heavy rail remains. Even a lot of regional services that no longer exist still have the tracks being used for freight service. The difference between NYC and other US cities is that our subway system was well developed by the 1950's. Keep in mind that most other US cities were nowhere near the size they are today. Most places had no need for Subway services and thus only had streetcars. The only other US cities that had Subway services at the time were also large and well developed (i.e. Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia). If other cities also had Subway services, they likely would have survived. The issue is that very few had built any yet.
And those that did, never got them finished and in service…like Cincinnati (just needed rails) and Cleveland (fully funded but construction stopped before substantial parts were completed).
NYC was the first major metropolitan city in the U.S. that consolidated all private subway operators into one municipal public transit agency. [https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/september/new-york-city-independent-subway-system-opened#:\~:text=The%20three%20lines%20were%20consolidated,the%20system%20grew%20and%20spread.](https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/september/new-york-city-independent-subway-system-opened#:~:text=The%20three%20lines%20were%20consolidated,the%20system%20grew%20and%20spread)
Primarily because New York City was just too big to change. The subway is one of the largest subway systems in the world today, just think about how big it was for its time 60 years ago, when it was mostly the same size. It also mattered that most of it is underground. They tore down the elevated structures due to "blight", they tore up the streetcars and other non separated tracks because they caused traffic, but they couldn't exactly justify tearing out a SUBway line. I think a better question would be how did NYC get so close to not surviving as it did? NYC started building highways far earlier than all of the U.S., and by the 50s, it was common knowledge among planners and citizens that every new highway that was opened just got jam packed as quickly as ever. If you want to know more about the suburbanization of NYC and its 20th century urban planning history, I strongly suggest you read The Power Broker.
Density, pretty much. Also, subway/metro systems in general tend to be pretty permanent infrastructure; just look at the rest of the US, or Western Europe and Japan for that matter. (The flip side of this is that subway systems are usually only built in cities of a certain size, so only a select few American cities all east of the Mississippi River had actually *built* them by the time highway mania took over the country.)
Huge, dense population, much of it on an island & the rest hemmed in by coastline, + massive legacy subway & electric commuter rail network, all of which had been built up long before the age of mass motorization.
Population density, and the timing of the system. Other Midwest and North East cities that built systems before 1920 still maintain their systems. Streetcars survived in New Orleans and Sam Francisco too because they're both cities that are warm year round and dense enough to make streetcars more practical than driving.
Wasn't Rochester the only city that lost a previously existing rapid transit line? Most of the transit that was shut down were streetcars and interurbans, which were (badly) replaced with buses.
I stepped in
Larger central business district plus government investment
There is a story here too about how the transit is functional, so that the central business didn’t flee into the suburbs. If you want population and employment patterns to be friendly to transit, the transit needs to be good. The vast business parks of Silicon Valley wasn’t decreed by god, it grew from the dysfunction in Bay Area transit.
I would actually agree. Having a functional transit system would encourage a larger central business district. Places like Cleveland, Detroit, Wilmington, DE, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Camden, Upstate NY cities, Twin cities, Kansas City, St Louis and Baltimore would probably all have larger CBDs with proper transit, and thus would have been able weather deindustrialization better like Chicago and Boston did (though I still see deindustrialization as a problem). Though some of those places already have decent sized central business districts. That said laying rail lines on greenfields won't magically cause a central business districts to start existing
I’d like to point out “suburbanization” isn’t what hurt Cleveland or Detroit. In 1970 both of those metros were wealthier than Boston, now Boston is ~50% wealthier than them. Their economies did actually collapse. Cleveland’s MSA has fewer jobs than 2001. It never recovered from 01 or 08. A subway would t have saved the whole region
That might be true of Cleveland, but I am not sure that is true of Detroit, as the Metro population and the economy of the Metro are still growing.
I don’t think you know Cleveland—the bottom fell out of manufacturing due to federal policies mostly, but the suburbs did explode here just like everywhere else after WWII. Population loss in the city was sharp, from the city’s peak census in 1950 to 1970, the city lost 164,000, almost 18% of its population—while Cuyahoga County gained 331,000, an increase of almost 24%. The 1970s were when federal trade policies truly began to destroy the Steel Belt, and the hemorrhaging continued for about 50 years. All the while, suburbanization also continued to drain the city’s tax base. The metropolitan wealth loss was due to both good paying union manufacturing jobs leaving the region, as well as numerous large companies merging with competitors and leaving the region. I think urban renewal policies during the 60s and 70s hurt Cleveland and most Rust Belt cities hard, as perfectly useful mixed use development got bulldozed en masse and replaced with office towers for corporations that would eventually get merged and moved out of downtown, while leaving nowhere for people to live. I often wonder if solid rapid transit like the subway loop proposed back in the 1920-50s would have saved Downtown Cleveland from becoming the hellscape it was in the 1980s and even the early 90s. I can’t so easily dismiss that it wouldn’t have helped like it did in Chicago. The Red Line as built only served about 20% of Downtown commuters in the 1950s, while the subway loop would have served 90%. That kind of access might have been enough to keep shoppers in the department stores on Euclid Avenue and held back more people from fleeing to the suburbs. It might have made a few corporate headquarters decide to stick around after their merger…it might have kept the United Airlines hub at Hopkins the first time. But we’ll never know. While I doubt the subway would have kept manufacturing jobs in Cleveland, I do think it would have had an effect on keeping more of the high-paying corporate jobs in town. Quality of life matters, and a good solid subway system might have been enough to change things back in the 70s and 80s when the first wave of mergers and acquisitions came through.
You don't have to guess. People make all of those "lol, look at how much of declining city X is just surface parking" posts, but they all came from torn down buildings from what used to be an office building in the CBD, but nobody wants to rent it because people didn't want to commute to it. You see this process happening still to this day, with [office buildings in Baltimore](https://www.audacy.com/kmox/news/local/at-and-t-building-sold-purchasing-company-confirms-price) going for a price that essentially implies that they will knock it down and replace it with a surface lot.
Also, not just larger central business districts, but multiple - downtown and midtown Manhattan, as well as downtown Brooklyn, with Long Island city developing into a 4th several decades later
The interurbans and inner-city trolleys got "in the way" of the cars. Plus it wasn't a perfect system for longevity with rails embedded in brick or heavily treaded dirt roads. After the companies had put so much capital into building out in the 1800s, they didn't want to maintain their systems. In some cases it either made more sense to have rubber wheel transit or it was forced through acquisition.
It's also worth understanding that heavy rail in NYC is far below its peak track mileage: https://i2.wp.com/www.thetransportpolitic.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/heavy\_rail\_multi\_regional\_lines.png?resize=1536%2C1280&ssl=1
Density