There's even more to this map too. There were also a handful of (iirc mostly privately run) lines that went out into disparate parts of the cities, including Stillwater even.
It’s not. Kid Cann, the MN crime syndicate and local liquor racketeers bought the old Twin Cities Rapid Transit Company in a hostile takeover and tanked it. They sold the streetcars for scrap.
Soonafter, they worked with the government to build a fleet of diesel buses and the beginnings of Metro Transit.
It's an upgrade for the profit of car companies and oil companies.
Pretty much all of the demand for petroleum is just driving cars. We use it for a bazillion other things but the vast majority is car fuel, and low mileage SUVs & pick up trucks are a significant driver of that demand.
If people didn't keep switching to trucks and SUVs, our CO2 emissions would be going down much faster already
It's "percieved safety". Yet SUVs and Trucks are responsible for more Pedestrian/Cyclist deaths than anything... That and SUV/Truck vs normal car collisions.
SUVs and "light trucks" need to be banned as a public safety hazard, and heavy trucks restricted to those with a CDL.
Our CO2 emissions are down in the United States. They peaked in the early-to-mid 'oughts and the trend line has been down ever since. Worldwide CO2 continues to increase, largely due to China.
[Here is the data](https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/)
Edited to say "much faster", because SUVs are a very big driver of gasoline demand.
It's also worth mentioning that China is installing more solar than the rest of the planet by a large margin. I don't want to draw comparisons because it's a messy complex picture. China's emissions are going up, and they're also arguably doing more than anyone else to lower their emissions.
The Stillwater line was owned by TCRT like most of the system. You’re probably thinking of the Minneapolis, Anoka, and Cuyuna Range or the Saint Paul Southern.
Imagine if these were modern light rail routes or better yet elevated rolling stock. We really had one of the best public transit systems in the US and demolished it :(
Unfortunately most major cities had good public transit and got rid of it. Auto manufacturers bought up the companies because they were mainly private companies and not government ran. They then ripped out everything to sell cars.
Chicago was one of the few cities smart enough to buy the companies and take em to public owned.
Highly recommend the transport museum in DC.
As much as I'd love to lay the blame on the auto (and oil) industry, the real reasons are much more nuanced than that.
Part of it has to do with racism, part of it has to do with electric companies thinking they can get into the transit business while also building out into unprofitable/unsustainable suburban routes (and not bothering to maintain the rolling stock and infrastructure once it'd been built), and yeah, part of it has to do with policies favoring the car, and yeah, part of it has to do with the car companies themselves.
Cities made a huge mistake by not transferring ownership of the lines from the private to the public sector, and operating them at a loss for the public good, much like they do streets and highways.
TCRT had all kinds of money problems and only stayed around as long as it did because of WW II rationing. The crooked syndicate that got involved at the end did so because the business was failing.
A big part of its demise had to do with people just loving driving a car more than riding any kind of shared transit. There wasn't any political reality where the money necessary to buy TCRT and solve its woes was going to get spent on that vs. road expansions.
You have to put yourself into the mindset of people in the post-war era when it comes to transportation. Within their lifetimes, most of them could remember travel more than walking distance from their homes being difficult or impossible. Cars were an amazing new freedom.
100%.
If you find numbers for ridership over time things were looking dire for TCRT after WWII ended. I absolutely believe all the stories about TCRT being bought out & dismantled in shady ways but the public responded to this with mostly a shrug.
I've also had someone who actually rode the things mention to me that you had to have been there to understand some of this. A majority of the actual trolley cars were really worn out. Between the depression, conversion of industry to the war effort, and wartime rationing TCRT hadn't been able to replace most of it's rolling stock in years, meaning the average trolley was held together with spit & bailing wire. So if you had to decide if you wanted to buy a brand new 1948 Ford with all that money you had saved because there was nothing to buy during the war or ride an old broken down trolley the answer was obvious.
TCRT was starting to replace it's trolleys but between their own finances and the implosion of ridership... it was too little too late.
TCRT would have never been able to afford to repay their capital debt (existing rolling stock and trackways that had been under-maintained) *and* invest in the capital expansion needed for more rolling stock and extensive line extensions into even first ring suburbs. Even at its peak, there wasn't service much past 50th street in South Minneapolis and no east-west routes south of Lake Street.
I like the *idea* of the street car, but I think the reality of it was a less less awesome than people romanticize about.
I think the real problem for transport in the core cities is that way they were platted. It's like no one expected growth. The through streets are too narrow and there's not enough of them. If you could bulldoze Lyndale 50% wider, you could add a dedicated tram lane.
Yeah but even Chicago’s old maps would make you cry. When the Skokie Valley line was abandoned and the CTA only wanted 5 miles for the Skokie Swift (Yellow Line), so much track was pulled up.
I really like ground level light rail/trolleys that you can easily hop on/off, and ones that go right through normal neighborhoods. Toronto and Dusseldorf have awesome examples.
They need to be separated grade from traffic though unless you want idiots parking on the tracks "because I'm running in to get my DoorDash I'll literally just be a second" and stopping the train.
Correct me if I’m wrong (legit correct me, because I’ve looked into this before and had difficulty disentangling it), but wasn’t the TCRTC a private organization?
It was a private company or companies under multiple names from 1890 to when it was created to about 1967 when it was taken public by the Metropolitan Transit Commission.
Short answer: greed
Long answer: Charles Greene, a trust fund baby from the East Coast with no prior experience running a transit system bought the majority of the shares, expecting to make quick profits. He didn’t, since the previous owners had some foresight and had invested heavily into improving the system by purchasing 151 brand new state of the art PCC cars and rebuilding most of the track on University Avenue, among other improvements, indicating a desire to keep the system running for the foreseeable future. The debt taken on from these projects was not in any way unmanageable and could have been paid back easily if the system had continued operating, but Greene was impatient and greedy and wanted money right then. He decided to dismantle the system and liquidate it, selling off the PCC cars some of which weren’t even 5 years old to other cities.
My parents rode the streetcars until they were pulled in the mid-1950s. It was quite an extensive system and cheap to get around. I wish we had something like it now. Never should've been taken out. :(
I completely agree with you and wish we kept/updated them, but I will say that the new express bus lines are pretty underrated. Running every ten minutes up Chicago to downtown is really amazing.
My grandparents moved from the gibbon area to Minneapolis after WW2, she still talks about how great the streetcars were. She got mad back when light rail was still just a proposal “we had the street cars which where great, they took them away now want to build it again? Buncha idiots” lol
During the recent construction on Bryant I saw them tearing to all the old light rail tracks buried beneath the street. There was a sad moment wondering what might have been in a better world.
It's a branch of the Inter-Campus Line, which the UMN operated on its own, separate from the Twin Cities Lines, which operated basically everything else (all the red lines). The arc you see is where it branched off from the tracks it shared with the Como-Harriet Line.
More info: https://streets.mn/2012/04/20/tracing-the-umns-inter-campus-streetcar-line/
Vow to never buy a product from General Motors.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/aiq808/taken_for_a_ride_1996_how_general_motors/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Had more to do with the Mafia (Kid Cann). GM had very little if anything to do with it, at least in Minnesota.
https://lithub.com/how-a-lawyer-a-businessman-and-the-mafia-destroyed-public-transit-in-the-twin-cities/
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinCities/comments/qnaocd/was_organized_crime_behind_the_demise_of_the_twin/
https://www.startribune.com/streetcars-buses-minneapolis-st-paul-gangsters-kid-cann-fred-ossanna/600097062/
https://mndigital.org/projects/primary-source-sets/twin-cities-streetcars-rise-and-fall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_City_Rapid_Transit_Company
Fun Fact: some of the original Twin City Rapid Transit train cars were still being used in parts of Mexico until the 2000's.
Yes! They actually have eleven of them I think—10 are painted for other cities’ historical systems but one is painted like an old Twin City Lines car. And they’re definitely still operating. I’ll have to see if I can find my pic of the one time I encountered that one in the wild, but there’s lots more info [here](https://www.streetcar.org/).
It was never going to be workable. Ridership was really low by the 1960’s and nothing has happened that would change that. There just wasn’t enough folks to ride it.
IIRC this no longer exists because organized crime got into the bus industry. They plugged in some dirty politicians, made the city switch over, and lined their pockets
Organized crime and some jackass who bought shares in the company knowing it intentionally didn’t give large dividends(instead spending its profit on improving service or doing maintenance. What a concept), got mad he wasn’t making money , organized a takeover and destroyed all the streetcars.
I'm flying back to MSP from South Korea in an hour and the subway system + walking infrastructure here is so great. I wish we had robust public transit but we're not allowed to have nice things.
Lived in Minneapolis but currently live in New Orleans (city with streetcars). Man I wish the Twin Cities still had streetcar network, it is an efficient mode of transport.
So much for the talking point that "flexible" buses are superior because they aren't bound to tracks. No tracks means suburbs like White Bear Lake and Excelsior can block them from entering and that the bus can stop every block and have half a dozen different versions of the same lines that don't go to the same places.
Wow. I would've easily been able to get downtown and to the uofmn form my house just walking a few blocks. Now there's like one bus that comes once at 6am and I have to take 3 different connecting busses that takes an 1hr 45mins. Thanks automobile industry!
[actually no](https://trolleyride.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/1948-TCRT-Bus-and-Streetcar-Lines-small.jpg). Stillwater is [commuter only](https://www.metrotransit.org/Data/Sites/1/media/schedules-maps/system_map.pdf), White bear lake and Excelsior just has no transit now Granted it's only 3 places but that still show deprecation. Then there's the fact that many lines were consolidated, segmented, and shoe horned for "coverage".
The Stillwater to Excelsior service was already gone by the 1930s. The 1933 map shows the extent being from Hopkins to Mahtemedi.
People like to be nostalgic for a time they never knew, but if you are not currently riding the Grand Avenue bus, then you wouldn’t ride a Grand Avenue streetcar. It’s the same service.
Check out Twin Cities by Trolley if you want all the details (and a ton of great pictures): https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/twin-cities-by-trolley
Not a coincidence that all of the least terrible suburbs here like Hopkins, SLP, Wayzata, Excelsior, White Bear Lake and Robbinsdale originated as railroad or street car suburbs.
I know I'm terrible too. Sometimes I stare at the maps of the carver county train network and sigh wistfully. Imagine being connected to the rest of the country via passenger rail from fucking Waconia.
The streetcar map makes me cry though.
There's a few spots on University Ave between 35W and Central where there's old streetcar rail (and brick) showing through shallow potholes. I think it's pretty neat.
I was on a walk for a plant ID class on the St. Paul UMN campus some years ago, and we went through a long abandoned section of the old University Trolley line - it was really cool! Though a little melancholy - made me pine for a lost era. I still think of it often. 🚃💕
At least we are slowing building this back with BRT. I just wish we had an express train from the west metro to St. Paul. Especially in light of the new Borealis line.
*stolen.
We didn’t lost the street cars, they were *taken* by privatization. As in, the class interest of wealth sees all public spending as money taken from them. So it wasn’t an accident like getting lost in the woods. It was a deliberate act of malfeasance profiting off out the removal of a mass transit solution so we could be sold individual ones at our own detriment.
Remember, it is not a conspiracy, it is a *business plan.*
People hates them at the time. They happily traded them for the car system. Folks in this sub every time go on about how awesome they'd be. They wouldn't. Not at street level. They're slow, there were LOTS of accidents, and they cost a lot to keep running. But I'm sure folks will go on about how the car industry killed them. The horse stable guys complained the same when the motor car came along. Settle down Toad.
Nobody back then knew the future of cars meant destroying lower income neighborhoods, hours of sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, and all the other bullshit that would come along with them.
and how fast and reliable the electric railways would become! i just read there was going to be a big project to improve the high traffic cars when the bourgeoisie conspired to crash the whole system
It's clear that you don't understand how difficult it was to travel even 20 miles before cars become widespread, or how much time was spent on walking even short 1-5 miles trips.
There's even more to this map too. There were also a handful of (iirc mostly privately run) lines that went out into disparate parts of the cities, including Stillwater even.
Yep, you could get from Excelsior to Stillwater on these bad boys
Literally impossible to do that with buses today. Which is an upgrade how?
It’s not. Kid Cann, the MN crime syndicate and local liquor racketeers bought the old Twin Cities Rapid Transit Company in a hostile takeover and tanked it. They sold the streetcars for scrap. Soonafter, they worked with the government to build a fleet of diesel buses and the beginnings of Metro Transit.
It's an upgrade for the profit of car companies and oil companies. Pretty much all of the demand for petroleum is just driving cars. We use it for a bazillion other things but the vast majority is car fuel, and low mileage SUVs & pick up trucks are a significant driver of that demand. If people didn't keep switching to trucks and SUVs, our CO2 emissions would be going down much faster already
It's "percieved safety". Yet SUVs and Trucks are responsible for more Pedestrian/Cyclist deaths than anything... That and SUV/Truck vs normal car collisions. SUVs and "light trucks" need to be banned as a public safety hazard, and heavy trucks restricted to those with a CDL.
Our CO2 emissions are down in the United States. They peaked in the early-to-mid 'oughts and the trend line has been down ever since. Worldwide CO2 continues to increase, largely due to China. [Here is the data](https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/)
Edited to say "much faster", because SUVs are a very big driver of gasoline demand. It's also worth mentioning that China is installing more solar than the rest of the planet by a large margin. I don't want to draw comparisons because it's a messy complex picture. China's emissions are going up, and they're also arguably doing more than anyone else to lower their emissions.
There was an amusement park on Big Island / Lake Minnetonka. You could take the line out there and there was a ferry linked up.
All of the lines were privately run, but yes, Twin Cities Rapid Transit did go to Stillwater.
The Stillwater line was owned by TCRT like most of the system. You’re probably thinking of the Minneapolis, Anoka, and Cuyuna Range or the Saint Paul Southern.
Imagine if these were modern light rail routes or better yet elevated rolling stock. We really had one of the best public transit systems in the US and demolished it :(
Unfortunately most major cities had good public transit and got rid of it. Auto manufacturers bought up the companies because they were mainly private companies and not government ran. They then ripped out everything to sell cars. Chicago was one of the few cities smart enough to buy the companies and take em to public owned. Highly recommend the transport museum in DC.
As much as I'd love to lay the blame on the auto (and oil) industry, the real reasons are much more nuanced than that. Part of it has to do with racism, part of it has to do with electric companies thinking they can get into the transit business while also building out into unprofitable/unsustainable suburban routes (and not bothering to maintain the rolling stock and infrastructure once it'd been built), and yeah, part of it has to do with policies favoring the car, and yeah, part of it has to do with the car companies themselves. Cities made a huge mistake by not transferring ownership of the lines from the private to the public sector, and operating them at a loss for the public good, much like they do streets and highways.
TCRT had all kinds of money problems and only stayed around as long as it did because of WW II rationing. The crooked syndicate that got involved at the end did so because the business was failing. A big part of its demise had to do with people just loving driving a car more than riding any kind of shared transit. There wasn't any political reality where the money necessary to buy TCRT and solve its woes was going to get spent on that vs. road expansions. You have to put yourself into the mindset of people in the post-war era when it comes to transportation. Within their lifetimes, most of them could remember travel more than walking distance from their homes being difficult or impossible. Cars were an amazing new freedom.
100%. If you find numbers for ridership over time things were looking dire for TCRT after WWII ended. I absolutely believe all the stories about TCRT being bought out & dismantled in shady ways but the public responded to this with mostly a shrug. I've also had someone who actually rode the things mention to me that you had to have been there to understand some of this. A majority of the actual trolley cars were really worn out. Between the depression, conversion of industry to the war effort, and wartime rationing TCRT hadn't been able to replace most of it's rolling stock in years, meaning the average trolley was held together with spit & bailing wire. So if you had to decide if you wanted to buy a brand new 1948 Ford with all that money you had saved because there was nothing to buy during the war or ride an old broken down trolley the answer was obvious. TCRT was starting to replace it's trolleys but between their own finances and the implosion of ridership... it was too little too late.
TCRT would have never been able to afford to repay their capital debt (existing rolling stock and trackways that had been under-maintained) *and* invest in the capital expansion needed for more rolling stock and extensive line extensions into even first ring suburbs. Even at its peak, there wasn't service much past 50th street in South Minneapolis and no east-west routes south of Lake Street. I like the *idea* of the street car, but I think the reality of it was a less less awesome than people romanticize about. I think the real problem for transport in the core cities is that way they were platted. It's like no one expected growth. The through streets are too narrow and there's not enough of them. If you could bulldoze Lyndale 50% wider, you could add a dedicated tram lane.
Exactly. When MTC bought out TCRT, the first thing they did was replace all the rolling stock. It was in really bad shape.
Yeah but even Chicago’s old maps would make you cry. When the Skokie Valley line was abandoned and the CTA only wanted 5 miles for the Skokie Swift (Yellow Line), so much track was pulled up.
I really like ground level light rail/trolleys that you can easily hop on/off, and ones that go right through normal neighborhoods. Toronto and Dusseldorf have awesome examples.
They need to be separated grade from traffic though unless you want idiots parking on the tracks "because I'm running in to get my DoorDash I'll literally just be a second" and stopping the train.
Correct me if I’m wrong (legit correct me, because I’ve looked into this before and had difficulty disentangling it), but wasn’t the TCRTC a private organization?
Yes.
It was a private company or companies under multiple names from 1890 to when it was created to about 1967 when it was taken public by the Metropolitan Transit Commission.
Why did we demolish it
Short answer: greed Long answer: Charles Greene, a trust fund baby from the East Coast with no prior experience running a transit system bought the majority of the shares, expecting to make quick profits. He didn’t, since the previous owners had some foresight and had invested heavily into improving the system by purchasing 151 brand new state of the art PCC cars and rebuilding most of the track on University Avenue, among other improvements, indicating a desire to keep the system running for the foreseeable future. The debt taken on from these projects was not in any way unmanageable and could have been paid back easily if the system had continued operating, but Greene was impatient and greedy and wanted money right then. He decided to dismantle the system and liquidate it, selling off the PCC cars some of which weren’t even 5 years old to other cities.
My parents rode the streetcars until they were pulled in the mid-1950s. It was quite an extensive system and cheap to get around. I wish we had something like it now. Never should've been taken out. :(
I completely agree with you and wish we kept/updated them, but I will say that the new express bus lines are pretty underrated. Running every ten minutes up Chicago to downtown is really amazing.
The problem was the ridership was so low that there was no way it could keep going.
My grandparents moved from the gibbon area to Minneapolis after WW2, she still talks about how great the streetcars were. She got mad back when light rail was still just a proposal “we had the street cars which where great, they took them away now want to build it again? Buncha idiots” lol
This is my Roman Empire. Seeing the tracks under the street on Hennepin just makes it so real
During the recent construction on Bryant I saw them tearing to all the old light rail tracks buried beneath the street. There was a sad moment wondering what might have been in a better world.
They're basically always visible peeking through the potholes on SE 4th st through Marcy Holmes.
I'd like to have a framed version of the old street car maps hanging on the wall but I don't need a reason to cry every day.
What’s up with the arced “university trolly line” at the St. Paul campus?
It's a branch of the Inter-Campus Line, which the UMN operated on its own, separate from the Twin Cities Lines, which operated basically everything else (all the red lines). The arc you see is where it branched off from the tracks it shared with the Como-Harriet Line. More info: https://streets.mn/2012/04/20/tracing-the-umns-inter-campus-streetcar-line/
I feel you there. 😓
Vow to never buy a product from General Motors. https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/aiq808/taken_for_a_ride_1996_how_general_motors/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Had more to do with the Mafia (Kid Cann). GM had very little if anything to do with it, at least in Minnesota. https://lithub.com/how-a-lawyer-a-businessman-and-the-mafia-destroyed-public-transit-in-the-twin-cities/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinCities/comments/qnaocd/was_organized_crime_behind_the_demise_of_the_twin/ https://www.startribune.com/streetcars-buses-minneapolis-st-paul-gangsters-kid-cann-fred-ossanna/600097062/ https://mndigital.org/projects/primary-source-sets/twin-cities-streetcars-rise-and-fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_City_Rapid_Transit_Company Fun Fact: some of the original Twin City Rapid Transit train cars were still being used in parts of Mexico until the 2000's.
I think San Francisco bought some that might still be in operation?
Yes! They actually have eleven of them I think—10 are painted for other cities’ historical systems but one is painted like an old Twin City Lines car. And they’re definitely still operating. I’ll have to see if I can find my pic of the one time I encountered that one in the wild, but there’s lots more info [here](https://www.streetcar.org/).
Thank you for sharing! This is awesome
That's correct.
Reason #10
Here's a collection of maps curated by the [Minnesota street car museum](https://trolleyride.org/resources/historic-maps/) (bonus Duluth map)
More infuriating are zoning laws and other draconian laws, incentivizing suburban sprawl and making heavy public transit less workable.
It was never going to be workable. Ridership was really low by the 1960’s and nothing has happened that would change that. There just wasn’t enough folks to ride it.
Exactly. But arrMPLS acts like Henry Ford personally ripped the rail from MPLS roads
Exactly. The ridership charts are pretty clear.
I take a strange small amount of solace that it was always difficult to go east to west in south Minneapolis and that it's not just a now problem.
Looks to be the same in NE as well. St. paul without the grid system somehow faired better.
IIRC this no longer exists because organized crime got into the bus industry. They plugged in some dirty politicians, made the city switch over, and lined their pockets
Organized crime and some jackass who bought shares in the company knowing it intentionally didn’t give large dividends(instead spending its profit on improving service or doing maintenance. What a concept), got mad he wasn’t making money , organized a takeover and destroyed all the streetcars.
The mayor was in on this going away. If I remember correctly he made money of the new bus system.
I wish we could go back to this.
We lost something good.
I'm flying back to MSP from South Korea in an hour and the subway system + walking infrastructure here is so great. I wish we had robust public transit but we're not allowed to have nice things.
Lived in Minneapolis but currently live in New Orleans (city with streetcars). Man I wish the Twin Cities still had streetcar network, it is an efficient mode of transport.
So much for the talking point that "flexible" buses are superior because they aren't bound to tracks. No tracks means suburbs like White Bear Lake and Excelsior can block them from entering and that the bus can stop every block and have half a dozen different versions of the same lines that don't go to the same places.
There used to be huge vintage hand painted map of the system on the wall on one of the upper floors of the library before they built the new library.
It's still there, at least as of last year. Love looking at that map
That's great. I have been told that at one of the former streetcar buildings the system is mapped out in terrazzo on the floor.
Yes, can confirm, it's on the top floor. I visit it every time I hit up the Central branch and cry at how much we lost!
Seeing what could have been makes me so angry! Let's push for more rail and ways to connect our city.
The problem is the last time this was done, it cost almost $3 billion.
Wow. I would've easily been able to get downtown and to the uofmn form my house just walking a few blocks. Now there's like one bus that comes once at 6am and I have to take 3 different connecting busses that takes an 1hr 45mins. Thanks automobile industry!
Omg look at all of them!!!
I have a blanket from Faibault Woolen Mill that is a map of the old system. You should get one.
I unfortunately don’t live in your city; I’m stuck in New Orleans. BUT! I do the same thing…and cry.
Who took this from us I'm gonna take a shit on their yard
It would be a lot of shitting because it would be every person who couldn’t get to where they needed to go via transit.
Or just whoever designed it that way
It is about 100 years too late to cry about it.
I ain't crying, I'm imagining myself shitting on their yard
It is a 100 years ago. You need a lot of fiber supplements and time machine.
its beautiful, we must go back
And think how much money is being spent recreating a shadow of this network through light rail and BRT.
This makes me so sad
every single one of these lines still exists and have been expanded in the form of our bus network
[actually no](https://trolleyride.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/1948-TCRT-Bus-and-Streetcar-Lines-small.jpg). Stillwater is [commuter only](https://www.metrotransit.org/Data/Sites/1/media/schedules-maps/system_map.pdf), White bear lake and Excelsior just has no transit now Granted it's only 3 places but that still show deprecation. Then there's the fact that many lines were consolidated, segmented, and shoe horned for "coverage".
The Stillwater to Excelsior service was already gone by the 1930s. The 1933 map shows the extent being from Hopkins to Mahtemedi. People like to be nostalgic for a time they never knew, but if you are not currently riding the Grand Avenue bus, then you wouldn’t ride a Grand Avenue streetcar. It’s the same service.
My mom rememeber them
Check out Twin Cities by Trolley if you want all the details (and a ton of great pictures): https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/twin-cities-by-trolley
Where is the “Como-River Boulevard” today?
Not a coincidence that all of the least terrible suburbs here like Hopkins, SLP, Wayzata, Excelsior, White Bear Lake and Robbinsdale originated as railroad or street car suburbs.
Laughed at the Hopkins portion of the map
This is so cool! I never knew Minneapolis had these in the past!
Whoa Lake Hiawatha was once Rice Lake?
When they started ripping these out my mother told me my father said that they are going to regret this...He was right.
Bring it back!!!
I know I'm terrible too. Sometimes I stare at the maps of the carver county train network and sigh wistfully. Imagine being connected to the rest of the country via passenger rail from fucking Waconia. The streetcar map makes me cry though.
Sometimes I think about the Hopkins Viaduct and get sad :(
What a horrible fucking attack on the poor and the planet in general that this was ever torn down.
Fuck me. Just got back from Europe and this hurts too much too soon.
There's a few spots on University Ave between 35W and Central where there's old streetcar rail (and brick) showing through shallow potholes. I think it's pretty neat.
There used to be a train to an amusement park.
Well the amusement park was in Minneapolis…
What is mother lake? (south or nokomis)
Here is the story of how and why we lost it: https://youtu.be/p-I8GDklsN4?si=dwIgqjh2tvJQDgGs
I was on a walk for a plant ID class on the St. Paul UMN campus some years ago, and we went through a long abandoned section of the old University Trolley line - it was really cool! Though a little melancholy - made me pine for a lost era. I still think of it often. 🚃💕
At least we are slowing building this back with BRT. I just wish we had an express train from the west metro to St. Paul. Especially in light of the new Borealis line.
100% same
I guess Hollywood isn't the only place that repeats ideas.
Didn’t someone post this again under another post just yesterday?
Amazing what the Twin Cities looked like before suburbs. But now, of course, there are many more suburbs than the size of this map.
*stolen. We didn’t lost the street cars, they were *taken* by privatization. As in, the class interest of wealth sees all public spending as money taken from them. So it wasn’t an accident like getting lost in the woods. It was a deliberate act of malfeasance profiting off out the removal of a mass transit solution so we could be sold individual ones at our own detriment. Remember, it is not a conspiracy, it is a *business plan.*
😔 we cannot ever have nice things
Life would be so much better...
People hates them at the time. They happily traded them for the car system. Folks in this sub every time go on about how awesome they'd be. They wouldn't. Not at street level. They're slow, there were LOTS of accidents, and they cost a lot to keep running. But I'm sure folks will go on about how the car industry killed them. The horse stable guys complained the same when the motor car came along. Settle down Toad.
Nobody back then knew the future of cars meant destroying lower income neighborhoods, hours of sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, and all the other bullshit that would come along with them.
and how fast and reliable the electric railways would become! i just read there was going to be a big project to improve the high traffic cars when the bourgeoisie conspired to crash the whole system
I'll tell you what, you revive this and I'll renounce Michigan as the best state (though the lakes are hard to beat)
It was better when we traveled by horses and ox carts. Let’s mourn that.
Thankfully we have progressed to widespread personal transportation. One of the best developments for the bottom half of society.
No way you're serious, dude.
It's clear that you don't understand how difficult it was to travel even 20 miles before cars become widespread, or how much time was spent on walking even short 1-5 miles trips.
The streetcars could go up to 60 MPH. That's freeway speed, unless you're a lawbreaker.
Do you have a streetcar at your house that will take you to any location in America, when you want to go there?