Secrets of the City

The other side of the streetcar tunnel under the Summit Hill is unsealed, and looks very cool. Little hard to find, but worth it.

Also cool — the renovated streetcar station in Como Park.

I’m sure this has been dredged up once before, but the old streetcar routes are as valid today as ever.

That video will make wayne cry. Max, you’re a heartless beast.

Also, if you hit up Google Maps around the basilica, this is the east entrance, and you’ll notice in Street View that the neighborhood gets fresh-and-new right around Selby & Farrington, almost as if somoene had completely leveled and redeveloped a one block area in the past few decades of an otherwise-historic neighborhood.

@champs Wow, that’s a great picture in that last link

Based on how often I get cussed out just riding a bike, getting rid of those streetcars probably saved a lot of Minnesotan drivers from heart attacks. If they can’t deal with a 2-foot wide object going 15 mph, they certainly couldn’t deal with a 15-foot wide object going 15 mph.

One important correction: the buses didn’t just “come in,” and it wasn’t due to declining ridership.

Rather transit officials decided, as in scores of cities across the country, to retire the trolleys.

In their place buses created a market for rubber and gas, and they kept the factories rolling.

Sound far-fetched? Truth is, GM, Firestone and Standard Oil Formed a company called National City Lines.

This company ran rail transit systems and dismantled them, creating bus systems instead.

Furthermore, there is strong evidence many city officials nationwide were offered payoffs to support the conversions.

Check out this documentary from PBS’ivess history detectives: http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/pdf/410_electric_car.pdf

I’m proud of the once-ginormous streetcar system the Twin Cities had. Stillwater to Lake Minnetonka? Awesome. However, if I’d been a car driver ca. 1950, I, too, would’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with how inconvenient streetcars were making travel downtown (Mpls or STP) and might’ve wondered how quickly the trolleys could be replaced by buses. (What’s good for GM is good for the country!)

Tokyo once had a sprawling streetcar system, too. Ridership peaked in 1940 but the decline in service started a decade earlier. It was discovered that repairing all the track after the devastating 1923 earthquake was horribly expensive. Much cheaper to start running buses. Two short sections of streetcar line still operate outside the city center but, for the most part, the last streetcar in Tokyo stopped running in 1965.

Construction began in the 1950s to put the streetcars underground. So, all but one of Tokyo’s current 12 subway lines follow the old streetcar routes.

Btw, today (11/26) is the anniversary of the start of public streetcar service in the US. From City Hall to 14th Street, NYC, 1832.