Washington's first streetcars trundled down Pennsylvania Avenue during the Civil War. By the end of the century, streetcar lines crisscrossed the city, expanding it into the suburbs and defining where Washingtonians lived, worked and played. One of the most beloved routes was the scenic Cabin John line to the amusement park in Glen Echo, Maryland. From the quaint early days of small horse-drawn cars to the modern "streamliners" of the twentieth century, the stories are all here. Join author John DeFerrari on a joyride through the fascinating history of streetcars in the nation's capital.
Street Cars of Washington D.C. is a photographic essay of the history of the well-kept modern street car system that provided frequent transit service to much of our nation's capital up to its closure in January, 1962. Washington D.C. was the first North American city to operate its entire base service by President's Conference Committee (PCC) cars. Washington D.C. had the fifth largest PCC car fleet in North America. While these cars had poles for overhead wire operation, they were the only PCC cars in the world equipped with plows for conduit operation. Washington D.C. PCC cars, all built by St. Louis Car Company, were about two foot shorter in length or one less window than other PCC cars, because of short clearances in car house transfer tables. The Silver Sightseer in Washington D.C. was the world's first air conditioned street car. Fifty four years later in February 2016, street cars returned to Washington D.C. All of this has been included in Street Cars of Washington D.C.
The DC Streetcar makes traveling within the District much easier for residents and visitors, connecting commuters to the bustling H Street NE neighborhood up to Benning Road with a modern twist. The innovative streetcar design is a far cry from the days when the District's streetcars were drawn by horse. Operating on fixed rails with low floors for quick and easy boarding and wheelchair accessibility, each streetcar can accommodate about 150 people, seated and standing. The average streetcar travels between 25 and 35 miles per hour. The H Street/Benning Road Line is currently the only route and runs east starting from Union Station toward Oklahoma Avenue and west starting at the Benning Road/Oklahoma Avenue stop. The streetcars run every 10-15 minutes. The Streetcar Tracker provides real-time vehicle arrivals for eastbound and westbound travel.
Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. Right to Ride<
The DC Streetcar makes traveling within the District much easier for residents and visitors, connecting commuters to the bustling H Street NE neighborhood up to Benning Road with a modern twist. The innovative streetcar design is a far cry from the days when the District's streetcars were drawn by horse. Operating on fixed rails with low floors for quick and easy boarding and wheelchair accessibility, each streetcar can accommodate about 150 people, seated and standing. The average streetcar travels between 25 and 35 miles per hour. The H Street/Benning Road Line is currently the only route and runs east starting from Union Station toward Oklahoma Avenue and west starting at the Benning Road/Oklahoma Avenue stop. The streetcars run every 10-15 minutes. The Streetcar Tracker provides real-time vehicle arrivals for eastbound and westbound travel.
This deeply felt memoir is a love letter to Washington, DC. Lancaster, a third-generation Washingtonian, takes readers on a tour of the capital from its swamp-infested beginnings to the present day, with an insider's view of the gritty politics, environment, society, culture, and larger-than-life heroes that characterize her beloved hometown.
Chicago's extensive transit system first started in 1859, when horsecars ran on rails in city streets. Cable cars and electric streetcars came next. Where new trolley car lines were built, people, businesses, and neighborhoods followed. Chicago quickly became a world-class city. At its peak, Chicago had over 3,000 streetcars and 1,000 miles of track--the largest such system in the world. By the 1930s, there were also streamlined trolleys and trolley buses on rubber tires. Some parts of Chicago's famous "L" system also used trolley wire instead of a third rail. Trolley cars once took people from the Loop to such faraway places as Aurora, Elgin, Milwaukee, and South Bend. A few still run today.
"The public-private partnerships of the future will need to embody a triple-bottom-line approach that focuses on the new P3: people-planet-profit. This book is for anyone who wants to improve the way that we live in cities, without waiting for the glacial pace of change in government or corporate settings. If you are willing to go against the tide and follow some basic lessons in goal setting, experimentation, change management, financial innovation, and communication, real change in cities is possible."--Publisher's description.
Seattle's first street railway opened in 1884, with two horses per streetcar. By 1899 ten companies operated trolleys and cable in the city--and hillside properties became prized building lots. A decade later, all but one were run by Seattle Electric Company, and their 103 million passenger ridership was equivalent to every Seattleite boarding a streetcar 435 times a year. Seattle voters approved municipal ownership in 1918, and the mayor issued bonds to fund the $15 million purchase. Bus routes and several line extensions followed, but the debt load and the Great Depression forced the system into disrepair, and the Seattle Municipal Railway converted to trolley and motor buses. Author Michael Bergman worked as a transit planner for Sound Transit and King County Metro Transit for more than 35 years. Through narrative, maps, and previously unpublished photographs, he delivers a detailed jaunt through Seattle's fascinating streetcar era.
The fight for the future of the city street between pedestrians, street railways, and promoters of the automobile between 1915 and 1930. Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” He considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
