The Key Word Is 'Public'

Most of us have the vague sense that there was a ‘golden age of the trolley’ in which transit systems made money hauling full carloads of passengers. For some systems there were a few good years.

But most systems, most of the time, did not make much money, and it usually took little more than a fire in a carbarn to put the system in receivership.

But people wanted transportation, and quite a bit of America, at one time or another, had rails- carrying horsecars, cablecars, steamcars, and finally the streetcars and interurbans. At the bottom line this was financed and built by the public.

The cablecars were perhaps the most costly and complex form of land transportation ever devised. A central power station pulled cables ten miles long, around corners and up and down hills. It was always a big night on the system when they replaced the cable. Most of these systems were broke when the first car rolled, but the public chipped in and kept them going.

The streetcars, in their day, were the social centers. They went to cemeteries, ball parks, and picnic parks, or simply served as a cool ride on a summers evening before air conditioning. They carried caskets in special cars, wedding parties in special cars, sightseers, and even the mail on occasion. To try to grasp their importance, remember that Brooklyn at one time had a dense net of streetcars on the surface above the subways.

The coming of the automobile, of course, changed all that, and in the lifetimes of most of us the private car, with the emphasis on the word private, has served as our roll model. Whether a society as finely atomized as the gasoline injected into their pistons can re-integrate itself into a social whole remains to be seen.

It is always frustrating, in our atomized society, to reflect on the public measures needed to build transit. But the day of the ginormous subsidies to the automobile is drawing to a close, and much sooner than we think, the question will be, not how to build transit, but how to build it well.