Streetcars In North America
Electric streetcars—trams outside North America—once were the chief mode of public transit in scores of North American cities. Most municipal systems were dismantled in the mid-20th century.
Today, only Toronto and New Orleans still operate streetcar networks that are essentially unchanged in their layout and mode of operation.
Boston, Cleveland, Mexico City, Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco have rebuilt their streetcar systems as light rail systems. Buffalo, Calgary, Dallas, Edmonton, Houston, Los Angeles, Norfolk, Minneapolis, San Diego, Charlotte, St. Louis and other cities have installed new light rail systems, parts of which run along historic streetcar corridors and in a few cases feature mixed-traffic operation like a streetcar. Portland, Oregon and Seattle have built both modern light rail and modern streetcar systems.
Edmonton, Memphis, Seattle, Vancouver, Whitehorse, and other cities have restored a small number of streetcars to run as heritage lines for tourists.
Read more about Streetcars In North America: Surviving Systems, New Systems, Heritage Streetcar Systems, Museums
Famous quotes containing the words north america, north and/or america:
“The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“When the Somalians were merely another hungry third world people, we sent them guns. Now that they are falling down dead from starvation, we send them troops. Some may see in this a tidy metaphor for the entire relationship between north and south. But it would make a whole lot more sense nutritionallyas well as providing infinitely more vivid viewingif the Somalians could be persuaded to eat the troops.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I do not share the gloomy thought that Negroes in America are doomed to be stomped out bodaciously, nor even shackled to the bottom of things. Of course some of them will be tromped out, and some will always be at the bottom, keeping company with other bottom-folks.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (18911960)