Chart: America’s Streetcar Renaissance » INFRASTRUCTURIST
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Chart: America’s Streetcar Renaissance
Posted on Monday May 4th by Yonah Freemark
Streetcars were a common sight in U.S. cities at the beginning of the 20th century, but by the 1960s, they had been wiped out, usually replaced by buses deemed cheaper to operate and more comfortable. A few cities like San Francisco and New Orleans preserved several of their lines and continued to run historic trolley cars.
Until recently, though, there has been little interest in the United States in building new street-running train networks, with communities more likely to focus on faster — but more expensive — light rail transit systems, which operate in their own rights-of-way.
In 2001, Portland reversed the trend, opening a downtown streetcar line with brand new rolling stock, intent on using this mode of transportation to encourage transit-oriented development. The results have been impressive: $3.5 billion in new construction, 10,000 residential units, more than 5,000,000 square feet of office and hotel space. Politicians and transportation experts have flocked to Portland to see the results, and cities across the country are now pondering systems of their own. This map provides a description of current proposals for modern streetcar networks in metropolitan areas around the country and their development status. It also indicates where historic systems, either never terminated or newly restored, operate today.
See the full-sized version of the chart after the jump.
Click here for a map for a larger version: americas-modern-streetcar
Yonah Freemark is an independent researcher currently working in France on comparative urban development as part of a Gordon Grand Fellowship from Yale University, from which he graduated in May 2008 with a BA in architecture. He writes about transportation and land use issues for The Transport Politic and The Infrastructurist.
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