Omnibuses and horsecars in 1895. The first streetcar lines in North America were opened in New York City in 1832. From the 1820s to the 1880s urban transit in North America began when horse-drawn
omnibus lines started to operate along city streets. Examples included
Gilbert Vanderwerken's 1826 omnibus service in
Newark, New Jersey. Before long Omnibus companies sought to boost profitability of their wagons by increasing ridership along their lines.
Horsecar lines simply ran wagons along rails set in a city street instead of on the unpaved street surface as the omnibus lines used. When a wagon was drawn upon rails the
rolling resistance of the vehicle was lowered and the average speed was increased. A horse or team that rode along rails could carry more fare paying passengers per day of operation than those that did not have rails. North America's first streetcar lines opened in 1832 from downtown
New York City to
Harlem by the
New York and Harlem Railroad, in 1834 in New Orleans, and in 1849 in Toronto along the
Williams Omnibus Bus Line. These streetcars used horses and sometimes mules. Mules were thought to give more hours per day of useful transit service than horses and were especially popular in the south in cities such as New Orleans, Louisiana. In many cities, streetcars drawn by a single animal were known as "bobtail streetcars" whether mule-drawn or horse-drawn. By the mid-1880s, there were 415 street railway companies in the U.S. operating over of track and carrying 188 million passengers per year using animal-drawn cars. In the nineteenth century
Mexico had streetcars in around 1,000 towns and many were animal-powered. The 1907
Anuario Estadístico lists 35 animal-powered streetcar lines in
Veracruz state, 80 in
Guanajuato, and 300 lines in
Yucatán. "trucks" in
Cuzamá, 2010. Horse-drawn streetcars are still used in Cuzamá. Although most animal-drawn lines were shut down in the 19th century, a few lines lasted into the 20th century and later. Toronto's horse-drawn streetcar operations ended in 1891. New York City saw regular horsecar service last until 1917. In
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Sarah Street line lasted until 1923. The last regular mule-drawn cars in the United States ran in
Sulphur Rock, Arkansas, until 1926 and were commemorated by a
U.S. Postage Stamp issued in 1983. The last mule tram service in
Mexico City ended in 1932, and a mule-powered line in Celaya, survived until May 1954. In the 21st century, horsecars are still used to take visitors along the tour of the 3
cenotes from Chunkanán near
Cuzamá Municipality in the state of Yucatán. Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, Cal., has operated a short horsecar line since it opened in July 1955. Similarly, Disney World theme park in Orlando has operated a short horsecar line since it opened in Oct 1971. At both parks, they run from 8-9am to 1:30-2pm, and, depending on the season, sometimes 5-7pm.
Early power , advocating the switch from horsecars to electric streetcars, October 1893 During the nineteenth century, particularly from the 1860s to the 1890s, many streetcar operators switched from animals to other types of motive power. Before the use of electricity the use of
steam dummies,
tram engines, or
cable cars was tried in several North American cities. A notable transition took place in Washington, D.C., in the U.S. where horsecars were used on street railways from 1862 to the early 1890s. From about 1890 to 1893 cable drives provided motive power to Washington streetcars, and after 1893 electricity powered the cars. The advantages of eliminating animal drive power included dispensing with the need to feed the animals and clean up their waste. A North American city that did not eliminate its cable car lines was San Francisco and much of its
San Francisco cable car system continues to operate to this day. In this transition period some early streetcar lines in large cities opted to rebuild their railways above or below grade to help further speed transit. Such system would become known as
rapid transit or later as
heavy rail lines.
Electrification . Electric streetcars were introduced to
Montgomery in 1886. The
World Cotton Centennial was held in
New Orleans, Louisiana, from December 16, 1884, to June 2, 1885. It featured displays with a great deal of electric light illumination, an observation tower with electric elevators, and several prototype designs of electric streetcars.
Montgomery, Alabama, established its electric streetcar system nicknamed the
Lightning Route on April 15, 1886. Another early electrified streetcar system in the United States was established in
Scranton, Pennsylvania, by November 30, 1886; it was the first system to be run exclusively on electric power, giving Scranton the nickname "The Electric City". In 1887 an electric streetcar line opened between
Omaha and
South Omaha,
Nebraska. The Omaha Motor Railway Company began operation in 1888.
Growth streetcar and
interurban lines. The rapid growth of streetcar systems in the late-19th century led to the development of
streetcar suburbs in North America. By 1889 110 electric railways incorporating Sprague's equipment had been started or were planned on several continents. By 1895 almost 900 electric street railways and nearly 11,000 miles (18,000 km) of track had been built in the United States. ,
1907 The rapid growth of streetcar systems led to the widespread ability of people to live outside of a city and commute into it for work on a daily basis. Several of the communities that grew as a result of this new mobility were known as
streetcar suburbs. Another outgrowth of the popularity of urban streetcar systems was the rise of
interurban lines, which were basically streetcars that operated between cities and served remote, even rural, areas. In some areas interurban lines competed with regular passenger service on mainline railroads and in others they simply complemented the mainline roads by serving towns not on the mainlines. The largest of these was the Pacific Electric system in Los Angeles, which had over of track and 2,700 scheduled services each day. The
Hagerstown and Frederick Railway that started in 1896 in northern
Maryland was built to provide transit service to resorts and the streetcar company built and operated two
amusement parks to entice more people to ride their streetcars. The
Lake Shore Electric Railway interurban in northern Ohio carried passengers to
Cedar Point and several other Ohio amusement parks. The
Lake Compounce amusement park, which started in 1846, had by 1895 established trolley service to its rural Connecticut location. Although outside trolley service to Lake Compounce stopped in the 1930s, the park resurrected its trolley past with the "Lakeside Trolley" ride from 1997-2024, when the car was returned to the
Shoreline Trolley Museum. In the days before widespread radio listening was popular and in towns or neighborhoods too small to support a viable amusement park streetcar lines might help to fund an appearance of a touring musical act at the local
bandstand to boost weekend afternoon ridership. Many of Mexico's streetcars were fitted with gasoline motors in the 1920s and some were pulled by steam locomotives. Only 15 Mexican streetcar systems were electrified in the 1920s. at times amounting to prolonged riots and
civil insurrection. Streetcar strikes rank among the deadliest armed conflicts in American labor union history.
Samuel Gompers of the
American Federation of Labor called the
St. Louis Streetcar Strike of 1900 "the fiercest struggle ever waged by the organized toilers" up to that point, with a total casualty count of 14 dead and about 200 wounded. The
San Francisco Streetcar Strike of 1907 saw 30 killed and about 1000 injured.
Decline streetcars in April 1951, a week before streetcar service ended. Streetcars were replaced by
trolleybuses (one of which is seen behind the streetcars). The increased use of automobiles during the 1920s contributed to the decline of many streetcar lines in North America, and the decline continued during the
Great Depression of the 1930s. The onset of World War II held off the closure of some streetcar lines as civilians used them to commute to war related factory jobs during a time when rubber tires and gasoline were rationed. After the war automobile use continued to rise and was assisted in the 1940s and 1950s by the passage of the
Trans-Canada Highway Act of 1948 and growth of provincial highways in Canada as well as the
Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 in the United States. By the 1960s most North American streetcar lines were closed, with only the exceptions noted above and discussed below remaining in service. During the same time all streetcar systems in Central America were scrapped as well. The survival of the lines that made it past the 1960s was aided by the introduction of the successful
PCC streetcar (Presidents' Conference Committee car) in the 1940s and 1950s in all these cities except New Orleans. City buses were seen as more economical and flexible: a bus could carry a number of people similar to that in a streetcar without tracks and associated infrastructure. Many transit operators removed some streetcar tracks but kept the electric infrastructure so as to run electrified trackless
trolley buses. Many such systems lasted only as long as the first generation of equipment, but several survive to the present.
Purported conspiracies streetcars stacked at a
junkyard on
Terminal Island, March 1956 The abandonment of city streetcar systems in the mid-twentieth century led to accusations of conspiracy that held that a union of automobile, oil, and tire manufacturers shut down the streetcar systems in order to further the use of buses and automobiles. The struggling
depression-era streetcar companies were bought up by this union of companies who, over the following decades, dismantled many of the North American streetcar systems. While it is true that
General Motors,
Firestone Tire,
Standard Oil of California,
Phillips Petroleum, and some other companies funded holding companies that purchased about 30 more of the hundreds of transit systems across North America, their real goal was to sell their products — buses, tires, and fuel — to those transit systems as they converted from streetcars to buses. During the time the holding companies owned an interest in American transit systems, more than 300 cities converted to buses. The holding companies only owned an interest in the transit systems of less than fifty of those cities. GM and other companies were subsequently convicted in 1949 of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products via a complex network of linked holding companies including National City Lines and Pacific City Lines. They were also indicted, but acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the ownership of these companies. The former verdict was upheld on
appeal in 1951.
Renaissance Light rail station. As opposed to traditional streetcars, modern light rail systems typically run on
reserved track, and often use
railway platforms instead of street-level stops. The systems described in the paragraphs above and below are genuine streetcars or tramways, with smaller vehicles and mixed-traffic
street running (i.e. no separation from other vehicles), such as those in
New Orleans and
San Francisco. A greater number of North American cities have built
light rail systems in recent decades, some of which operate partially in the right-of-way of city streets, but that mostly operate in exclusive rights-of-way. A few North American 'light rail' systems date to the "first" streetcar era, such as
Boston's Green Line,
Cleveland's Blue and Green Lines,
Mexico City's Xochimilco Light Rail, and the
light rail system in
Newark, New Jersey, and so can be considered "holdovers" or "legacies" from that era. The term
light rail was devised in 1972 by the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA; the precursor to the U.S.
Federal Transit Administration) to describe new streetcar transformations that were taking place in Europe and being planned in North America. Some notable distinctions between light rail systems and their streetcar predecessors were that: • Light rail lines may run at least partially along exclusive rights of way instead of only along or in streets (i.e. without
street running). • A light rail line is more likely to run
multiple unit trains instead of single cars. • A light rail line may use
high level platforms instead of in street level stops. These design differences mean that light rail systems tend to have higher passenger capacities and higher speeds than their streetcar predecessors. is an early example of a North American modern light rail system. The pioneering "modern" North American light rail system,
Edmonton LRT, was started in
Edmonton in 1974 and became operational on April 22, 1978 – it used mostly European technology, did not use street running, and operated in tunnels in the downtown area (which accounted for much of the high expense of building that system). It was soon followed by light rail systems in San Diego and Calgary in 1981 that used similar vehicles but that avoided the expense of tunnels by using surface alignments and, on a few sections, even partial street running, in reserved lanes (restricted to transit vehicles only). The development of light rail systems in North America then proliferated widely after 1985, mostly in the United States, but also in Canada and Mexico. Including streetcars, light rail systems are operating successfully in over 30 U.S. cities, and are in planning or construction stages in several more.
Heritage and modern streetcars New public transit streetcar services also returned, at least in the United States, around the same time as the emergence of the new light rail transit. in
Dallas. The majority of streetcar lines opened in the late-20th century were heritage lines, opened as a tourist service, and not as a "true" public transit line. Prior to 2001, the new streetcar systems that opened in North America for public transit were so-called heritage streetcar systems, alternatively known as "vintage trolley" or "historic trolley" lines. While Detroit and Seattle were the first cities to open heritage lines in 1976 and 1982, their heritage lines ultimately closed in 2003 and 2005, respectively. The first heritage system to be successful was Dallas'
M-Line Trolley, which opened in 1989. Memphis opened what ultimately became a larger heritage streetcar system in 1993, while San Francisco restored one of its defunct streetcar lines (
F Market & Wharves) using heritage streetcar operations in 1995. These heritage systems were followed in the 2000s by new heritage streetcar lines in Kenosha, Tampa, and Little Rock, and the restoration of a defunct streetcar line using heritage streetcars in Philadelphia (
SEPTA Route 15) in 2005. Other cities in both the United States and Canada opened new heritage streetcar lines that operated only on weekends or seasonally, primarily as tourist services, and so didn't provide true "public transit" service. Truly modern streetcar systems arose in the United States, starting in 2001, in Portland, Oregon. This was followed by new streetcar lines in Seattle, Salt Lake City, Tucson, and Atlanta. These systems were completely new in every way, operating on new track built specifically for them, and operating with "modern" streetcar vehicles rather than the "heritage" vehicles used in places like Dallas, Memphis and San Francisco.
Transportation vs. development In 2015, the
Mineta Transportation Institute released a peer-reviewed research report that used key informant interviews to examine the experiences on modern-era streetcars operating in Little Rock, Memphis, Portland, Seattle, and Tampa. The research revealed that in these cities, the primary purpose of the streetcar was to serve as a development tool (in all cities examined), a second objective was to serve as a tourism-promoting amenity (in Little Rock and Tampa), and transportation objectives were largely afterthoughts with the notable exception of Portland, and to a lesser degree, Seattle. ==Surviving first-generation streetcar systems==