io9
Urban history is littered with the dead bodies of scrapped public transit projects. When eager commuters and car companies turned the automobile into the most popular form of transit in the world in the twentieth century, many cities set aside plans for expanding their public transit systems, such as the electric tram system planned for regions feeding into Melbourne, Australia. In some cases, city planners actually ripped out existing transit systems like Los Angeles' once-enormous cable car network. What would these cities and others look like if their public transit systems had continued to thrive and we lived in a world without cars? We've got five alternate urban histories of public transport for you below.
As you can see above, the city of Los Angeles would look a lot less ugly and disheartening if you could just wipe this traffic jam (photographed by The Infamous Gdub) out of existence and bring the city's formerly glorious cable car system back to life. If you ever want to see the LA cable car system of yore, it makes many exciting appearances in Harold Lloyd's 1923 comedy Safety Last!.
Right now, the city of Baltimore is considering upgrading its mass transit to include aerial gondolas, a system of elevated trams on cables with a tiny carbon footprint. They would initially service mostly the convention center and waterfront areas, but could branch out all over the city. Apparently gondola-makers have recently seen a spike in requests for mass transit systems, and even New York City is considering an aerial gondola to take commuters from Manhattan to Governor's Island and on to Brooklyn. Here is what the proposed gondolas might look like on a typical Baltimore city street (original photo from Zaloudek.net).
Seattle has a long and tragic history with monorails, once believed to be the public transit of the future. Just recently, the city voted to expand its tiny, largely-decorative monorail system, built for the World's Fair back in the 1960s. But urban planners have been trying to make Seattle a monorail city since 1910, when a Seattle monorail was first proposed (and shelved). We have yet to see whether the city will act on this latest vote for the monorail, but this is what you might see in downtown Seattle (original photo by GiSuser) if the system started ferrying commuters.
Although Melbourne has one of the most extensive electronic tram systems in the world, it might have been much bigger if early-twentieth century plans to expand it hadn't been derailed. If you look at images of late-nineteenth century Melbourne, you'll see a peaceful city full of trams and horses, but no traffic jams. Here's what Melbourne might look like today if the automobile had never taken over, and the city had become a haven for trams.
If you've ever visited San Francisco, you know that the downtown area is dominated by a wide street called Market (original photo by Hyku). What you probably don't know is that Market is actually a gushing river that early city planners decided to bury underground just to make everything nicer for carriages — and, later, cars. If we'd built San Francisco to cooperate with the region's actual geography, downtown San Francisco might have a system of canals like the ones in Venice (original photo by Minnaert). People could boat to work instead of burning gas in their cars.
Photoshoppage on all images by Stephanie Fox.
Comments
San Francisco cable cars are good for tourists and as an aesthetic novelty. Otherwise they're slow and noisy.
there are better alternatives.
@capntim: Like gondolas apparently.
And yes, they are slow, but if the rails hadn't been pulled up way back when, we'd have modernised them instead of just switching to cars, no?
There was a post here a month or so back with some hippie ecotopia vision that included urban canals. Sorry, do not want my beloved City transformed into an open sewer "like Venice". Of course, with climate change and rising sea levels we may not have a choice. We'll probably just need more dikes. [insert inevitable joke here]
I'm all for a system of trebuchets and multi-passenger foam rubber pods.
WHHHHhhheeeeeEEEE!!
@aspiringexpatriate: Yeah, I think if Los Angeles had kept its cable car system in place it would have been modernized, and certainly would have been an excellent alternative to the insane traffic jams that prevent you from getting across the city in less than an hour.
@Grey_Area: Still, you have to admit that river looks awesome. It's my new desktop wallpaper.
@capntim: In the Eighties there was serious talk about dismantling the last few cable car lines here. It was torches and pitchforks at City Hall until the City regained it senses--way too big a tourist draw. I'm sitting not thirty feet away from the California Street Line. I love listening to the cable whirring away beneath the street. Charming as f*ck.
@Annalee Newitz: You have a portrait style monitor AND the Mini Manmelter?
"Where does she get all those wonderful toys?"
"Eddie pppppplllease..."
Looks like Judge Doom won after all.
Gorgeous San Fran canal... on the serious tip, why any metro area doesn't have a monorail as effective as Sydney, Australia is a damn shame.
General Motors bought public transportation systems with the sole intention of dismantling them so people would be forced to buy cars. Money to politicians ensured that the taxpayers would foot the bill for roads better suited to GM products.
"Free market" my ass.
We have electric trolleys in Dayton. They are almost always empty. The frequently screw up when their "feelers" jump off the wires. The wires also give off so much RF energy that radios crap out under them - AM, FM, CB, cellular, wifi, GPS, the whole shebang.
A relative of mine worked for the transit authority. They'd have dumped the trolleys years ago, but in a twisted way, the useless crapwagons pay for the rest of the transit system. Seems the Federal Govt pays Dayton for keeping the inefficient rolling vacant echo chambers going. Without that money, all the buses would stop.
Man, it's nice to see Seattle getting its props for its useless monorail. They're finally getting the Sea-Tac-Seattle rail built, but I will not drive to Seattle anymore due to the parking lot that is I-5. A Seattle-Olympia commuter train-thing should have been built a loooong time ago.
There are some misconceptions around LA's rail line. Many further the story that the line was unceremoniously scrapped to make way for freeways, gas-stations and the like. Truth is that cars were already strangling the red car to death. The spiking popularity of cars filled roads and slowed the lines. Frustrated commuters got slowly stopped using them and, themselves, got cars.
Yeah, I meant "they" and not "the" there.
I'd rather see better urban planning (build safe/secure housing close to safe/secure workplaces and safe/secure malls) and more telecommuting.
To a degree, this problem is solving itself. People are voting with their feet. They're moving away from places with high traffic AND places where mass transit is all but required.
Haha, that shot of Melbourne (Collins Street I think?) is more or less exactly what the intersection already looks like, trams and all. Of course, the point of the shot was that there's no cars in the photo, which I admit is a rare scene! Odd choice to apply a Photoshop effect to it though...
Anyway, moving on! I think the Eastern Freeway here in Melbourne was intended to have a train line running up the centre of it, but that unfortunately never happened either. Still, they made room for it, so it may still happen in some fortunate future.
San Francisco's streetcar system used to be quite extensive, AND connected to the peninsula. Not only did they have dedicated streetcars to take kids on field trips, they also had "party cars" one could rent and have drinks and the like before going to the opera or whatever.
They also used to have special "Funeral" cars that would take caskets and mourners to Colma as well.
Funny enough , they knocked out the streetcars on geary because BART was going to go to the ocean, and it was decided that having 2 lines was duplication of service. Anyone see BART headed out to Sutro Baths anytime recently?
What might have been. If we'd put even one tenth of the money from highways towards rapid transit, imagine the improvement to our current gridlock problems. The auto/highway construction lobby helped get us here. And now, even with gas pushing its way to $4/gal, I still hear petrolheads talking about the freedom of the auto and lets build more roads. In any urban area rush hours are gridlock time and increasingly the same can be said for almost any time of the day but the wee hours of the morning. No sense, makes sense.
@bjarmson: Speaking as a petrolhead here:
I have a 20 mile / 20 minute commute, 1 way each morning and evening. Mass transit stops 1.5 miles from my house. It takes 3 transfers and 1.25 hours to get to the edge of the Air Force base on which I work. There is a base bus that I can take, but it's faster to walk the .75 miles from the gate to the building in which I work. The last time the mass transit picks up at the base is 6pm. If I miss that, I'm screwed.
There are about 2 months out of the year during which that mess would almost be bearable. The rest would be snow, rain and oppressive heat.
I want a more fuel efficient car, but I can't afford one yet. I'm open to carpooling, but no takers yet.
So I'm a petrolhead. I'm evil. I'm screwing the planet by working (for the DoD no less) and paying 50% of my income in taxes.
Does calling me names help this situation?
Bah. I'd go cling to my guns (if I had any) or my church (if I wasn't an atheist).
Just along the hudson across from the WTC, NJ has the Light Rail moving along there. It's not a terribly extensive network, but it is pretty nice, and does not really impede much on traffic (What's the difference between avoiding this and avoiding a bus?)
I wouldn't mind seeing something similar in more cities.
@hakubak: I don't think he's refering to you. You're very pragmatic about your drive. There are others that think driving is a constitutionally protected right.
@bjarmson: It's easy to blame drivers. The truth is, its a combination of politicians and their constituents. It requires long term thinking and deciding that you don't need a house that's 2X the size of your parents house for the same number of kids (It's true the average size house has doubled in the last 50 or so years).
Downtown San Diego will be in danger if sea level rises more than 5 feet, which it could in like, 150 years. I say we just Venice the whole area. The city of Coronado would also be completely submerged. I'm writing a comic right now about a Google like company called Zillion pairing with the citizens of Coronado (if you don't know, Coronado is an island connected to southern San Diego suburbs by an artificial land bridge called the Strand, whose inhabitants are FILTHY fucking rich) creating a tax free, low law, artificial island, center of commerce to rival Dubai called New Coronado paid for in part by the Zillion Corp and the money won by the citizens of New Coronado who sued the government for giving them false information in the early 00's about climate change. In the comic all of San Diego proper has a wide network of chicago style above ground trolley networks, based on the quite successful trolley system already in place (though criminally limited in scope)
@Grey_Area: No, I just stretched it to make it all horizontal looking. It looks pretty cool on my MacBook even though it's stretchy.
@hakubak: Haha nobody's calling you names. I think there is clearly a place for cars when it comes to commuting. But cities are not one of those places. There's no excuse for not having decent public transit in high-density areas like cities.
@hakubak: Sorry, not intended to offend people who have no real choice. My wife drives 60 miles roundtrip to work, one small town to another, so not even the chance of alternate transit. It was 20 miles when we bought our house in 2001 (one of our reasons for buying where we did), but company closed local place and offered her the choice of driving to their main facility 3 times as far away. What can you do?
I was speaking of those who seem to think driving is a god-given American right and particularly politicians of this slant. Just had a primary election where the local guy running for a county supervisor position spouted this kind of knee-jerk, anti-mass transit nonsense. He won over the woman who favored money for light rail
We don't have much choice but driving in most areas. But I remember when I lived in Chicago in 79/80. The El and bus system were the way to get around. A monthly pass meant you could ride as much as you wanted for a very reasonable fee. Unfortunately many urban areas switched over to cars post WWII and tore out what transit systems they had. Gridlock ensued. It may be headed the other way now that gas prices are climbing almost daily.
Aerial gondolas! Totally amusement-park-esque.
Pretty sure the Market Canal would just be full of speedboats and barges by now.
@Evil Tortie's Mom: I want to get downtown via barge.
[farm1.static.flickr.com]
How about the space-pod looking Portland Aerial Tram? Granted it does exist, but it would be cool if they built new lines, fanning out across the city.
@bjarmson: I still live here and you can get to most of the places you want to go with 1 (2 tops) busses or trains.
That's the sad part, many suburbs would benefit greatly from a mass transit system going through their town, but they don't want to pay for it. But they buy huge houses further and further from cities (because they're cheaper), only pay giant taxes for street infrastructure, etc. only to later complain about traffic when their suburb overdevelops.
The problem with most modern mass transit projects is they tend to be of the "park and ride" variety where commuters are still expected to drive some distance to mass transit. You see this particularly in commuter rail networks where suburban stations are often built with massive parking lots to "capture" cars otherwise bound for the highway.
Instead of solving the problems of traffic and pollution, you're just pushing them further out from the urban center. Worse, you're just encouraging sprawl in a one-car-ride radius around suburban rail stations.
Mass transit has to completely eliminate the need for a car in order to be effective. It doesn't count if you still have to drive just to get to the mass transit hub.
@Discrete-Daniel: The problem with most modern mass transit projects...
well, that and the freakshows who ride the bus when i get out of work late at night.
methinks that geography and urban sprawl are the biggest b*tches that make park-and-ride solutions unavoidable. in los angeles, if the city were confined by the mountains and the ocean, mass transit could be a door-to-door solution. but with the workforce spread throughout the local valleys, park-and-ride is unavoidable.
in most cases, i suspect transit hubs aren't the cause of sprawl, poor city planning is. sticking with los angeles as the example, mass transit was only an afterthought for decades. then sprawl happened, and the only solution was park-and-ride transit hubs. when downtown started filling up, they didn't build a commuter rail station in the san fernando valley. they built single-driver freeways that wouldn't support the eventual crowds and would make transit hubs a necessity.
the moral of this long story is that i need to move.
@capntim: Actually, the Powell and Mason is the fastest way to get from my apartment to Market Street -- a good five or ten minutes faster than the electric trolley bus. If I could transfer to a waterborne gondola, better yet!
But then I've been an early and vocal proponent of more horses in San Francisco. The Animal Rights nuts will hate it, but hey (pun intended), America has more horses today than the world has ever seen in history.
I live in London, UK, so I use the Tube and bus. I have a car, but due to historical reasons I share it with someone else. I'm considering a move to LA or San Francisco with work, and I think I would prefer SF because of the similar transit situation. I can't face driving everywhere. Apart from anything else, what about DUIs?
Man, if only the right kind of autocrat was in office and forced us all to live they way we should... life would be perfect!
@hakubak: I'm in much the same position as you. But here's the catch: if you have a 20-mile / 20-minute commute, it means the roads are still working... for now.
Many of us have something closer to a 20-mile / 40-minute commute. Those are the people for whom alternatives clearly need to be made available.
@bjarmson: That's the other problem with transit in general: if more people drive longer distances, it means more cars must occupy the same stretch of road. Imagine a 60 mile stretch of road, where every car on it drove the full 60 miles. It gets congested. But, if each of those cars only drove 10-20 miles and then got off, you can have the same number of cars on that 60 mile stretch of road without the congestion.
Sprawl is a huge problem in the transit issue.
Now, bearing the aforementioned in mind, that's why I'd love to believe a lot of what this post is about, but I think that it conveniently ignores the issue of demand. The overall demand for people to get from point A to point B has dramatically increased in the past century. All of these systems would struggle just as much to keep up with demand as the roadways do. Go find photos of rail systems in London, New York, or Tokyo at rush hour, and you'll see what I mean.
Maybe things would be different if they were built to use all mass-transit from the get-go, but even if it solved the problems posed by the automobile as the 20th century wore on, a completely different set of problems would arise...
Which to me... would make a great sci-fi.
No one has mentioned the wonderful monorail systems of Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook!
Monorail, Monorail, Monorail!
Cincinnati was looking to put in a subway once upon the time. You can now take tours of the tunnels.
We had a thing called "Metro Moves" a few years ago, that would have moved our bus system from something that had downtown as a hub to more of a mesh (making it more usable), and setting the groundwork for light rail. However, it got voted down, because they believed more lanes was the answer.
In discussing the Seattle Monorail, a commentator indicated that it takes 30 years for a public transportation system to develop and be useful and self-sufficient. It really needs subsidies until then. Unfortunately, the people who vote to kick it off will likely not be significant users of such a system, at least not during their time in the workforce.
Zip lines.
And at each tower, waiver of liability forms.
" commentator indicated that it takes 30 years for a public transportation system to develop and be useful and self-sufficient."
Unless you're the DC Metro, where after forty you're still nowhere near sufficient, or useful enough to eliminate sprawl.
As I commented a few weeks ago in a similar thread-- NO public transportation system will ever work in a city that was not designed organically with public transportation in mind. Even the best grafted-on systems-- like the Metro-- still must be built to accomodate a city that evolved with cars (the aforementioned park-and-ride problems, sprawl, the simple fact that you can't serve everyone).
Everyone has dreams of turning their cities into New York or London. Guess what? The subways were there before the cars. Had the cars come first, the sprawl would have followed, and we wouldn't even have those "successful" examples.
As long as the automobile is around-- and count me as one of the fans-- mass transit will never completely replace it, or even effectively augment it.
When the light rail/bus/monorail/gondola(water or aerial) pulls up the front of my house (or at least the end of my block) at the moment I am ready to use one and takes me directly to the location I am proceeding to, then another does the same thing in reverse (front of the location, when I am ready). This would be for any and every possible location that I have to go to in order to feed my family, and support the freaking economy, that will have to pay for this. On a secondary note, I desire that the device that transports me be clean, free of the scum of society, as well maintained as my vehicle I was forced to give up, and not smelling of left over farts. I don't want to sit next to a drunk, a prostitute, or a public school teacher (my own rant). I want the ability to leave items in the vehicle that transports me, in case I have purchases that I don't want to carry around the mall,(supporting the economy thing (maybe China's though)) but just leave them in the vehicle similar to what I can do now. I suppose that means the same light rail/bus/monorail/gondola(water or aerial)would have to wait for me so I could visit it to place my items.
Just a rant. You all know that in our society, in order to support ourselves and our economy public transportation won't work for every situation. Use it where it does. Don't use it where it doesn't. When I take the family to Disney World, we stay at the resorts and use the Disney Transports to go everywhere. The vehicle stays in the parking lot for the entire time. But that only works because the locations don't change and Disney is set up to handle the packages you don't want to carry.
Distances between homes and work places have changed radically in the last 100 years. Most people don't live downtown (uptown if you are a snob) with easy access to a public transportation device. Business requires much different hours than a regulated transportation schedule can handle. There is not enough money or manpower in the world to move everyone back into a footprint that would allow public transporation take everyone where they 'needed' to go. When the roads are shut down, will you wait on the bus to get to the hospital? Oh, I suppose ambulances would have special right of way to use the roads, but roads that only had ambulances and police cars on them would fall into disrepair real fast. After all, who's going to vote for money to spend on a road they can't use?
Take a look at the pictures above. Where are the drop off points for the people on the monorail? How many people fit in the boat? The only ones that might work a little are the cablecars and electric trains, where they stop and start block by block, and even then, they would be very limited in getting a 'suburbanite' to his work location without multiple transfers. Now (as I saw someone else point out) instead of my commute being 25 minutes (18.5 miles), it jumps to 1.5 to 2 hours, each way. What!?! I am not sitting in a bus for 3 to 4 hours every day. How lame is that. Productivity goes to hell! My family becomes the people I visit just as they are finishing dinner. Then I have to sleep, because in the mornings I have to be up and gone before the sun rises.
For you who think this works, put your money where your keyboard is. Move out about 20 miles from your city center. Get rid of, or don't buy a vehicle. Now, go and public transport it. Come back in 18 to 24 months and let us know how that went.
(Before you say, no, you do it, I have, for almost 2 years when I lived near D.C. It doesn't work. It takes too much out of your life, your 'well being' to run the Public Transportation Marathon every frigging day if you can't afford to live downtown. ($500,000 minimum to live downtown here for about 800 square feet of monolithic ant farm compression living).
So put a transporter (Star Trek style) or a Willy 'Freaking' Wonka Magic Elevator in my house and I'll get off the road in my 'Petrol' burning, congestionmobile. (I'll drive electric when they are affordable, safe, and able to move at least 500 miles in one day with an overnight charge that makes it fully capable of doing the same the next day, on and on for 100,000 miles before I have to change the batteries. (Don't want to fill up the landfills with batteries, now do we?)
Did you really read all this? Maybe you do have time for the bus. :) I don't, I am too busy typing.
I am hazy on the specific details, but I remember back in the mid 80s, that Texas looked into creating a bullet train system that would connect all the major cities (DFW, Austin, San Antonio, Houston).
End up failing because the farmers didn't want to give up there land.
But can you imagine traveling from Dallas to Austin in 45 minutes vs. the 3.5 hrs it takes now?
What about Springfield?
I have a developer, Lyle Lanley, all lined up to build us a monorail!
He sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook.. and by gum it put them on the map!
Sydneys monorail is just a tourists ride, no local would ever use it.
And that Melbourne photo could be taken now (apart from the ye olde tram there) It's the corner of Collins and Swanston, and Swanston is closed to cars I believe.
But what would I know, I live in London.. so I'll shutup