Does LA still have streetcars?

Now streetcars are making a comeback in LA. There's a plan to run them through downtown again and the old right's-of-way have been brought out of retirement for use by the city's burgeoning light-rail network. The E-Line and the A-Line both use extensive stretches of the old Pacific Electric red car network.



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Widespread adoption of diesel buses ultimately led to the abandonment of all streetcar systems on March 31, 1963. This ended nearly 90 years of streetcar service in the Los Angeles region.

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Cheaper to operate and requiring less maintenance, buses began phasing out the streetcars very early. As Richmond points out, in 1926, 15 percent of the total miles traveled by Pacific Electric riders was along bus routes; that share would more than double by 1939.

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Streetcars in Los Angeles over history have included horse-drawn streetcars and cable cars, and later extensive electric streetcar networks of the Los Angeles Railway and Pacific Electric Railway and their predecessors. Also included are modern light rail lines.

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It was because of the introduction of the private automobile and cheap gasoline in the US. Cities began to concentrate on building freeway systems for cars and dismantling their streetcar systems as relics of the past. Many reasons— the top reasons varied depending on the city you consider.

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A tram (called a streetcar or trolley in USA) is a type of urban rail transit. Consists of a rail vehicle, either alone or coupled in a multiple train unit, traveling on tramway tracks on public urban streets; some include segments on segregated right-of-way.

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California saw an exodus during the COVID-19 pandemic, as remote work and soaring home values had some residents moving to cheaper locales. Recent data show the so-called exodus — which hit coastal cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco particularly hard — eased considerably in the last two years.

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Widespread adoption of diesel buses ultimately led to the abandonment of all streetcar systems on March 31, 1963. This ended nearly 90 years of streetcar service in the Los Angeles region.

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And both cable cars and trolley cars are still operating in San Francisco. Cable cars have no motor. A grip man pulls a lever that grabs a cable that runs through a slot that is under a street. A trolley has an electric motor that attaches to overhead wires.

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LISTEN: Unearthing London's transportation history introduced the horse-drawn trolleys in 1875. Two decades later, the system was converted to electric streetcars.

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Electrification of streetcars began here in 1892 in Brooklyn. The last NY streetcars were removed in the late 1950s in favor of diesel buses.

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The F Line streetcar is part of San Francisco's public transit system (known locally as Muni). The F Line runs from the Castro along Market Street to the Embarcadero, passing through Civic Center and the Financial District, before turning north and following the waterfront to Fisherman's Wharf.

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Waymo, which has been testing its driverless white Jaguars in Los Angeles for more than a year, rolled out a months-long “tour” in October offering passengers free rides as part of the promotion scheduled for Santa Monica, Culver City, West Hollywood, Mid-City, Koreatown and downtown.

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Between 1947 and 1958 all streetcars were eliminated (and 700 new ones scrapped or turned into El cars) because busses had a lower overhead cost (no track or wire) and trolleys got in the way of automobiles. In the same ten years, about sixteen miles of elevated in the inner city were abandoned and demolished.

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Chicago at one time did claim to have the largest streetcar system in the world, with a fleet of over 3,200 passenger cars and over 1,000 miles of track – a claim backed up in several sources we found. It all started in 1859 with a horse-drawn car running along a single rail track down State Street.

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In 1883 New York City's first steam-driven Cable Car emerged, which ran until 1909 when electric trolleys hit the urban scene of all five boroughs.

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