What happened to trolleys in NYC?

A few trolley lines remained in business until the late 1940s. And the last streetcar the Queensboro Bridge local was not run out of town until 1957. But the big switch from rail to rubber began in 1935 and was completed a year later. Most of the city's familiar old streetcars were suddenly gone.



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The real problem was that once cars appeared on the road, they could drive on streetcar tracks — and the streetcars could no longer operate efficiently. Once just 10 percent or so of people were driving, the tracks were so crowded that [the streetcars] weren't making their schedules, Norton says.

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1909: Electric trolleys replaced the steam-powered cable cars in all five boroughs, giving NYC transportation a sudden boost in speed and efficiency. 1957: The last streetcars disappeared, fully replaced by the city's bus system.

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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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The last NY streetcars were removed in the late 1950s in favor of diesel buses.

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Trolley service ended on Flatbush Avenue on March 5, 1951, and on Nostrand Avenue on April 1, 1951. Only eight trolley lines remained in service after those on Nostrand were replaced by busses. The last trolley service in Brooklyn ended on October 31, 1956 with the cessation of service on MacDonald Avenue.

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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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The Loop Trolley shut down in 2019 after ridership and revenue fell far short of projections, but was reopened in 2022 after the federal government threatened to demand the return of funds used to build it. It is currently operated in summer and fall by the Metro Transit division of the Bi-State Development Agency.

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During the early and mid-1900's the historic streetcar served as a popular mode of transportation along Broadway and throughout the Los Angeles region. The streetcar system was primarily operated by Pacific Electric (1901-1961) and developed into the largest trolley system in the world by the 1920's.

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In the early evening of May 12, 1955, a train pulled out of Lower Manhattan's Chatham Square, near City Hall, bound for upper Manhattan and the Bronx via Third Avenue. It was the last run of the Third Avenue elevated, and the last time a train ran up a large chunk of Manhattan east of Lexington Avenue for six decades.

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Changing economics and evolving public needs motivated policymakers to remove elevated lines and replace them with subways, which continued to burgeon. In the 1930s those forces, in combination with the Great Depression and upheaval in New York city and state politics, doomed the Manhattan Elevated system.

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By the early twentieth century, there were more than 300 miles of streetcar track in Manhattan, with an additional 200 miles of track spread across the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island.

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Automobile usage began supplanting the trolley not long after the end of the First World War. Some routes were so unprofitable that they were abandoned in the 1920s, reports Touring Pittsburgh by Trolley, a nostalgic look at trolley service.

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The resulting monument was stable and secure, capable of helping millions of people travel from Manhattan to Brooklyn in no time. Today the Brooklyn Bridge continues to rein supreme as one of the busiest bridges in NYC, as thousands of New York City car rentals cross the bridge each day.

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Boston's “Green Line” is more accurately a system of four streetcar / light rail lines serving Boston that converge into a common subway in the downtown area. The subway is America's oldest, the first portion having opened in 1897.

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In 1888 the first electric streetcar line began operation, and in 1897 Boston's subway system, the nation's first, began operation. By 1917, only one horse-drawn streetcar remained in service along Boylston Street in the Back Bay. It is shown here in front of New Old South Church at the corner of Dartmouth Street.

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