How to build a streetcar in 6 easy steps

United Streetcar is now building modern streetcars in the United States (click here for the story).  This graphic illustrates the process of building one.  Click on the image to enlarge and use Ctrl+mouse wheel to zoom.

Streetcar Maiden, USA

Portland's first streetcars made in USA. Courtesy United Streetcar Skoda is a legendary firm dating from 1859 that has made weapons, brewing equipment, bridge parts, airplanes, and automobiles (now a separate division owned by Volkswagen).  Today the Czech company makes steam turbines and condensers, but the few Americans who are aware of Skoda probably know the company because of its transit...

Anatomy of a Good Stop

Bus stops are the sentinels, the grunts, the pawns, the privates, the foot soldiers of every transit agency.  Unlike bus depots and rail stations, glory hounds all with their cover, vending, restroom facilities, security and more, the bus stop stands alone, ignored until activated by the presence of a human.  Then it is a flag in the breeze calling for service until the vehicle departs and the bus...

Streetcar Timeline

  From horse-drawn to recent hurricanes, here is the short history of the streetcar. Click to enlarge.

Cutting the Cord: Streetcars without Wires

  At the Americana at Brand in Glendale, CA, the money saved on overhead wires could be spent on lavish appointments for the streetcars themselves. Photo Gomaco Trolley Company. We tend to think of streetcars as operating on a fixed guideway.  The majority of the world’s streetcar systems, however, move between two of them, the unobtrusive rails in the ground and the power lines that run overhead...

Moscow Metro II: Buried History in the Moscow Metro

To say that the Park Pobedy (Victory Park) station is deep is to say that the Moscow Metropolitan is just a good way to get around.  Mounting the escalator, one immediately recalls the posters in the metro showing a station attendant, young, blond, and cute, in her blue uniform.  She smiles beguilingly and the text reads “Yest’ Vykhod.”  There is an exit.  This is reassuring.  The escalators,...

The Space Between: shaping community with transit

This photo simulation juxtaposes a modern streetcar vehicle (photographed in Tacoma Washington) with the newly built home of the Live Arts, a community theater in downtown Charlottesville. Image by Okerlund Associates. by Gary Okerlund and Todd Gordon Charlottesville, a small city in central Virginia with a population of 40,000, has been home to three presidents, Madison, Monroe, and most famously...

Moscow Metro I: The Virtual Tour

  Detail from the false cupolas of Mayakovskaya The wonders of socialist construction are few.  Visitors to the Russian capital go to see the Kremlin, Red Square, and St. Basil’s Cathedral, remnants of Moscovy, the ancient land of the Rus.  Of course Lenin’s macabre presence still draws a crowd to his mausoleum, but with the exception of the Seven Sisters—the seven soviet-gothic skyscrapers...

Mass Transit, Mass Evacuation

The cell phones kept ringing.  As Kevin Price, the Safety and Training Coordinator for Blacksburg Transit remembers, those brutal ring tones made April 16, 2007 so terribly hard to bear.  As victims were brought out of Norris Hall after a shooting rampage that left 33 people dead, the incessant ring tones coming from purses, pockets, and backpacks of victims made panicked family and friends a constant...

Through the Looking Glass

This is a visual metaphor of the Philly streetcar, an anachronistic machine that does not fit well into the contemporary urban fabric. Photo by Scheib. It looks like transit, sounds like money, and smells like politics.  It must be Philly’s Girard Streetcar Line. Philadelphia is home to over 118 miles of bona fide, in-the-asphalt, exposed streetcar rails, the greatest quantity in the country. ...

The Streetcar in American Life

From 1888 when Frank Sprague implemented the world’s first successful streetcar system in Richmond, Virginia through the 1920s, the electric streetcar symbolized the American transit industry.  In cities throughout the country the press followed the expansion and financial scandals of the traction industry, “traction” being the term that the public then used for streetcars.   Baltimore streetcars...

A Distinction Subtle and Broad

A SEPTA maintenance streetcar is followed by a passenger streetcar in west Philadelphia. Photo by Bill Mohnahan of Friends of the Philadelphia Trolleys. It is one of the great ironies of American life that suburban sprawl—a low-density pattern of development that is difficult to serve with public transit—was created by public transit.  Frank J. Sprague created the first successful electric...

Charter Rules

The breathtaking view from the sky of Husky Stadium, a multimodal place on gameday. That could be a problem. Photo by Mary Levin.         Husky Stadium is a point of convergence.  From its lofty seats sky, mountains, verdant land, and water are layered in undulating shades of blue and green; the built and the natural environments blend as multi-story towers wave through the trees; and here...