A Weak Platform: The streetcar as development tool, not transportation

A person born in Tampa, Florida, or nearly any other significant American city in 1888, the year Frank J. Sprague produced the first successful electric streetcar in Richmond, Virginia, would live his youth knowing only the streetcar as a regular means of mechanized transport.   He would marry in a church within earshot of the clang of a streetcar bell and take his own young children on trips downtown...