I don't think I am the only one but I couldn't help but shed a tear truly was the loss of an old friend, they truly had something great but now it is gone. ah well here is a film to commemorate the last run of the streetcars in LA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ug94xEHZoE
Railroad to Freedom
Nice!! Too bad in a fit of stupidity they got rid of all the lines, and condemned LA to the traffic and pollution probles it has. How is it now, still wedded to the car, or has public transport helped it out?
Well the situation has improved light rail and new bus lines help but the speed at which these services operate is less than ideal and you often have to shift from one form of transit to another, still awhile before the entire system hits critical mass, but the metro Expo line has shown some success and the extension to Santa monica should add riders. Anyways the streetcar system was hard to expand because of the increasing size of LA and the cost of doing so meant you might as well go with buses. But buses of course brought their own set of problems.
More than the narrow gauge streetcars, there were certainly PE red-car lines that should have been kept, the most obvious being the line to Long Beach, which was restored essentially as the first of the new light rail lines, now the Blue Line. The narrow gauge mostly PCC operated city system was fine, but was mostly street running and only slightly better than the buses that replaced it. But the PE had lots of private right of way that took transit out of traffic congestion. Expansion of the streetcar system would of course have been easier if it had been standard gauge and could share tracks with PE wihtout the third rail that did exist in parts of the systems where they ran together.
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