Development of Mass Transportation in the United States

Before the development of cheap, reliable urban transportation in the United States(U.S.)，city size had been limited by the distance people could comfortably walk to work. In such “walking cities,”the radius rarely extended beyond a few miles, and people of all classes lived and worked close to one another By the end of the nineteenth century the walking city had metamorphose into the sprawling, segmented city. Economic function and income divided the city roughly into a concentric pattern. A central business district, or downtown core, where few lived, Was ringed by a manufacturing and wholesaling district, where immigrants and the working lower-income classes jammed into tenements and subdivided old houses. Beyond them was stretch of lower-middle-class to middle-class row houses or apartment buildings, where skilled, clerical, and some factory workers resided. Then came the fringes of the city, where professionals, managers, and businessmen retreated to their spacious homes, leading comfortable lives and tending their manicured lawns and shrubs away from the stench, noise, dirt, and push-and-shove of the city.

New means of transportation made possible the new urban geography of economic integration and social segregation. As early as the 1820s and 1830s such eastern cities as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia had operated horse-dray public carriers called omnibuses. Omnibus systems Spread rapidly through the 1850s, but the slow, heavy vehicles accommodated few passengers and high fares limited ridership. By mid-century, steam-powered commuter railroads were pushing city boundaries outward for the affluent. The New York Harlem Railroad connected the sub urban village of Harlem with New York.and the Chicago& Milwaukee Railroad linked communities such as Evanston. Wilmette and Lake Forest with Chicago.

At the same time, many cities had switched to horse-drawn streetcars. Rails smoothed the ride, compared to the bouncing of omnibus wheels over cobblestones, and they made possible larger conveyances and more rapid movement. By establishing fixed routes, the horse railways promised riders predictability. They also broadened the compass of the city to five miles or more. With lower fares, the horse car systems attracted a middle-class clientele, who commuted to work downtown from newly developed residential areas, or suburbs, on city borderlands. By the 1880s, horse-drawn streetcars were carrying almost 190 million passengers annually in the United States. Horse cars, however, were not as clean, cheap, or reliable as needed. Technology soon replaced the horse cars with cable cars, pulled by steam-driven, underground wire rope clamped to the car. Introduced in San Francisco in1873，cable cars proved especially effective there and in such other hilly cities as Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

The most important advance in urban transit was the electric trolley. In 1888，on a twelve-mile track in hilly Richmond,Virginia, Frank J. Sprague, a naval engineer and former associate of Thomas Edison, demonstrated the practicality of powering streetcars with electrical currents transferred from overhead wires to the Vehicle by a four-wheeled spring device, or troller. A frenzy of construction and conversion to electricity followed, as city governments awarded generous trolley franchises to transit entrepreneurs. Trolleys rolled along at twice the speed of horse cars, and the US system of flat-fee fares(the same fare no matter how long the trip) with free transfers encouraged mass ridership. For ten cents one could escape the soot and smells of the city on daily commute or, for the poor, on a Sunday outing.

Mass ridership encouraged construction. In 1890 the nation had 5,700 miles of horse-drawn track and only 1,260 miles of electrified track; twelve years later, just 250 miles of horse-drawn track remained in service, while the total length of electrified track had grown to 22,000 miles. Transit companies tried to increase ridership by developing areas surrounding cities. By the 1890s, the Peoples Railroad trolley in St. Louis ran out to Grand Boulevard, a dirt road amid cornfields that the transit company Was transforming into an avenue worthy of its name. The company laid out private streets with fountains, and it planted shade trees and shrubs to lure prospective home builders and buyers. Everywhere in the urban United States, transit companies invested heavily in such suburban real estate development, thereby encouraging population dispersal.

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1.?Before the development of cheap, reliable urban transportation in the United States(U.S.)，city size had been limited by the distance people could comfortably walk to work. In such “walking cities,”the radius rarely extended beyond a few miles, and people of all classes lived and worked close to one another By the end of the nineteenth century the walking city had metamorphose into the sprawling,?segmented?city. Economic function and income divided the city roughly into a concentric pattern. A central business district, or downtown core, where few lived, Was ringed by a manufacturing and wholesaling district, where immigrants and the working lower-income classes jammed into tenements and subdivided old houses. Beyond them was stretch of lower-middle-class to middle-class row houses or apartment buildings, where skilled, clerical, and some factory workers resided. Then came the fringes of the city, where professionals, managers, and businessmen retreated to their spacious homes, leading comfortable lives and tending their manicured lawns and shrubs away from the stench, noise, dirt, and push-and-shove of the city.