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Old trolley tracks never die; they just get covered over with asphalt
By adamg on Thu, 05/21/2015 - 8:07am
Wilmington Police report a crew repairing a water-main break on Shawsheen Avenue uncovered some trolley tracks:
Yesterday, Sgt. Dave Sugrue was working a detail at a water main break on Shawsheen Ave. He noticed something strange beneath the pavement as the the repair crew excavated the road...Trolley tracks! Yes these are the rails from the former street car line the ran along Shawsheen Ave. into Billerica and eventually into Lowell. It is just a bit of the many miles of street car tracks that ran along Main St., Lowell St., Woburn St., Wildwood St., Middlesex Ave., Church St. and Shawsheen Ave. In the early 1900s it was possible to travel to and from nearly every city and town in eastern Massachusetts by street car.
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Comments
What we have lost
It was also possible to travel to nearly every city in the Northeast by rail.
And now you can travel to
And now you can travel to every single one of these cities by car.
You can travel to every single one of these cities by car...
...unless you can't afford a car. Or can't physically operate a car. Or are too old or too young to drive a car.
Yeah those people can go screw.
Or have problems that....
... prevent you from driving.
(You edited your post to add my addendum at the very same momemt that I wrote mine).
I just love people who think the world must revolve solely around automobiles (and trucks).
In which case you'd be SOL
In which case you'd be SOL anyway.
Those old streetcars usually weren't very accessible. Even if you ran a modern streetcar, those were actual STREETCAR routes - often in the road, no convenient curb heights
Great old map, used to be a real network
Awesome
I just saw this map at Ward Maps last weekend for $20 bucks. Awesome.
Which makes you wonder if you
Which makes you wonder if you can travel back then on trolley from the farthest eastern Mass town into Boston as a one-seat ride (no transfers)!
You still can get from
You still can get from Wilmington to Lowell by mass transit, on the commuter rail or the LRTA #12 bus.
It looks like LRTA service has been extended by two hours, and the last return trips to Lowell now depart at 8 pm. And the 12 passes through downtown Lowell, instead of just dumping you at the train station in the middle of nowhere. Now they just need to work improving the hourly frequency, and it could start to look like a useful service.
True
It was also once possible to travel between towns by horse and buggy. Or riding a donkey. Or by walking. Eventually we developed Honda Accords and everyone's productivity shot up eponentially. Imagine, getting from town to town based on the timing of my own needs and schedule. Brilliant!
Yes, traffic is a pain. So is waiting for public transportation, if it works at all.
Citations please
You must not have read any studies of how many hours a week the typical American sits in traffic, or how that has doubled since the 1980s.
OK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/File:US_produ...
And where does this chart show....
... that productivity increases were linked -- in any fashion -- to the abandonment of public transportation and the shift to driving one's own car?
How many hours...?
How many hours of your labor goes to pay for a car and the maintenance?
I think it at least ten hours or one-fourth of one's wages.
Of course this varies quite a bit depending on pay.
And just how much of the cost of this horribly inefficient use of energy (in single-occupancy vehicles) is hidden? Why drag a ton and-a-half of metal and plastic containing (most of the time) and leaking and emitting toxic and flammable chemicals. Shitting in the soup is not efficiency.
I think cars are very useful tools, but their use is excessive and the efficiency is poor. Live near your job if you want efficiency. Duh.
Seriously. Car culture need to mature into something less resource intensive.
That chart does not show that the Honda Accord improved anything
Did the motorcar improve productivity? If so, did that improve the quality of life for everyone? Plenty of European countries have both high "productivity" and a high quality of life, and guess what? Great public transportation!
Europe?
Full of socialists who don't believe in the right of the richest 1 percent to capture 100 percent of productivity gains .
Funny that productivity shot
Funny that productivity shot up after 75, and yet wages pretty much stagnant or drop. BTW, the street cars where gone well before this (bustitution was more a 50/60s thing along with "urban renewal"). Perhaps the huge gains in productivity were more to do with, *gasp*, technology improvements such as little things like the computer, networking, and automation ?
Someone needs to lock up the
Someone needs to lock up the UHub poster name "CitationsPlease"
Funny thing that
"everyone's productivity shot up eponentially."
And yet our salaries remained the same.
I don't think people's
I don't think people's productivity went up. When the car was invented they just decided to live further away from work so they were still spending the same amount of time commuting.