Why streetcars survived in Boston

It's a commonplace sentiment among fans of streetcars that a cabal of car and tire manufacturers bought out city streetcar systems one by one and shut them down, replacing the wonderful old PCC trolley cars with diesel-belching buses. In reality, there were many factors undermining the popularity and financial feasibility of streetcars: Municipal governments fixed the fares too low for franchisees to make a profit; jitneys competed with streetcars for passengers, offering faster and more comfortable service; the automobile became more affordable, fueling urban growth beyond the reach of the trolley systems. This last factor was the nail in the coffin: More and more people were driving automobiles, the streetcars were blocking traffic, and the tracks were damaging autos.

For example, in the May 26, 1922, edition of the Tulsa World, reader A. E. Stephens complains in a letter to the editor about the decrepit state of the roads leading into Tulsa. Stephens' bitterest complaint is reserved for North Peoria Avenue:

Entering from the north we have for the welcome of out-of-town visitors, the Avenue of Horrors, or our North Peoria street sinkhole, with the only spot where driving is possible, taken up by our antedeluvian relic, the Tulsa Street railway, with rails protruding 4 to 12 inches above the other part of the street. The Avenue of Horrors also takes visitors through the Plunge of Death, or the Peoria Street viaduct under the Frisco railway.

Maps show the TSR tracks extending along Peoria from King Street to 1st Street, where it joined the Kendall branch on the way into downtown. Stephens also complained about the Third Street viaduct over the Frisco tracks, the main route into Tulsa from Sand Springs, "which is a very narrow, roughly paved street and also infested with our old eyesore, the decrepit Tulsa Street railway."

Gil Propp grew up in Brookline, Mass., between the B and C line of the MBTA Green Line streetcar network. His curiosity about some oddities -- the lack of an A line, discrepancies between old and new maps about the E line -- led him to research the history and evolution of the MBTA's streetcar system. A few years ago he turned his research into a short film called "Streetcar Tracks: A Reconstruction of Boston's Lost Streetcar Empire." The film and its script are available for viewing on bostonstreetcars.com, and you can view "Streetcar Tracks" directly on YouTube.

Propp has also posted many detailed articles on the site about the individual lines in the Boston fixed-rail transit system and the slow consolidation of the network and elimination of streetcar lines to the system we see today. The article "Why Are There Still Streetcars in Boston?" offers a compelling explanation for the survival of a handful of lines -- and why so many others disappeared: "The answer is simple: they have private right-of-ways that lead to subways."

The extension of subway tunnels prior to World War II allowed three streetcar lines (B, C, and E) to avoid busy intersections like Kenmore Square. After surfacing, the three lines also had reserved right-of-ways down the middle of Commonwealth Ave., Beacon Street, and Huntington Ave., respectively. Only the E line did not have a reserved right-of-way for its full length, and at the end of 1985, service was cut back to the end of the reserved right-of-way at Heath St. The fourth currently operating branch, the D line to Riverside, is on a former steam railway line that was linked into the subway tunnels. While the A line to Watertown also connected to the subway tunnels, it was street-running all the way, impeding car traffic. In Cambridge, there had been street-running trolleys that fed into the subway via an incline at Harvard Square. These were replaced with trackless trolley buses that used the same overhead wires but could pull to the curb for loading passengers, while the underground tracks were converted from overhead trolley wires to third-rail operation.

One other Boston streetcar line has survived: The Mattapan High Speed line, which runs in a private right-of-way, not parallel to any street and thus not easily bustituted, and provides a connection to the Ashmont branch of the Red Line. This is the last line of the MBTA that runs the old PCC cars -- when I was in college they also ran on the C and E branches of the Green Line.

I have often wondered how Tulsa's streetcar system might have evolved had it and the city begun 20 years earlier. I suspect there would have been at least two cut-and-cover subways through downtown -- one along Main Street and another along 3rd Street, with other east-west streetcar lines being rerouted to take advantage. That might have kept the Oklahoma Union Traction interurban to Sapulpa (now the Tulsa Sapulpa Union Railway) and the Sand Springs Railway interurban, both of which had dedicated right-of-ways outside of downtown. Perhaps a dedicated right-of-way along 3rd or 11th Streets would have been built to maintain service to the east.