Streetcars: Past, Present, and Future

Nadine Lee: If you recognize that toot, it's the sound of the M line trolley that runs up and down McKinney Avenue in uptown Dallas.

And that particular toot belongs to Matilda, an Australian streetcar built in the 1920s.

This is Mobility in Motion. A podcast produced by Dallas Area Rapid Transit, and I'm your host, Nadine Lee, President and CEO of DART.

Today, we're talking about streetcars: past, present, and future.

Matilda is one of seven streetcars that are part of the M Line trolley system today, but in 1910, over 20 lines traveled throughout Dallas through neighborhoods like the Cedars, Uptown, East Dallas, Downtown, and Oak Cliff.

In its heyday, we had almost 400 streetcars.

Peter Norton: People are usually very surprised to know just how extensive our transit networks were, even in small cities, and Dallas a century ago was a relatively small city.

Nadine Lee: That's historian Peter Norton. He studies the history of urban mobility, and like a lot of us, he just loves streetcars.

Peter Norton: Yesterday I posted something on my social media accounts about Wichita Falls, Texas, which had a street railway network. It's almost unthinkable now.

Nadine Lee: In fact, if you said the word “car” in 1910, people would assume you were referring to a streetcar.

Peter Norton: So, if you go back to say 1900, there were a lot of electric streetcars and there were almost no automobiles.

But the streets were still busy. They were busy with pedestrians who walked wherever they wanted, and we had a lot more pedestrians on the street then.

If you look at a picture of an American city street around 1900, most of what you see are people walking. There was also a lot of cycling. There was a real cycling boom in the 1890s, mid to late 1890s especially. And so there were a lot of bicyclists around too.

There was a lot of horse drawn traffic, primarily in the form of wagons pulling cargo of various kinds.

Nadine Lee: Local streetcars were not public transportation in the purest sense of the term. They were built and owned by private companies who made a deal with the host city.

Peter Norton: Always the arrangement was that a private company would arrange to get a franchise, a sort of license to operate. The deal was you, the street railway can make money in our city and we will give you a monopoly so that you can be sure that after you spent all this money laying this track and buying the rolling stock.

And in return, you will agree to carry everybody at a fare that we decide is reasonable. And you will serve the high profit neighborhoods and the low profit neighborhoods. You will serve all day, not just during rush hour when it's most profitable.

For a long time it was affordable, reliable, and convenient.

Nadine Lee: Until it wasn't anymore. The streetcar era ended abruptly in many cities during the 1950s as cars began to take over. In Dallas, the City Council ordered the shutdown of all streetcars in 1954, and lines officially ceased service in January of 1956.

How did we go from 400 to 7?

Peter Norton: An argument that people who love streetcars like to use, this is sometimes called the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy is that companies like General Motors, Firestone Tire Company, Standard Oil, established a holding company, that bought up street railways and then scrapped them.

Nadine Lee: The movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit is all about the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy.

movie track: Nobody's gonna drive this lousy freeway when they can take the red car for a nickel. Oh, they'll drive. They'll have to. You see, I bought the red car so I could dismantle it.

Peter Norton: And this explanation has some merit but it doesn't explain why the streetcar railways failed. Because by the time that was happening, The street railways, most of them were already bankrupt or losing money, and so we have to go back earlier.

In the late teens and early 20s, there was inflation that was connected in part with World War I. Coal prices were going up and coal prices were very important to the street railways because that's what they used to generate the electric power that they all used to operate.

The workers were unionized and demanding more wages as well, and those stresses led to higher operating costs for the railways and the railways could not just raise the fare as soon as their costs went up because they had these contracts called franchises.

Instead, they had to go to the State Public Utilities Commission: “We need to raise our fare to seven cents.” And politicians could make political points by saying, “I stand for the five cent fare.”

So it was actually very hard for them to raise the fares. They had to resort instead to things like, switching from what they called two-man operation, where you had a motor man driving the streetcar and a conductor taking the fares, to one-man operation.

And that saved costs, but it also made it more inconvenient for the customer.

Nadine Lee: And on top of all that, the streetcars suddenly had competition for the right of way. More and more Americans were driving cars.

Peter Norton: That was a nuisance as well, and I would say those were the two biggest factors in the street railways profitability going away. And when that happened the railways would economize by cutting back on maintenance with very predictable consequences, you know breakdowns, uncomfortable streetcars and so on.

Vic Cervantes: Hi, I am Vic Cervantes. I'm the president of the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority, otherwise known as the M Line Trolley in the central part of Dallas, Texas. I think there's an attachment to the long gone era when people used to ride these.

Our cars retain everything about the nostalgic look, the sound, the way they operate. We have operators that have to stand and actually manually run the accelerator and the brakes.

We have bells, whistles and our purpose is not only to provide good, reliable transportation, which we definitely strive to do, but also to let people enjoy the ride. There's a saying that Ed Landrum used to have that if a passenger ever got off a trolley not wearing a smile, we didn't do our job. 

Nadine Lee: Ed Landrum was like the fairy godfather of the Dallas trolley. The idea to resurrect the streetcar came from him.

Vic Cervantes: Ed Landrum, was such an aficionado that in his North Dallas house, he had three of these trolleys sitting in his yard that he was restoring. How he convinced his wife to have these, I don't know, but it was truly a love affair with these vintage trolleys.

Nadine Lee: So when Ed, who was one of the last riders of Dallas streetcars in 1956, heard old streetcar tracks on McKinney Avenue had been uncovered, he saw an opportunity.

Vic Cervantes: So when the news, which was published in the local newspaper, came out that Phil Cobb, our other founder and chairman, had found these tracks, he picked up the phone and called Phil and said, “I know what you can do with those tracks.”

He not only helped Phil envision the idea of restarting the line but also told him that he could find some of these trolleys. And as a matter of fact, donated one of them from his collection to be one of the first four streetcars that ran in the city.

They began service with four vintage trolleys. And there's a history behind every one of those.

Nadine Lee: Today, the M Line trolley has seven cars, three that are original to Dallas.

Vic Cervantes: Rosie. Built in 1909.

Matilda, built sometime in the 1920s. Emma, we bought her in Belgium. 

Petunia, car 636, and the reason why she was called Petunia is because of Ed Landrum loving that little car and thought she was cute as a button and thought of a flower and called her Petunia.

Nadine Lee: We took a ride on Matilda one very cold day in February with motor woman Rachelle Kemp at the helm.

Rachelle Kemp: Um, so the brakes run off an air compressor, um, and then your controls, your notches, it just, you kind of, all you, all you want to do is want to pick up speed, let it coast, and then just apply the brakes.

It’s really simple to operate.

So right every time I notch up it goes bit faster. Then when I notch it off it just coasts. That’s when you apply the brakes.

Real simple.

I love it here. Yeah. I have very bad days

I meet a lot of really interesting people.

I have a lot of regular commuters in the morning that I see every day, and then Uh, yeah.

That's the hard part of the job. It's the cars around me.

You really have and be careful.

This guy over here was an operator for 19 years.

James: I'm a conductor now. I'm retired from driving.

Back in the day, the streetcars went through downtown Dallas and went by every street corner every five minutes. If you missed one, you could catch another one in five minutes.

Nadine Lee: Dallas didn't just renovate the M Line for nostalgic reasons. It has a very real impact on economic development here. Vic Cervantes again.

Vic Cervantes: It's my belief that this area would not have the charm and the success that it has if it wasn't because, in small part, the trolley provided that.

This is probably one of the highest valued real estate per square foot in the state of Texas, if not in many states in the U.S.

This is somewhat of an affluent area and you could as easily drive your Mercedes, or jump on an Uber, or take it a little bit easier and jump on one of our vintage trolleys.

There are also some discussions about expanding the route north of here. We're going to have a lot more people living here and what you want them to do is to want to use public transit. It is critical that the city consider retaining and maybe even expanding our system, because it'll provide one of the pillars of a very walkable, desirable neighborhood.

Nadine Lee: Another city that has revived its once vibrant streetcar is Kansas City in Missouri.

Donna Mandelbaum: We had a really large system that started in the early 1800s. We had one of the third largest streetcar systems in the country at one point. But the last ride for our last streetcar was in 1957.

So by the time that we opened up this new modern downtown line, Kansas City had not had a streetcar system for like 50 years.

So nobody knew how it would go. We're like, is anyone going to ride this?

I'm Donna Mandelbaum. Some people call me Streetcar Donna. I am the Communications and Marketing Director for the Kansas City Streetcar Authority. Here in Kansas City, Missouri.

We currently operate a downtown line, which is 2.2 miles, and we opened in May of 2016.

So we estimated our average daily ridership to be like maybe 2,700 a day. We far exceeded that when we opened and we were clocking 6,000 trips a day.

We hit the first million passenger mark five months into our system opening. So Kansas City really likes the streetcar I think for several reasons. It's free and it's always free. It's a very easy route. It just goes up and down Main Street and around the river market.

Super easy to understand. If you're scared of public transit, this is like an easy way to get into public transit. And it runs every 10 minutes so you don't even need a schedule. You don't need to know like, “Oh man. 4:15, it'll arrive.” No, just go out to the stop. Every 10 minutes, a streetcar is going to show up.

And it's a very large vehicle. It holds between 150 to 200 people. And it's very stroller, wheelchair, bicycle friendly. It's just really easy.

Nadine Lee: When Kansas City was deciding what kind of streetcars to run, they had a choice. Do they go for the charm and nostalgia of the old streetcars, like here in Dallas, or go modern?

Donna Mandelbaum: What do we want for ourselves? Do we want to go back, or do we want to go forward and be modern and sleek and sophisticated and dare we say sexy, you know, like something really cool. So we went cool, and we wanted something very minimalist. The colors of our streetcars are white, gray, and black. It's basically a blank canvas.

Nadine Lee: There are also environmental reasons why streetcars make sense today.

Peter Norton: When people talk about EVs or electric vehicles in this country, they're nearly always thinking about an SUV with a thousand pound battery in it.

But, a streetcar that's electric is a wonderful vehicle because it can carry many more people and it doesn't even need a battery because it draws its power usually from overhead wires. So the need to electrify transport, which we have to do for sustainability, is a major attraction of streetcars as well.

Nadine Lee: So it's fascinating to me that an old concept like streetcar can be the instigator for new development all over the country.

When I was a mid-level engineer, I actually worked on the streetcar in Portland, Oregon. Portland was really the first city that started doing modern streetcar. And so all the different, you know, like Kansas City, Seattle, Tampa, all these other cities followed Portland's example. And they used the streetcar in Portland to revitalize the Pearl District. It's such a destination there now.

 This episode was produced by The Glue and Neille Ilel, edited by Michael May, with music by BC Cambell.

Thank you to Peter Norton, Vic Cervantes, Rachelle Kemp, James Kropp, and Donna Mandelbaum, who all shared their love of streetcars with us. This has been Mobility in Motion. I'm your host, Nadine Lee.

We'd love to hear from you, especially your burning transit questions. If you have ideas for future episodes, or anything else you'd like to ask us about DART or transit, please email us at [email protected] and we might answer in a future episode.

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