When they're #rebuilding #LA after the #PalisadesFire and #EatonFire they should seriously consider bringing back the #Trolleys. Now is the time to make everyone's lives better for decades, perhaps centuries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Railway

Pick a trolley, any trolley!

Dallas, Melbourne, Porto, or Toronto... all on the M-Line in Dallas today.

Enroute to part ii of today's adventure.

https://trolleyride.org/excelsior-streetcar/

This map of historic #Yakima #trolleys built on remix.com makes me want to make a similar interactive online map of the historic #streetcar lines here in #BellinghamWA. Map via: https://www.facebook.com/yakimavalleytrolleys

A visit to the #Boston #MBTA “Green Line” light-rail #Trolleys. #Copley Station, pictured here, opened in 1914. On the photos we see a “Type 7” vehicle, built in the 1980s. The railfan would obviously take a ride … just for the pleasure of travelling on board one of those .

A couple of the 27 famous "trolley cats" that make their home at the Ft. Smith Trolley Museum in Ft Smith, Arkansas. They enjoy riding the trolleys and making visitors feel welcome. Years ago the museum staff gave love and protection to a stray, and it only grew from there. If you'd like to help their mission to preserve both trolleys and felines, I'm sure they would appreciate your donation very much.

https://www.fstm.org/

"Most politicians don’t use public transport. Most politicians don’t rent their accommodation. Most politicians won’t wait on hospital trolleys. That will tell you everything." Letter to Irish Times about Dublin's disgraceful bus service #DublinBus #GhostBuses #Politicians #Trolleys #rent https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/2023/01/12/why-politicians-dont-use-public-transport/

This is the country Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have made
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/a-90-year-old-man-has-been-waiting-50-hours-nurses-tell-of-horrendous-conditions-in-mater-hospital-a-and-e-42263269.html
#Incompetence #IncompetentPoliticians #Trolleys #WaitingLists

Some Muni Central Subway thoughts that no one asked for

The main argument I've seen in favor of the Central Subway (and more traditional heavy-rail subway and elevated lines) is that it offers increased speed over existing options along the route. While I'm sure this is true, it does beg the questions "Is this the ONLY way to speed up service?" and "Was this extra speed really worth the time and resources?"

If you look only at the portions of Muni that run between 4th & Townsend and Chinatown, then the subway seems like a good option. This, I would hope we can all agree, is a very limited viewpoint. If we instead do the more sensible thing and look at this 1.7 mile stretch of San Francisco as merely a small portion of a much larger whole, the project becomes less defensible.

The two key advantages of street-level transit are access and cost. A service that you can simply walk or roll onto right from the street or sidewalk is always going to be easier to access and cheaper to build and maintain than a tunnel. American transit agencies spend, on average, 35 millon dollars-per-mile when building new light rail service (this is way above what other countries spend, btw). Even at that ridiculous rate, Muni could have built 45 MILES of new light rail (really rebuilt, as most of SF was served by light rail before WWII). A subway supporter might say "Well that would just be 45 miles of slow stuff" but why is surface transit "slow" in the first place? In places with adequate public transit, that might be a more difficult question, but here in 'murka, the answer is simple: cars.

SF, the bay area, and america in general have wayyyyyyyyyyyy to many cars on the road, while our public transit is left to wither and decay, with occasional "uplifts" like the Central Subway. This means that most people have little to no access to practical public transit and only neighborhoods near affluent or tourist areas get any real attention. So what happens when someone needs to go somewhere in SF that Muni doesn't serve well, or doesn't have accessible service to, or doesn't have service at the time needed? They drive, clogging up the roads that buses and streetcars use, slowing down both.

At minimum, Muni Metro (the light rail portion of Muni) has four "legacy" streetcar lines on the table it could restore. It could also upgrade it's service to 100% low-floor vehicles, as it's current fleet is high-floor, and therefore inaccessible to anyone who can't climb stairs at 71 of it's now 100 stops. Even with the comically high amount of money american transit agencies spend on their projects, both of these things could have been accomplished with the amount of money spent on the Central Subway.

So what would have happened if Muni had invested 1.578 BILLION dollars in increasing the density, frequency, and accessibility of it's system city-wide instead of one 1.7 mile tourist tunnel? Fewer people would need to drive, so there would be fewer cars on the road, so the buses and streetcars would be faster, including the ones that go to Chinatown, and new services would open access to far more of the city for far more people.

#muni #SanFrancisco #LightRail #streetcar #streetcars #trolley #trolleys #bus# subway #CentralSubway