Yay, Trudy, that's the whole thing! In New York we had Robert Moses, in LA we had General Motors. What happened to the trolleys was a national disaster. Americans got brainwashed into thinking that two cars with 2 or 3 people in them were more deserving of space in the public roads than trolleys or buses with 60. And I agree, some more modern cities, and ruined old ones like Atlanta, are going to be very hard to re-create in the public transportation mode. They were built to sprawl. I've never lived in a place where I had to drive to get milk, and I didn't even bother to learn to drive until I was 28. I went to a school where there were about ten student parking spaces--alloted very strictly according to need--and none of my friends could dream of affording a car, with the insurance and all. But Gar's thing about inefficiency got me thinking about what a problem cars are.

Edit: PMM, please calm down! I wasn't talking about you personally and your situation sounds very, very bad. This is just a little discussion board for a soon-to-be-gone TV show and its low-rated spinoffs, I'm just throwing out hypotheticals. Sorry.

Hey, I just found out Seattle still has trolleys! But having no idea how big the city is, I don't know if they help people get to work or if they're just for tourists. They do seem to run pretty often from the timetables.

More maps! Trolleys from 1963 in the North and South. Seems like they had that peninsula problem licked. To be fair, though, by then some of them were trolley-buses. The ones in Boston don't pollute but I don't know if the ones in Seattle did.

Edit: PMM, please calm down! I wasn't talking about you personally and your situation sounds very, very bad. This is just a little discussion board for a soon-to-be-gone TV show and its low-rated spinoffs, I'm just throwing out hypotheticals. Sorry.

I'm perfectly calm. I'm just throwing out the West Coast perspective. Our trolleys are tourist things along the waterfront, for the record.

They're cute. Almost too twee.

However, you do understand that "this is just a discussion board for blah blah blah" really holds no water as an argument for those of us who do take this place and our communication in it seriously, don't you?

I've never lived in a place where I had to drive to get milk, and I didn't even bother to learn to drive until I was 28.

I grew up four miles from the nearest wide spot in the road with a gas station or two and an expensive, poorly stocked grocery store, and seven miles from the town where I went to school, which had a few more basic amenities. 25 miles from Birmingham, where you had to go if you wanted any kind of selection for shopping, or to see a movie or find a decent restaurant. I got my learner's permit the day after my fifteenth birthday, my license the Monday after I turned 16, and my first car two months later. But that was rural, not sprawl.

I hear you about sprawl, though. I give Seattle credit, in spite of its myriad transportation problems, for caring enough to try to maintain the environment and the natural beauty of its setting. Every time I go home to Alabama, Birmingham has sprawled another few miles southward, chopping the tops of mountains for grandiose subdivisions and endless strip malls. I remember what it looked like twenty years ago, before those glorious pine-covered ridges were denuded and decapitated, and the desecration makes me sick.

Just another reason I could never live in the South again.

Well, I guess so, but it does seem odd that a hypothetical observation is taken so personally. I didn't mean to imply that anybody *here* is a hummer-loving gas-guzzling hypocrite, just that it's funny when people who call themselves environmentalists are. People in general.

Cars are a problem, and I don't own one myself, but God knows I cadge enough lifts that I can't really get high and mighty about people owning them.

I will say this though: as a more-or-less full time pedestrian, I hate drivers. All of them. No offence, but when people get behind the wheel of a car, they become monsters.

They're cute. Almost too twee.

I know the former city council rep whose baby they were. He always loved trolleys, in a geeky, trainspotting kind of way--one of the reasons he married the woman he did was that she was the only girl he dated who enjoyed his trolley natter. Good people. But what Plei said--they're strictly tourist trolleys. Our public transit, such as it is, is 100% bus.

Oh, and living in a city that never got rid of its trolleys (except we call them trams), can I just say:

haaaa-haaa!

Oh yes, I know that rural America needs a car, but then again you don't have to pay parking and the high insurance and all, so from what I've seen even poor people have them. It's like houses-when I was a kid everybody who could afford an actual house instead of an apartment was upper-middle-class, and the idea of a person saying they were poor and lived in their.very.own.single.family.house! took some getting used to.

Caroma, your original post made it sound like I couldn't call myself an environmentalist unless I sold our cars--cars, mind you, not SUV's, and they get decent mileage--and left Seattle for somewhere with better transit. Made me feel a little snippy somehow.