You ought to thank the bicycle, and apologize to the streetcar.

[2strokebloke]

Every now and then, somebody comes along and takes credit for the hard work of others and recieves all the praise.
Think about automobile, and our modern commuter society.
The very concept of suburban communities didn't exist before the invention of the streetcar, most American cities had barely any paved roads before the invention of the bicycle.
Before the automobile had become reliable enough/cheap enough to be useful to anybody, the trolley was the main means for transport in cities. Further, as a way to boost ridership most pubic transport companies would lay rails leading out of the city to empty tracts of land anticipating that because the line ran there people would buy the land, build houses, and become patrons of the transport system. Surprisingly from today's perspective, this always worked out for the company. You can spot a "streetcar" suburb easily, as they are usually distinctive in that the houses have small front yards, large patios, and if there is a garage it is usually detached from the house, and opens into an alleyway behind the house.
Suburbs and commuting were both concepts advanced by streetcar companies.
When the bicycling craze of the 1890's really took off, the demand for paved roads also took off. Cycling clubs petitioned for roads to be paved, as well as to be cleaned of debris for safer riding.
With people now living out of city itself and in periphery suburbs instead, and paved roads becoming the norm, all anybody had to wait was for technology to catch up to the automobile and make it useful.
It is ironic however that the infrastructure these machines built, lead to them being discarded in favour of machines that simply stole all the glory and rested on the achievments of the machines they were replacing.
There are some popular myths about the demise of the streetcar, such as that GM bought streetcar lines so they could junk the streetcars and replace them with their own busses - which is in fact true, GM did do this but it only ever happened to a handful of lines. GM also bribed company owners with new cars and other incentives to scrap their streetcars and replace them with busses. The other myth is that streetcars were too expensive to run, in fact the actual cost of running an electric streetcar was much lower than to run a bus. The cost of expanding a streetcar line to serve new area however was enormous, as you had to lay rails and hang wires - with a bus you simply steered to the new location and picked up passengers.
But the biggest factor in the death of the streetcar was the American mindset right after WWII. In the atomic age, new always equalled better in the American psyche - the streetcar was seen as backwards, literally embarassing to be seen in a modern city. Consequentally many good systems were torn up in the fifties and replaced with "modern" busses.
Also, as if the automobile hadn't already done it's damage to the streetcar business by taking away a good portion of ridership - the resulting traffic of all those cars in the city meant that traffic planners had to adopt systems which used massive ammounts of one way streets to cure growing jams. Trollies with their rails rooted firmly in the pavement couldn't simply take new routes and adapt to the one way streets.
The bicycle similiarly had fallen upon hard times - nobody had seriously thought of the bicycle as transportation since the depression, and while fuel rationing kept them useful through the war, the attitude towards the bicycle after war was that it was a sign of cheapness, you had ought to buy the biggest most chrome laden car you could afford to show off how succesful you were. Bicycles became sidewalk toys for children.
For a while though things seemed great, I mean cars are really great machines afterall. But our dependence on automobiles, and pollution and worries about natural resources - traffic jams, accidents, a fattening populace, and the fact that parking isn't free anymore, one wonders if we should come full circle and go back to electric streetcars, and cheap, dependable bicycles. I doubt it though, nobody in our society would be willing to sacrifice even the tiniest sliver of their own comfort for the good of anybody else. But it's an entertaining thought regardless, think about it next time you see that steel rail peeking up through a pothole in the pavement. And wonder, if less people were driving in the city, they may even take down all those parking meters, so on the off chance you would be driving, you could park for free.
And if you're prefectly happy with driving on paved roads to your suburban home (even if in 15mph traffic) you ought to thank those responsible, respectively the bicycle and the streetcar.

[L-Spec]

Amen, brother

[speediva]

Pittsburgh, PA still has a fully-capable (okay, MOSTLY capable) streetcar system... mostly because it was not developed until much later than most. We call it the "T", but the city is now trying to "rename it" to the "lightrail system". Any time I don't feel like driving in City traffic, I hop on the T... although the places that it goes within the city is pretty limited, so I better hope I need to go somewhere closeby.

[MagicRat]

I would agree with this post.
However, streetcars as being cheaper, or better than buses?
The roadway for buses already exists, its cost is shared with all it's users.
The modern streetcar requires extensive additional infrastructure, at considerable expense.

The Toronto Trasnsit commission has to spend $60 million to rebuild an existing streetcar line.
It was originally budgeted for $22 million, but cost overruns have been massively uncontrolled.
http://www.toronto.ca/wes/techservic...air_w_transit/

Buses would not have required such investment.

However, a dedecated streetcar line, that is used heavily, by many people and streetcars is much cheaper than other alternatives, like subways and is much more economical than buses, so long as there is sufficient volume of passengers to justify its expense of construction.
http://www.script2004.ca/

[2strokebloke]

you'll note that I mentioned the infrastructure costs of streetcars are indeed high, but the running costs of streetcars are lower than busses.