By Robert C. Post

This quantity within the Greenwood Technographies sequence covers city mass transit - that's, the applied sciences that let towns to maneuver huge numbers of individuals round. quite a few hundred years in the past, the dimensions of towns was once constrained by the point it took humans to maneuver from one a part of the town to a different. the advance of successive applied sciences has eternally altered the city panorama. From horse-drawn omnibuses to subways to present light-rail, this quantity highlights the technological and social struggles that experience followed urbanization and the necessity for a good and low-priced technique of transportation in towns.

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Extra resources for Urban Mass Transit: The Life Story of a Technology (Greenwood Technographies)

Sample text

In getting authorization from municipal officials in the form of franchises—that is, a public privilege conferred by a governmental body—most street railway entrepreneurs would be obligated in a similar way. Long afterwards, this would become a significant financial burden, and an increasingly attractive inducement to switch from streetcars to conveyances that did not entail an obligation to take care of the street—the rubber-tired motorbus that became practical for mass transit about a century later.

B O B TA I L S A N D D O U B L E - E N D E R S Most smaller cities and towns had “bobtails” with only a step up to the door at the rear. Motive power was provided by a single horse (hence the expression “one-horse town”). Passengers were instructed to put their fare in a box located beside the driver, or into an inclined channel that sent it up to the box by gravity. This device for collecting fares was a patented invention of John B. Slawson, who later joined Stevenson’s firm as treasurer. Bobtails were often called “farebox cars” and Booth Tarkington evoked an image of a one-horse streetcar (actually, in Tarkington’s Midland it was a mule) in The Magnificent Ambersons: At the rear door of the car there was no platform, but a step where passengers clung in wet clumps when the weather was bad and the car crowded.

Even with lightweight cars, scenes involving overburdened streetcar horses were a pathetic aspect of urban life. Horses labored on the slightest grade, and even on level ground they strained desperately to get a loaded car rolling from a dead stop. tex 22 ggbd048 GR3916/Post October 14, 2006 Urban Mass Transit would be time to slow down for another stop. When their horses were tired, drivers sometimes tried to avoid full stops, and customers had to get on and off moving cars as best they could—one of numerous reasons why they tended to regard drivers as adversaries.

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