What were the three types of transportation systems in the early 19th century?

Mass transit—streetcars, elevated and commuter rail, subways, buses, ferries, and other transportation vehicles serving large numbers of passengers and operating on fixed routes and schedules—has been part of the urban scene in the United States since the early 19th century. Regular steam ferry service connected Brooklyn and New Jersey to Manhattan in the early 1810s and horse-drawn omnibuses plied city streets starting in the late 1820s. Expanding networks of horse railways emerged by the mid-19th century. A half century later, technological innovation and urban industrialization enabled the electric streetcar to become the dominant mass transit vehicle. During this era, mass transit had a significant impact on American urban development, suburbanization, the rise of technological networks, consumerism, and even race and gender relations. Mass transit’s importance in the lives of most Americans started to decline with the growth of automobile ownership in the 1920s, except for a temporary rise in transit ridership during World War II. In the 1960s, when congressional subsidies began to reinvigorate mass transit, heavy-rail systems opened in cities such as San Francisco and Washington D.C., followed by light rail systems in San Diego, Portland, and other cities in the next decades. As the 21st century approached, concern about environmental sustainability and urban revitalization stimulated renewed interest in the benefits of mass transit.

The history of urban mass transit in the United States is more complex than a simple progression of improved public transportation modes before the rise of the automobile ultimately replaced transit’s dominance by the mid-20th century. Transit history in American cities is rooted in different phases of urbanization, the rise of large corporate entities during the industrial era, the relationship between technology and society, and other broad themes within American history. At the same time, mass transit history shows the value of emphasizing local contexts, as the details of urban transit unfolded differently across the United States based on municipal traditions, environments, economies, and phases of growth.

Ferry Boats, Omnibuses, and the Beginnings of Mass Transit in the Early 19th Century

The ferry boats that regularly crossed the waters of a few American cities in the early 19th century provided an important precedent to the mass transit industry that emerged later in the century. Before the age of industrialization, the cities of the American merchant economy were primarily sites of commercial exchange of goods and services. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and most other urban centers were dense, port cities located along rivers, bays, and other bodies of water. And while this geography facilitated the transshipment of goods, it also impeded the expansion of urban settlement. During the early 1810s, Robert Fulton, an engineer and inventor, established using steam power. The service linked lower Manhattan with Jersey City over the Hudson River, as well as the village of Brooklyn, at the time a small suburban settlement across the East River. The early development of regular ferry service illustrates the dominant role that New York City would play in American urban mass transit—not surprising considering the city’s rapid demographic and physical growth and dominant position in the hierarchy of American cities during the 19th century. Ferries also demonstrate the early connections between transit and urban expansion, as the service allowed commuters living in areas such as the newly subdivided Brooklyn Heights neighborhood to overcome obstacles for continuous settlement posed by bodies of water. Typically, regular users of this service enjoyed above-average incomes and social positions. Unlike most working people, they could afford the expense of a daily fare. By the 1860s, the annual ridership of New York’s ferry industry had expanded to more than 32 million people. Thirteen companies employed seventy steamboats for more than twenty different ferry routes. Similar service had also spread to other northeastern cities, such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Ferry service is still an integral part of daily commuting in some cities today. Despite its success, however, ferry boat service could do little to improve transportation over land.

The omnibus had weaknesses. Since most vehicles featured unpadded seats and typically travelled on uneven cobblestone roads (if paved at all), passengers experienced an uncomfortable ride. The fare—generally 12 cents—was too expensive for most urban dwellers. Nonetheless, the omnibus initiated a “riding habit” of regular transit use within its main segment of users: members of the urban middle class. This growing demographic found private stagecoaches too expensive, but they had the affluence and desire to commute to work instead of walking. Although getting around by foot remained the main source of mobility for most urban dwellers, the “walking city” was slowly eroding.

Horsecars: The “American Railway”

A vehicle with less surface friction could reduce the shortcomings that had plagued the omnibus. Horse streetcars—commonly known as horsecars—traveled on rail instead of road, and had numerous advantages over the omnibus. The use of rails provided a faster, quieter, more comfortable ride, while enabling a more efficient use of horse power. This fact allowed for larger cars that carried approximately three times as many riders as the omnibus. Importantly, the horsecar’s lower operating cost per passenger mile translated to a cheaper fare for users (typically 5 cents compared to the 12-cent omnibus fare) and a growing “riding habit” within the American urban population. Horsecars reduced the time and cost of commuting to and from the central core, and, thus, they expanded the area of development along the urban fringe. Following a slow start, other American cities adopted horsecars by the 1850s, part of the wider context of rampant urbanization during the second half of the 19th century. Typically, a private company ran lines under a franchise awarded by the municipality that outlined the public roads on which the company could build rails and operate routes, along with other stipulations. By the end of the 1850s, New York, New Orleans, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cincinnati provided horsecar service. Further expansion developed during the 1860s. Two decades later, almost twenty thousand horsecars traveled on more than thirty thousand miles of street railway across the United States. Such expansion was particularly notable in contrast to comparatively slower growth in Europe (where people called the technology “American Railways”). The horsecar’s initial development in the United States, and its early spread across the country, exemplified how the country was often at the forefront of transit use and technological innovation during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.

Transit Becomes Electric

Street railway companies quickly adopted electricity. Often, they used existing rails and even former horsecar vehicles. Electric streetcars transformed the transit industry. New forms of expertise related to electricity replaced veterinarians, blacksmiths, and other horse-related professions. The new technology also generated mergers with large companies swallowing up smaller enterprises, monopolizing service in urban areas, and employing corporate business forms in order to raise capital needed for investment in electricity infrastructure (in some cases, electrical utility companies were also transit providers). Transit remained within the private market in most American cities until the second half of the 20th century, but the organizational structure of the industry became more complex.

Electric streetcars rapidly spread across the country. Like horsecars decades earlier, electric streetcars accommodated heavier passenger loads compared to predecessors. This reduced passenger cost per mile, lowered fares, and stimulated greater transit use by wider segments of society. Two years after Sprague’s Richmond success, the vehicle carried twice the number of passengers in the United States compared to the rest of the world, with thirty-two thousand electric streetcars traversing American streets from small towns to major metropolises—a number that nearly doubled by the turn of the century.

The Effects of Electric Streetcars on Urban Life

Streetcars and other forms of electric traction had a tremendous influence on the shapes and sensations of urban life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In many cases, the technology exacerbated trends that began with the horsecar. Streetcars continued the horsecar’s role in enabling the seemingly contradictory yet related forces of centralization and dispersal in American cities. In essence, this entailed the general separation between major commercial activities in the downtown and districts of residence and other activities, such as manufacturing, in less dense areas surrounding the core and along the urban fringe. The American walking city—in which the dominant mode for the journey to work was by foot—came to an end, although many workers still walked to their places of employment.

The many streetcar lines that radiated from central business districts across the United States increased accessibility to and from downtown. The shapes, spectacles, and symbols of what is still associated today with “downtown”—business skyscrapers and other tall buildings as well as large theaters, department stores, hotels, and other palaces of consumption—emerged with the arrival of horsecars, but they reached a new scale with electric streetcars. Electric traction had a centralizing effect by increasing land values in the core and creating the economy of large buildings and places of entertainment during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These attractions relied upon other technologies such as the elevator, telephone, and electric light, yet the rise of skyscrapers and other iconic elements of the modern urban landscape would have been unlikely without streetcars.

Streetcars played a dramatic role in suburbanization. Unlike the natural limits of horsecars, electric streetcars could journey well beyond the existing city once trackage was laid. In Boston, for example, the area of urban settlement expanded from two miles outside the old walking city core during the horsecar era to four miles during the first decade of electric streetcar service. Suburban living was more readily available to Americans of the growing middle class and in the skilled trades from cities as varied as New York City to Milwaukee. Those who worked within the older city but could not afford the daily ten-cent round trip fare were forced to stay (or walk long distances from the urban fringe). The characteristics of “streetcar suburbs” differed across and within cities, yet they also shared similarities. For example, accessible, cheap land enabled suburban residential developments of semi-detached or detached dwellings set back from the street and surrounded by a yard (apartments also existed). Walkability remained important for at least some daily tasks and, of course, for the journey to the nearby streetcar stop. Thus, on the whole, streetcar suburbs had fairly compact forms and high population densities compared to the automobile-centric suburbs that developed later in the 20th century, although such forms and densities varied based on local influences, levels of affluence, and other factors. Real estate speculators knew the value of streetcar service to their developments. In many cases, transit companies held real estate interests along the urban fringe, which they connected via streetcar to spur development, even if the line itself was unprofitable. Yet the many streetcar suburbs that still dot the American landscape today were not simply the result of ambitious developers, but also the desires and actions of many people, from local politicians to the varied residents who made such places home.

Various social factors joined the development and expansion of the electric streetcar to create the new scale of suburbanization at the turn of the 20th century. The streetcar did not solely create the suburbs; the relationship was more complex. The experience of suburbanization in the United States evolved differently from that in Europe, where dense row housing continued to develop along the urban fringe. Demand existed for suburbanization—and its distinct shapes and forms—as well as the technologies that made it possible. Scholars have often explained such demand through the value placed by Americans on private property ownership and the 19th-century belief in the “rural ideal.” To these factors, historian Clay McShane has added popular ideas about public health that emerged during the second half of the 19th century. The miasmic theory of disease contended that vapors emanating from rotting organic matter caused illness. To counter these miasmic threats, Americans sought suburban environments filled with grass, trees, and fresh air. Ironically, the new scale of suburbanization generated by electric streetcars created new social issues, such as the growing geographic division of wealth and political fragmentation within the American metropolis.

Transit also enabled new social experiences associated with the modern age. Whereas streetcars linked people to department stores, theaters, and other attractions of downtown, the technology also connected riders to attractions at the end of the line. Amusement parks were the most prominent. Transit companies often owned such parks as a means to generate more passenger traffic in outer areas and on off-peak times: weekends and holidays. For example, Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon Park originated as a natural springs attraction served by omnibus service and became a large amusement park after the Atlanta Street Railway assumed control of it by the turn of the 20th century. Even one of the greatest attractions at amusement parks—the rollercoaster—had a connection to transit technology; it turned apprehensions about new transit technology (such as the fear of accidents) into a sensorial thrill. According to David Nye, destinations at both ends of the streetcar line—the downtown department store and the amusement park along the urban fringe—promoted a consumerist, mass society that “subverted the Victorian moral code” of thrift and self-restraint.

Electric streetcars, along with subways and elevated railroads, allowed for new ways of seeing the city and its inhabitants. Riding within a swift, enclosed transit vehicle emphasized a visual understanding of the urban landscape. In particular, elevateds allowed for a comprehensive, panoramic view of the city that was unattainable by walking on the ground. The interiors of transit vehicles also became essential public spaces by forcing face-to-face contact between people of varying racial, class, and gender identities. Crowded rush-hour cars such as those of the New York elevateds and subways made social contact particularly common. Ironically, transit interiors became points of intimate contact at the same time that the American city, through suburbanization via transit technology, was becoming more residentially segregated by race and class.

The Decline of Mass Transit in 20th-Century America

Starting in the 1910s, inflation imposed pressure on the overwhelmingly private-owned transit industry. Transit companies began to reduce investment in their capital stock before World War I. Inflation led to increased prices for materials (the value of steel rails rose by 50 percent after the war) and other costs. Labor, the largest part of the industry’s operating costs, also became more expensive as more workers unionized. Greater demand for better service from interest groups—not only users who protested against any hike to the common five-cent fare, but also politicians and business groups—compounded these economic forces by making more difficult the implementation of positive reforms that could have improved the competitiveness of transit against the automobile.

Another challenge originated with jitneys: privately owned automobiles operated by entrepreneurs who cruised streets (typically those with transit routes) in search of possible customers. Passengers enjoyed the jitney’s flexibility, especially its ability to drop off riders closer to their destination compared to the same cost as a streetcar. Unlike transit companies, jitneys usually were unlicensed and paid no municipal fees or taxes. Transit operators saw jitneys as unfair competition and pressured local governments to prohibit the service in many cities. The jitney enjoyed only short-lived success, but it provided but one example of how the automobile threatened the transit industry.

World War II saw a steep but temporary rise in ridership—in fact the highest in the mass transit industry’s history. The booming war economy created a strong demand from passengers requiring transit for work trips, especially compared to the rampant unemployment and declining rider figures during the Great Depression. Wartime gasoline and rubber rationing, and an automobile production ban, also led to increased ridership. Yet the boom failed to solve the transit industry’s larger issues, which were evident before the war. In fact, the wartime riding experience hurt transit in the long run. Passengers in Detroit and other industrial cities crowded into packed, often dilapidated transit vehicles, which created uncomfortable riding situations and even racial conflict. These memories surely remained with former riders who decided to purchase automobiles once the conflict ended.

Federal Funding and a Return to Ridership Stability

Mass transit has made a modest comeback since the 1960s, when the federal government began to subsidize transit expansion on a broad scale. The push for federal funding originated from a coalition of railroad executives and big city mayors. In the late 1950s, rail companies with major freight operations cut many of their unprofitable commuter rail services that served large metropolitan areas. Together, the mayors and rail companies fought for a national transportation policy from the federal government that recognized the importance of mass transit, not just highways and automobiles. Older cities worried that further decline of transit would diminish the competitive advantages of their central cores over more peripheral areas in terms of business services and manufacturing. And middle-class suburbanites who relied on commuter rail worried about the loss of a service that connected them to places of work, consumption, and leisure. A few precedents for capital funding from government existed, for example, municipal funds for subways in Boston and New York City, and federal funding for the Chicago subway during the Great Depression and World War II.

Discussion of the Literature

Urban mass transit has been a focus of academic historical research since the 1960s. Sam Bass Warner Jr. produced the first major academic work on the subject. He examined the connections between changing forms of transit technology (namely horsecars and electric streetcars) and residential growth in the Boston suburbs of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester. Relying on sources such as censuses, land deeds, government reports, and local histories, Warner focused on the impact street railways and other institutions—as well as the choices of individual builders and residents—had on the metropolitan landscape. He also paid attention to the relationship between commuting and the geography of class, as he noted the overwhelmingly middle-class nature of the new suburbs in contrast to the higher proportion of poorer residents concentrated in the inner city. Warner, writing during the era of suburban “white flight” and the transformation of the inner city through urban renewal, defined this process of suburban–inner city segregation by class as “the central event of the 1870s–1900 era.”

Historical research on mass transit history continued during subsequent decades. Such interest developed as part of the growth of urban history during this time, as scholars sought to uncover the historical roots and wider contexts of housing issues, racial segregation, and economic inequality that came to the surface in American cities during the postwar “urban crisis.” In the wake of rising concern over air pollution, energy use, and the impact of automobiles on the urban fabric, several works focused on the historical factors that had led to the rise and fall of mass transit (and related, the rise of urban automobile use). Increased attention to transit also followed federal funding starting in the 1960s. Brian J. Cudahy has looked at the issue from a national perspective. Other authors have selected single cities—Scott Bottles on Los Angeles or Paul Barrett on Chicago, for example—as their case studies or took a comparative approach in order to emphasize how such processes unfolded in different locales. A common thread running through much of this work emphasized the technological choices behind various transit forms and the political relationships among private transit providers, local governments, and various interest groups.

A growing body of work by urban historians surveys the impact of suburbanization on American life since the 19th century. The connections between suburbanization and mass transit, along with the growth in automobility and road building, serve as major aspects of the work. Clay McShane used an innovative approach to examine the impact of transportation patterns on urban life. He argued that the rising popularity of the automobile in the early 20th century derived from changing social perceptions of the street as traffic corridors rather than public spaces, a trend that had begun with the railway and mass transit in the 19th century. Peter Norton built on this approach to uncover the highly contested nature of the street in American cities as different interest groups, including mass transit operators and users, fought for or against its transformation via the automobile.

More recently, the influences of environmental history and cultural history have made their mark on the study of mass transit. Clay McShane and Joel Tarr have focused on an integral part of the horsecar that historians had previously ignored: the animal that powered the vehicle. They show the essential role that horses had on not only mass transit, but also the wider processes of change in the industrial American city. David Nye’s work on electricity has emphasized the need to consider the creation of social meaning as key in understanding the influence of the electric streetcar and other transit technologies. To Nye, the electric streetcar emerged as part of a constellation of technologies at the turn of the 20th century that influenced the transition to the modern American city based on consumerism and spectacle. Recent scholarship has also focused less on the elite decisions made within corporate boardrooms and political offices and more on the daily experiences of transit passengers. Robin Kelley and others have conceptualized the transit vehicle as a contested public space in which the practices of racial and gender inequality in everyday life were reinforced and challenged. Others, influenced by a growing emphasis on the user within the history of technology and mobility studies, have examined how unfavorable experiences of transit may have influenced former passengers to purchase automobiles.

While the dynamics of mass transit during the 19th and early 20th century has received a fair amount of attention from scholars, the subject’s more recent history has received far less attention. For instance, broad histories of mass transit in the United States rightly emphasize earlier eras when more Americans used transit per capita, while giving much shorter accounts of transit since the mid-20th century. To give one example, no extensive study examines San Francisco’s BART—one of the largest megaprojects of the 1960s and 1970s—from a historical perspective. Fortunately, historians are beginning to focus more attention on mass transit during the eras after World War II. Leading this trend is Zachary Schrag’s fine work on the Washington Metro, which has brought a postwar perspective to the literature on subways by Clifton Hood and other historians. Public concern about environmental sustainability, alternative transportation forms and energy sources, and the consequences of an automobile-based lifestyle suggest that research on more recent transit history will continue to grow.

Primary Sources

Historians of mass transit use a variety of primary sources to understand issues related to the topic. Such breadth reflects the fact that the study of mass transit requires knowledge of both technical matters and social dynamics, since both elements are interconnected. The voices of elites—politicians, company executives, and technical experts—are often found in reports, trade publications, government records, and other official documents. Uncovering the thoughts and behaviors of ordinary people (whether they be users, observers, or workers) is more challenging but can be gleaned from newspaper reports, literature, and photographs and other forms of visual art as well as the census and other quantitative sources. Scale is a further consideration in the study of mass transit, as transit may be approached from a national to a local perspective. Depending on the research question, scale influences the types of sources used by the historian.

Several institutions contain historical information on mass transit at a national level. The National Transportation Library of the Department of Transportation features digitized sources with an emphasis on statistical, technical, or policy documents. The collection is more useful for the study of the recent past since a majority of its documents date from the late 20th century to the present. The Transportation Research Board operates TRID, a massive search database that covers more than one billion transportation documents, including conference proceedings, technical reports, books, and journal articles related to transit. More than thirty institutions across the United States form the University Transportation Centers program. These centers often feature strong transportation libraries, such as the Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library of Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies.

Local collections—archives, museums, libraries, and other repositories—are essential for historical research on mass transit in a specific city or region. These collections often feature reports, meeting minutes, and other documents related to local transit activities. For example, the New York Transit Museum houses an extensive collection of materials related to the transit history of the New York metropolitan area. The Dorothy Peyton Gray Transportation Library and Archive—operated by the Los Angeles Metro transit authority—caters to research devoted to Southern California’s transportation history. Since transit held a prominent place in public debates and daily life during the 19th and 20th centuries, local newspapers are also excellent sources for research on significant developments as well as more quotidian matters related to local transit history.

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