Via NARP:
The real story behind the demise of America's once-mighty streetcarsBack in the 1920s, most American city-dwellers took public transportation to work every day. There were 17,000 miles of streetcar lines across the country, running through virtually every major American city. Nowadays, by contrast, just 5 percent or so of workers commute via public transit, and they're disproportionately clustered in a handful of dense cities, and just a handful of cities still have extensive streetcar systems. So whatever happened to all those streetcars?