It’s worth taking a look around in your city or small community, and noticing that some of your most beloved neighborhoods were probably built in the era of the streetcar or interurban rail system. Some of the best, most desirable, walkable neighborhoods in cities like Los Angeles, Houston, and Atlanta; where streetcar systems are long since gone, grew up around a trolley stop or streetcar line.
So maybe we should enlist the help of some new streetcars or rail systems to help create some new ones?
On that note, The Overhead Wire has a great quote today you should probably jot down and stick on a card to carry with you:
Transit systems are often over analyzed in terms of cost and under analyzed in terms of benefits. We can use streetcars and interurbans to build the cities of tomorrow, while remembering that they built some of the best neighborhoods of today.
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This is a very good point. In fact when the question of does TOD work? The answer can often be to point to many of our streetcar suburbs.