By Robert C. Post
This quantity within the Greenwood Technographies sequence covers city mass transit - that's, the applied sciences that permit towns to maneuver huge numbers of individuals round. quite a few hundred years in the past, the dimensions of towns used to be 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 perpetually 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 reasonably priced technique of transportation in towns.
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Extra resources for Urban Mass Transit: The Life Story of a Technology (Greenwood Technographies)
Example text
But the ideal of “efficiency” is always a moving target, and the history of cable railways demonstrates this perfectly. What once seemed efficient and supremely rational compared to horse power would eventually seem dreadfully burdensome compared to electricity—far more readily transmitted from place to place than mechanical power could be transmitted through cables. After San Francisco, cable propulsion was adopted in cities equally hilly, such as Seattle, and also in cities where the terrain was almost perfectly flat, such as Chicago.
Built as part of the California Street Cable Railway in the 1880s, this line is one of the three now operated by the San Francisco Municipal Railway and considered to be one of the city’s premier tourist attractions. (Author’s photo) Ultimately there was at least one cable car line in every large American city except Boston, Detroit, and New Orleans. In several cities they played a role similar to what they played on Temple Street, in others they were profitable ventures in and of themselves, as in Chicago.
Four miles was a typical length, Roebling’s price for such a cable would be about $7,000, and the weight 60,000 pounds. There were railroad cars designed to carry that sort of load, but trucking a cable through city streets from a siding to a powerhouse could be a real challenge. The prodigious weight, 30 tons for a 4-mile cable, is indicative of an inherent defect in the whole concept. The engine in the powerhouse had to be run at full capacity just to keep the cables moving, no matter how many cars were out on the line.
