page_883 < previous page page_883 next page > Page 883 on the omnibus to ten cents on the horsecar. The only person whose ride was not noticeably improved was the driver, who sat unprotected from the weather on an open platform. It was thought that if the platform were enclosed, the driver's attention and alertness might be compromised. By the mid-1880s, there were 415 street railway companies in the United States operating over six thousand miles of track and carrying 188 million passengers per year, or about twelve rides for every man, woman, and child who lived in a city of at least twenty-five hundred persons. Horsecar railways were built much more slowly in Europe. As late as 1875, the total ridership of Paris, London, Vienna, and Berlin combined was much less than that of New York City alone. In Tokyo, the largest city in Asia, the horsecar was not even introduced until 1882. The Cable Car In 1867, a maverick New York City inventor, Charles T. Harvey, developed an overhead vehicle connected by a releasable grip to a constantly moving cable and installed a primitive prototype over a three-block run in Greenwich Village. The effort ultimately failed, however, and it was left to Andrew Smith Hallidie, a Scottish immigrant who had found wealth in San Francisco as a wire-rope manufacturer, to attempt an urban duplication of the English mining technique of hauling cars by large cables. Passenger vehicles ran along tracks similar to those of the horse railways, but the power came from giant steam engines that moved the cable. Easily adaptable to the broad, straight avenues of American cities, as opposed to the narrow, sinuous streets of European urban centers, the cable car was particularly suited to Nob Hill and other perilous inclines of the City by the Bay. Chicago, however, quickly developed the world's most extensive cable system, particularly to its South Side, and by 1894, the city boasted more than fifteen hundred grip and trailer cars operating on eighty-six miles of track. Philadelphia opened its first cable line in 1883, followed by New York and Oakland in 1887. By 1890, when cable transportation reached its peak, there were five hundred miles of track in twenty-three cities carrying 373 million passengers per year. But since cable car construction costs were several times those of the horsecar, cable operations had to be restricted to the most heavily traveled routes where passenger revenues would be sufficient to recover the investment. Not surprisingly, the popularity of cable systems soon waned, and most cities remained with the horsecar. Only San Francisco retains Hallidie's invention, primarily for nostalgia and tourism. The Steam Railroad The first American railroads were designed for long distance rather than local travel. But they sought ridership wherever they could find it and very early on built stations whenever their lines passed through rural villages on the outskirts of the larger cities. In the nation's largest metropolis, rudimentary commuter travel by steam railroad began in 1832, and by 1837 the New York and Harlem Railroad was offering regular service to 125th Street. Meanwhile, the New York and New Haven Railroad along Long Island Sound reached New Haven in 1843, and the Harlem River line toward Albany reached Peekskill in 1849. Similarly, the Long Island Railroad and the New York and Flushing Railroad enabled former Manhattanites to commute from the east. Over the next half century population growth along these tracks was substantial, and by 1898 the three major passenger lines to the north of the city were alone disgorging 118,000 daily commuters into Grand Central Terminal. This pattern was duplicated elsewhere, and by 1900 railroad commuting was well established in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. Relative to other forms of public transportation, however, railroad travel was both expensive and time consuming. Steam engines were difficult to start and stop; unlike the horsecar or the electric streetcar, the steam engine generated speed slowly. The practical result of this limitation was that railroad suburbs were usually discontinuous and located at least a mile or two from each other. Typically, they developed like beads on a string; the towns were connected by the railroad line but were not initially contiguous either to each other or to the central city. Â < previous page page_883 next page >