You Had to Ask; When and Why Did Pittsburgh Stop Using Street Cars?

Summary

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"Some routes were so unprofitable that they were abandoned in the 1920s," reports Touring Pittsburgh by Trolley, a nostalgic look at trolley service. Many other lines shut down in a system-wide reorganization in 1951, either disbanded entirely or scaled back, with buses operating "feeder routes" to shortened trolley routes -- a kind of hub-and-spoke system like US Airways used to have.

What really did in the trolleys, though, was a force greater than mere Nature: suburban sprawl. In 1947, as Port Authority history shows, nearly three-quarters of Allegheny County residents lived "close to urban population centers accessible by trolley lines." That was about to change, just as the Port Authority was taking over operations from Pittsburgh Railways and a score of long-struggling private bus companies. "The suburban housing and shopping-center boom of the 1950s and 1960s compelled the Authority to add and extend service," the Port Authority's history notes. "For the first time, transit service was provided to areas which had been sparsely populated and rural in character."

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Extract

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You Had to Ask; When and Why Did Pittsburgh Stop Using Street Cars?

STREET-CAR SERVICE in Pittsburgh ended not with a bang but with a transfer -- usually to a bus, and over the course of decades.

At its height, local trolley service was operated by the Pittsburgh Railways Company, wh...

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