Public Transportation and Smart Growth

As late as 1929, you could obtain a schedule of all of the electric railways in Western Pennsylvania. You can get a copy of it from the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum (Where I obtain mine many years ago).

These had been written for salesman so they could take these railways to the stores they were trying to get to buy their products. By the late 1920s most salesmen had converted to driving by automobile. Automobile could get the salesman to where he wanted to be at any time, as oppose to the trolley schedule. Thus these stopped being produced after the late 1920s, for the demand for them disappeared.

Not that salesman stop using trolleys, the roads were still BAD in the 1920s (most road construction did not take place till the 1930s and the various New Deal Programs to get people back to work). But given the adoption of gasoline taxes starting in 1919, the states finally had a source of revenue to actually start to pave rural roads..

Most Urban areas roads were paid by 1920, but paid for by local taxes, urban areas did not start to get a share of the gasoline taxes till after WWII and in many ways did not get a "fair share" till the US Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to elect members of the State Legislature other then by districts of equal population. That decision was in 1964, which forced a lot of states to change how their elected members of their state house and state senate. Prior to 1964 many states gave more representatives to rural areas then urban areas and those rural representatives made sure the urban areas did not get an equal share of the gasoline tax and the roads paved by that tax (one way was for any state highway was paved in rural areas, but in urban areas the city had to pay to pave those state highways put of city taxes NOT the state gasoline tax).

I bring this up for most of the time tables were for interurban streetcars that were put out of business when the rural roads near them were paved. Many converted to buses for with buses you did not have to maintain the right of way (and then went out of business a few years later anyway).