Why public transportation was so successful in old-time Phoenix


Part of the success of territorial Phoenix was its extensive public transportation system. That is, trolley cars.

If you lived in Phoenix anytime after the mid twentieth century, it would probably surprise you to find that underneath the streets crowded with cars are the old trolley lines, dating back to the 1800s. When the light rail in Phoenix began just a few years ago, while it may not have exactly followed the routes of the old trolley cars, but it followed the tradition.

And if you've ridden on the light rail, you know that it's great, but there are things missing. But don't blame the light rail!
Support Arizona history by becoming a patron on Patreon

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring blog posts are shared there daily, also there's "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, and super high-resolution photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona
One of things that is missing nowadays is the infrastructure that made using public transportation the first thing that people thought of when they needed to do something, like shopping. I have to admit that when I pondered the problem of trying to carry groceries, or bags of stuff from Walmart, on a public transportation system, I was puzzled.

The answer, of course, is delivery. When Mrs. Shirley Christy went shopping at the local store, assuming her husband was using the horse cart (that's him there next to the Adams Hotel at Central and Adams), she could walk over to the store, or take a trolley, pick out exactly what she needed, and go home empty-handed, carrying nothing. The store delivered to their house, for free.

Shirley Christy in front of the Adams Hotel

Of course, with the invention of the horseless carriage (automobiles), offering delivery no longer made sense. And so, very quickly, businesses became "cash and carry" - which just meant that you paid for your stuff right then and there, and carried it away in your automobile. If you didn't have an automobile, well, the new system just didn't work for you.

Bringing the old-fashioned idea of delivery into modern day, just think of ordering things online. Personally, I order a lot of stuff online. I click, and it gets delivered. Mostly it's routine stuff that I really don't need to see in real life, like vitamins, or dental floss. And just like the old days, delivery is free.

As of this writing, I can't think of any store along the light rail line in Phoenix that would allow me to go in, pick out what I wanted, and have it delivered to me for free. It sounds like a crazy idea, but if you ran a business along the old Phoenix trolley line, that's what you did.

Street cars in Phoenix in 1905. You're looking west on Washington from just east of 1st Street

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more