AskHistorians Podcast Episode 212 – Public Transport in North America with Jake Berman
The AskHistorians Podcast
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Streetcars - A Brief History of the Streetcar Industry
The electric streetcar is invented in the 1890s in Richmond, Virginia. By and large between then and 1920 or 1930, all of these are privately owned monopolies that have all transportation within a particular metropolitan area under their control. These types of monopolies began losing money in the late twenties and early thirties during the Great Depression before ultimately shutting down around World War II. They were universally under government control by about 1970 or 1975.
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