Waiting for a Streetcar

People are packed into streetcars like sardines in a box, with perspiration for oil. The seats being more than filled, the passengers are placed in rows down the middle, where they hang on by the straps, like smoked hams in a corner grocery.

So said the New York Herald, in October 1864. So, with more justice than at any time in the intervening 78 years, many a U.S. paper might have said last week.

Some 600 trolley and bus-line operators went to Chicago for an emergency conference of the American Transit Association last week. The emergency: too much business. How much too...

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