Desire for streetcars surges in US

Despite being celebrated in literature and film, streetcars had largely disappeared from America's cities by the end of the Second World War, to be replaced by buses and trains. Now, they are steadily making a clattering comeback.

With communities across the US investing to revitalise their often decrepit city centres, and with planners keen to try to avoid the congestion caused by cars, streetcars or trolleys are being reintroduced to lure tourists and commuters.

Officials say that developers - with an eye on capitalising on the nostalgia value - will now often back a project involving a streetcar that they might otherwise have dismissed.

"It's a lot sexier than a bus," said Len Brandrup, the director of transportation in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a city of 100,000 people on the shores of Lake Michigan, which opened a two-mile loop in 2000.

The Kenosha system attracts about 60,000 trips a year, but Mr Brandrup said the city was keen to enlarge the streetcar's operation and to build on its initial success. He said it was used by tourists and commuters. "If you arrived in Kenosha by train and you wanted to visit the museum or else get to your house on the lakeshore, the streetcar would be your thing," Mr Brandrup said. "We would like to try and expand it but you have to start somewhere."

Streetcars already operate in more than dozen American cities, most famously San Francisco and New Orleans - the latter being where the Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire, was set. But a recent article in USA Today suggested that three dozen other cities - as far afield as Omaha, Nebraska and Birmingham, Alabama - are planning to introduce similar systems.

"The return of the streetcars is not happening for new reasons but for the same reasons," Michael English, the vice-president of Tampa Historic Streetcar, which operates a two-and-a-half-mile line in the Florida city, told the newspaper.

Washington is also planing to reintroduce the vehicle. This week it was reported that officials in the capital intend to spend about $10m (£5m) on developing a line that will link the impoverished but slowly gentrifying suburb of Anacostia to the Bolling Air Force base. The city's once extensive trolley system was closed down 45 years ago.

"A lot of times, when streetcar systems are put into areas that are distressed or are undergoing some kind of economic change, economic development occurs around the area of the fixed investment," Catondra Noye, the city's Transportation Department's co-ordinator for the streetcar project, told Bloomberg News. Washington's new line is due to open next year.

According to the American Public Transportation Association, light rail - which includes the type of trolley-car system being planned for the US capital - saw the biggest increase in ridership among various transit systems across the country, based on 2005 figures.

Electric-powered streetcars were first introduced in the 1880s in Berlin, St Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia. Their golden age took place between the two world wars, when they became the primary form of urban transport.

But after the Second World War, while streetcars were retained by a number of European countries, city planners in the US gave precedence to cars and buses.