Light rail is the streetcar that cities scrapped and then reinvented
After the 1950s, cities across Britain and America ripped out their trams in favour of cars and buses. West Germany upgraded its networks instead, adding tunnels, bigger vehicles and dedicated tracks. In 1972 American planners borrowed the idea and gave it a new name, light rail, and the old streetcar came roaring back.
The word light has nothing to do with how much the trains weigh. It refers to lighter infrastructure and passenger capacity compared with heavy rail systems such as the London Underground or New York's subway. The US Urban Mass Transportation Administration coined the term in 1972 as an English stand-in for the German Stadtbahn, or city railway. What sets light rail apart is flexibility: the same vehicles can run through a tunnel, along a reserved lane, or among ordinary street traffic.
Some pieces are surprisingly old. In 1897 Boston dug North America's first tunnel designed specifically for trams, beneath Tremont Street, and it grew into today's Green Line. Cleveland's Shaker Heights line showed in the 1920s how a suburban railway could run like a tram, and Chicago's experimental Skokie Swift in 1964 tested features many later systems copied. Meanwhile Britain had abandoned every tramway except Blackpool's by 1962.
The new generation began in 1978 in Edmonton, Alberta, with German-built Siemens-Duewag cars. Calgary and San Diego followed, and San Diego's 1981 trolley became a template for American projects. The number of US systems roughly doubled between the 1990s and 2010s, from Portland and Denver to Minneapolis and Seattle. Europe rebuilt too: Nantes reopened its tramway in 1985, and Manchester, Strasbourg, Dublin and Edinburgh joined in.
Classification stays messy. Los Angeles has a line that behaves as a tramway in some stretches and something close to a metro in others. Even the vocabulary varies by country: in North America a trolley means a streetcar, while in Britain a light railway is a lightly regulated, slow mainline route. Newer systems keep appearing worldwide, from Toyama in Japan in 2006 to Addis Ababa in 2015.
Source: Light rail
