I live in Portland, a city famous for having more of a neighborhood feel than similar cities its size. There are a variety of highly desirable turn of the century neighborhoods. Nearly every single one of these neighborhoods centers on one of the old street car routes. A century after they were torn down, these street car lines had such an impact that these streets are among the most desirable properties on the west coast.
Modern light rail in the US suffers from a different distortion: it tends to be used as a tool to force development projects rather than being implemented in a way optimal for transit.
I live in PDX too! You could actually ride streetcars all the way from Milwaukee to Vancouver at the turn of the century (if you didn't mind taking the whole day to do it).
But ironically, MAX is a good example of the negatives of trying to modernize the streetcar concept. The length of a train is limited by the length of the smallest city block served. So there are severe capacity limitations inherent in the system. And you are still slowed down to some extent by street traffic. It boggles my mind how slow the yellow line is.
Eh, I hear ya but there's also multiple ripple on effects. Like, the stop density on MAX is just too high. It needs to be more arterial between transit centers, rather than trying to move people 4 blocks between stops through most of downtown. But making that workable means some sort of more high density connector fanning out from it than our system currently handles. Too much of the city core has these redundant routes of multiple modes each trying to have the same stop density.
I live in Portland, a city famous for having more of a neighborhood feel than similar cities its size. There are a variety of highly desirable turn of the century neighborhoods. Nearly every single one of these neighborhoods centers on one of the old street car routes. A century after they were torn down, these street car lines had such an impact that these streets are among the most desirable properties on the west coast.
Modern light rail in the US suffers from a different distortion: it tends to be used as a tool to force development projects rather than being implemented in a way optimal for transit.