One of the geekier things that I do in my spare time is design railway projects in a very amateur way, using Google Maps. One that I came up with about a month ago was a revived streetcar system serving the downtown area of my hometown: Santa Barbara, California.
In earlier times, the city of Santa Barbara did have an electric streetcar running up the main thoroughfare of State Street from the waterfront to the El Encanto Hotel, located up in the foothills in a neighborhood called the Riviera. Like many local railways in America were, it was dismantled sometime in the first half of the Twentieth Century when the conventional wisdom was that rubber tires were the ultimate future of transportation. The error of those ways has been realized, however, and several rail projects are being planned around the country.
Here’s a map of my idea:
View State Streetcar in a larger map