Electric Car Redux.

View from Flodden.. Norman Nicholson’s ancestral home.

Well, it’s not only my NDP MP Jamie Nicholls who is into electric cars, so, apparently, is Obama.

According to a News Reports he is putting 280 million towards trolleys in Washington, Tuscon, New Orleans and a few other places.

The Green Websites are praising it. The Washington Post calls it Obama’s Trolley Folly.

They call trams ‘an obsolete form of transportation.” But then, back in 1911, many people were calling the automobile a silly frivolous toy.

The Post thinks he should be working on traffic congestion because Americans spend so much time stuck in traffic. The Post says trolleys are folley because Americans prefer vehicles which allow for personal freedom. (What freedom is there stuck in a traffic jam?) I got it! Invest in Jet packs.

If you have a visionary project, it is very likely to attract criticism, the more visionary, the more criticism. But then maybe it is a folley: You can’t go back – usually

That’s what many were trying to do in 1911, with the Macdonald-Robertson movement, trying to make people go back to the farms and women back to the woodstove. They wanted to reverse the falls, so to speak. It didn’t work. Women went to work outside the home, despite the new profession of homemaking. Families did move to the ‘burbs in the middle of the century, but not back the country. And now aging (aged?) Boomers are heading back to the cities from the ‘burbs, according to a recent report on Sunday Morning, the CBS show.

Anyway, today, my husband and will trace Edith Nicholson’s June 11, 1911 trip to Montreal from Richmond… (backwards.) One hundred years and one week later. It’s a nice weekend. It also happens to the the anniversary of the death of Marion Blair Wells, Marion Nicholson’s daughter. In 2002.

We will not do it in a 1911 auto, but in our Malibu. We found Flodden on the Google Map, and even the quarry they all talk about. It is still there. So is Kingsbury.

We will no doubt find the Nicholson farm. Well, hopefully we will. It’s too bad. When I found the Nicholson stash of memorabilia, there was a inventory of one of the farms… but it got borrowed and then lost. I’m sure the address was there.

Edith and the Skinners passed through Marieville, on that day one hundred years and one week ago, but missed Valcourt, the home of Bombardier.

I checked and Bombardier is in the business of Electric Street Cars. Of course.

Who Killed the Electric STREET CAR.

So, as I edit the first draft of Flora in the City, adding detail, I learn that the library at Westmount is done in Queen Anne Revival style, like Tighsolas. It seems obvious now.

I also learn something else by reading gazettes. Sherbrooke Street didn’t have a trolley car in 1911. The newly amalgamated steetcar company, the Montreal Tramways Company, wanted to put in some tracks, but the residents complained.

I see it got through anyway.

The Ste. Catherine trolley was crowded. SO I will have Edith complain about the crowding. It is especially crowded as the office crowd is leaving for the half day on Saturday.

She’ll describe Sherbrooke Streets.

The residents of Sherbrooke at Greene said their road was built on a swamp and that their houses shook every time a truck went by. (What was a truck then?)

Of course, the wealthy never want the masses at their door!

A letter to the Editor also shows that the residents of Westmount were concerned about speeding trolleys. One man claimed the trolleys used ‘the loop’ to make up time.

I’ll also have Edith complain about that.

The City wanted somehow to eliminate 10 percent of routes to improve traffic congestion.

Gee, I even read that they were thinking of putting in a subway to ease congestion, a la Boston and New York. That didn’t happen until 1966.

How Interesting.

I mentioned this to my husband at night in bed and he said that GM killed the trolley cars in American Cities, especially LA.

I then remembered Toronto still has electric cars. Why? I know San Francisco does too but I always assumed that was touristy.

I saw that my new NPD MP promotes electric cars. He is a city planner.

I never saw an electric car in Montreal, only the remnants of tracks, here and there on roads when the pavement pulled back. Like fossilized remains…

Stats I found for the Toronto Street Railway Company showed that between 1896 and 1906 passengers increased from 23 million to 76 million, another big indication of what happening in Canada. And Montreal at that time was a bigger city and growing faster, population wise.

A lot of that increase was working women, like Marion, Edith and Flo, coming to the city!

And now, as Coco Chanel said, they needed looser clothing to be able to run for the streetcar!!