The advent of the streetcar would transform Los Angeles. The first electric streetcar appeared on a stretch of Pico Street 1887. These efficient people movers were a huge boon to developers since they enabled people to live farther and farther away from Downtown Los Angeles.

“By 1911, Southern Pacific consolidated the entire electric interurban streetcar network of Los Angeles and operated it as the Pacific Electric Railway Company, whose cars were known as ‘Red Cars,’” a historian for the website usp100la writes. “Around the same time, the Los Angeles Railway operated a local system of streetcars in central Los Angeles, known as the Yellow Cars.”

“For a half-century thereafter, the streetcar was the model and the marvel of the nation’s urban mass transit,” Los Angeles Times historian Cecilia Rasmussen writes. “For the price of a nickel, a dime or two bits, the trolley whizzed over more than 1,100 miles of tracks connecting the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach to the San Fernando Valley, and from San Bernardino to Redondo Beach. Tourists rode from downtown to the heights of Mt. Lowe in the San Gabriel Mountains.”

By the 1920s, Los Angeles had the best public streetcar system in the country.