[woodruffw]

> Having just come back from Switzerland, I'm aware that street cars can be highly functional, but they work well there because the cities are quite dense, even when the population is like 50k or 200k, which in U.S. a similar city would be far more spread out.

It's worth noting that US cities, even ones in the Western US states, were not always as spread out as they currently are: urban sprawl in the US was caused by the development of highways (and then interstates). Our cities used to have dense urban cores; we intentionally bulldozed and de-densified them to build highways.

As random examples: Denver[1], Topeka[2], Sacramento[3] (page 10). I picked these entirely randomly; Google just about any small-to-medium-sized US city and you'll find that it most likely had a streetcar network until the 1930s or 40s.

[1]: https://kdvr.com/news/local/denver-once-had-one-of-the-large...

[2]: https://www.ksnt.com/news/local-news/workers-uncover-topekas...

[3]: https://www.cityofsacramento.org/~/media/Corporate/Files/Pub...