Light rail in the United States

[3] In the late 1880s, electrically powered street railways became technically feasible with the invention of a trolley pole system of collecting current.

American inventor Frank J. Sprague installed the first successful electrified trolley system in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888.

When lines were built over longer distances (typically with a single track) before good roads were common, they were generally called interurban streetcars or radial railways in North America.

[5] After World War II, six major cities in the United States (Boston, Newark, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco) continued to operate large first-generation streetcar systems, although most of them were later converted to modern light rail standards.

Additionally, a seventh American city, Cleveland, maintained an interurban system (e.g. the Blue and Green Lines) equivalent to what is now "light rail", that opened before World War I, and which is still in operation to this day.

In the United States, most of the original first-generation streetcar systems were decommissioned from the 1950s onward through approximately 1970 as the usage of the automobile increased through government policy.

After World War II, the Germans retained their streetcar (Straßenbahn) networks and evolved them into model light rail systems (Stadtbahn).

(This was just three years after the first North American second-generation light rail system opened in the Canadian city of Edmonton, Alberta in 1978, and which used the same German Siemens-Duewag U2 vehicles as San Diego).

Modern streetcar systems generally have smaller single-car trains that travel on short routes with frequent stops in lanes that are shared with automobile traffic (street running).