The Daily Struggle of Tacoma’s Hillside Transit
Commuters express growing frustration as the unreliable cable car line repeatedly leaves passengers stranded mid-slope.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A strand in the cable caused a good deal of inconvenience to a number of people between 7:30 and 8 o'clock last night. It was not the 'shilling strand' that the children had been singing about in Sunday school a few hours before, but a strand in a greasy, black, worn-out cable that by fits and starts jerks the cars of the Tacoma Railway & Power Company up the hill from Pacific Avenue to X Street. The same strand has been making trouble for the last three months or more, so it is not surprising that the line should have been tied up again last night. One passenger remarked, 'When a car starts from Pacific Avenue a man never knows whether he is going to be able to ride to the top of the hill or not. If this thing doesn't change pretty soon, there's going to be war.' The conductor took the situation philosophically, as one who was used to such occurrences. He advised the passengers: 'If any of you are in a hurry to get on top of the hill, you'd better get out and walk.' It was quite cold, and as several passengers wanted to get home, they left the car and finished the journey on foot. The stopping of the cable last night was only a repetition of a common occurrence. People living on the hill have become so accustomed to that sort of thing that they take it as a matter of course.
“When a car starts from Pacific Avenue a man never knows whether he is going to be able to ride to the top of the hill or not.”
Early 20th-century Tacoma residents faced the exact same frustrations with infrastructure reliability that transit commuters grapple with today. The 'war' threatened by the passenger over a stalled cable car echoes the long-standing civic tension regarding Tacoma's public transportation capacity and quality.
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