[MRM]

Part of that myth about tearing up electric rail tracks to make way for cars and buses is true. In Minneapolis they had an extensive street car network that could take you all the way from Lake Minnetonka (extreme southwest of the metro area) to White Bear Lake (extreme northeast) as late as the 60s. The city fathers decided to scrap the street cars in favor of buses when the fleet was old and needed to be replaced or upgraded. They needed to deal with the track left behind. They could have paved over them or they could tear them up and pave over them. There was no advantage to tearing up the old tracks and it was vastly more expensive but they did it anyway, specifically to make sure there was no turning back on the streetcar to bus transition. Now the Twin Cities are trying to build light rail. If they had not ripped up the tracks they could have been dug out, fixed and reused at a fraction of the cost to lay new light rail - which is the same size as the old street car tracks. The population of the Twin Cities has grown in 40 years but the population still lives mostly inside the span of the old streetcar tracks.