Technological innovation and urban transportation: the streetcar in Buenos Aires in the 19th century.

LESKÓ, A; VELÁZQUEZ, G

Zaragoza

Congreso; XIX International Congress of History of Science; 1993

Univ. de Zaragoza

In this paper different aspects related to innovation in urban transportation in the city of Buenos Aires are analyzed as well as the role of streetcars in the expansion of the urbanized area.   A remarkable transformation in urban passenger transportation took place in Buenos Aires during the 19th century. The streetcar was the fundamental technological innovation during the second half of the century. It was still the main urban means of transportation for passengers during the first three decades of the 20th century: for that reason, despite the title of the present paper, reference to events related to streetcars up to the 1920's, was unavoidable.   Urban transportation in Buenos Aires evolved during the 19th century in different technological stages: first, the horse-drawn omnibus and then the horse-drawn streetcar which was followed by the electric streetcar. The latter evolved further into the 'underground streetcar' with the inauguration of the first underground line in 1913. During the 1860's there was an attempt to use a steam-powered omnibus but it did not survive as it was unable to compete with the horse-drawn streetcar, partly because of the bad condition of the streets in the city. Steam was successful as a power source for a rural tramway line build by the Lacroze Company (Bosques 1982, pp.189,193; Lozada-Islas 1987, p.198).   Both the streetcar and the railroad in general had their origins in the coal-mining industry. In the mines, the carts which were used to move the coal through the underground tunnels and from the pit head to a near navigable waterway were pulled on rails by horses. The first attempt to apply the streetcar to urban life took place in Manhattan in 1832 as a downtown prolongation of the New York and Harlem Railroad; the next followed two years later in New Orleans (Wilson 1971, p.18; McKay 1976, pp.13-14). The first attempt in Europe was made only two decades later in Paris - in 1853 by Alphonse Loubat -, and the diffusion of the streetcar in Europe "...followed America after a lag of ten to fifteen years. As late as 1869, only a very few large cities had streetcar service, usually confined to a small number of lines." (McKay 1976, p.16).[i]  As will be shown, in the city of Buenos Aires the diffusion was contemporary with the main European cities.   In Paris, despite the first experiments of Loubat, it was only after a pause of twenty years that a series of concessions marked the real beginnings of streetcar development (McKay 1976, p.16). The streetcar contributed to a greater dispersion of the Parisian population. The urbanized area grew from 3,402 hectares in 1855 to some 48,480 hectares by 1920. The progressive evolution of this means of transportation has been closely linked to the development of the non-central areas of Paris, whose population trebled between 1891 and 1921 (Jalikis 1925, p.12).   The European case, in general, showed a fast initial growth in the number of horse-drawn streetcars during the first decade or so of their existence, followed by a period of stagnation. In cities like Vienna and Leipzig, for instance, the number of passengers increased but usage per capita remained almost constant. Even in Paris and Berlin streetcar traffic stagnated in the beginning of the 1890's (McKay 1976, pp.23-24). In the United States, on the contrary, growth was sustained during a longer period. As will be shown, the case of Buenos Aires is more similar to the latter than to the former. [i] The line opened by Alphonse Loubat in 1853 was a demonstration line and public service began two years later (Wilson 1971, p.18).