Electric Streetcars Transformed Honolulu Before They Disappeared
The city was home to an extensive streetcar system that shaped neighborhoods before it was replaced by buses and automobiles.
It was meant to be a trial run. A final test before the official opening of a new electric streetcar system that was expected to catapult Honolulu into a new era.
On Aug. 31, 1901, the governor of the then-Territory of Hawaii flipped an electric switch and Honolulu Rapid Transit Co. employee John C. Bell drove the first of nine open-air streetcars out for a ceremonial ride.
So many people lined up to ride the new system that Bell and others started letting on passengers and kept the streetcars running straight into the night.聽By the following Monday, thousands of Honolulu residents had already 鈥渃aught onto the trolley,鈥 newspapers reported.聽
“These are great days for the people of the city,” the Hawaiian Gazette declared, adding that the opening of the line “marks an era in the new Honolulu.”
More than a century before on Oahu鈥檚 still-under-construction elevated rail line, Honolulu was home to an extensive electric streetcar system.
In its heyday, HRT鈥檚 streetcars carried 20 million paying passengers a year. Then, a mere 40 years after the first streetcar ran, Bell鈥檚 son — who had followed in his father鈥檚 footsteps and become a streetcar operator — was given the sorrowful honor of driving the last-ever electric streetcar in Honolulu on its final trip.聽
“Father started it, son will end it!” the Honolulu Star-Bulletin declared in 1941 of the task awaiting George Bell.
Though the rise and fall of the streetcar system was swift, its impact was significant.
When the cars first went into operation, the population of Honolulu was a mere 50,000 people. Four decades later, the city had swelled to 300,000. Many of the neighborhoods in the metropolis that Honolulu had become were created by the streetcar system.
A Modern System For A Growing City
Territorial lawmakers approved the franchise for a new electric streetcar system in 1898, on the very same day that the United States annexed Hawaii.
At the time, streetcars ruled American cities. What was good enough for San Francisco was good enough for Honolulu, went the argument.
The streetcar system was deemed by papers to be a remarkable success early on, though its rollout was not without challenges.
Competition with the existing horse-drawn tram system was fierce, with the operators of the two systems reportedly ripping up each other’s lines in the first few years that the electric streetcars operated. HRT also faced lawsuits over the legality of its franchise and its right to lay tracks on King Street, before it ended up purchasing the company that ran the horsecar system in 1903.
Even with some of the early fumbles, by November of 1901, the manager of the streetcar system was boasting that Honolulu’s ridership was more robust than that of San Francisco’s Market Street line.
That a system in Honolulu should have better ridership than a line in a city of 300,000 people appears remarkable, “And yet, there is no reason it should not be so,”
“The new electric line affords a cheap and rapid method of transportation, and is most eagerly taken advantage of by all classes,” the paper continued. “That such patronage is permanent is now assured.”
Eventually, the streetcar system traversed 22 miles of track around Honolulu. Lines were built into Manoa and Kaimuki before the neighborhoods were developed enough to have passengers to sustain a system.
“The streetcars came first,” said John Brizdle, who co-authored the book “.” “In other words, when the streetcar got to the top of the hill in Kaimuki, there was nothing at the top of the hill in Kaimuki.”
But where the streetcar went, people and businesses followed. Real estate agents started advertising the proximity of properties to the streetcar before the first line even opened.
In 1907, residents on Liliha Street along one of the railways, because the system was central to their decision to move to the neighborhood and they relied on the system for getting to and from school and work.
“It’s pretty well agreed that Honolulu has about the best electric cars to be found anywhere,” the Honolulu Advertiser proclaimed that same year. “There are few accidents, no long waits, connections are made with the accuracy of good railway service, and it is rare indeed to find a better set of employees than its conductors and motormen.”
By 1910, the system transported 8.9 million passengers a year — the equivalent of 110 rides annually for every person living on Oahu at the time, according to “Streetcar Days in Honolulu.”
No Match For The Automobile
Electric streetcars began operation in Hawaii four years before the first Model T arrived in the islands. Though they might have been a modern wonder in 1901, by the 1920s the system was already facing stiff competition from the automobile.
“Well, I’ve gone and done it. Bought myself an automobile,” a columnist wrote in the Honolulu Advertiser in 1924, in a piece lamenting the humps in between the streetcar tracks on Kalakaua Avenue. “An acquaintance said the street car company had put them there purposely: figuring that automobiles would not use the tracks and thereby not hold up trolley traffic. If there’s an automobile in Honolulu that can go slower than the street cars on Kalakaua Avenue, I haven’t seen it.”
Although many passengers started leaving the streetcar system as cars gained in popularity, the HRT still saw significant use through the 1920s, with ridership peaking in 1923 at 20 million paid passengers.
But by the early 1930s, alarms were being sounded about the decline in ridership. In 1931, bus ridership was on the rise, and hope for the streetcar system was being pinned on “trolley buses” that ran on rubber tires but used the overhead electrical system. Such a system would “eliminate the rather heavy current charge for track and paving maintenance,” the Honolulu Star-Bulletin wrote.
In 1935, HRT’s system and streetcars with 45 buses and 50 streetcars “in regular service.”
Finally, in 1941, the last streetcars were replaced by the trolley buses that had been first discussed a decade earlier.
The trackless trolley that replaced it was declared by the transit company to be the 鈥済reatest mass transportation improvement鈥 the city had seen since electric streetcars replaced mule-drawn trolleys.
“So goes the history of a pioneer Honolulu industry: transportation. Speedy, silver-colored buses will take their places 鈥 but the story the street cars could tell can never be replaced,” the “For they were Honolulu a quarter of a century ago. They promised a day at the beach or a trip into what was then country. They bound a spread-out community into a closely-knit city.”
George Bell drove the last run of an electric streetcar into Kaimuki a little after midnight on June 30, 1941.
When Honolulu鈥檚 last electric streetcar made its final run, the event was less significant than might be expected. A Honolulu Advertiser story about the occasion ran below the fold of the newspaper, deemed less significant than half a dozen war stories, the sentencing of an actor for public drunkenness in California, changes to service hours at the Honolulu library and plans for a parade in Waialua.
Though Hawaii’s bus system has won numerous awards and continues to carry passengers over an extensive route, it didn’t take long before concerns about the automobiles that spelled the end of the streetcar system began to surface.
By the early 1950s, newspapers were lamenting the congestion and rush-hour car traffic in Honolulu and conversations were beginning about the need for a high rail speed rail system in town.
Decade after decade the debates over how best to move people about the island have continued.
