Monthly Archives: December 2014

Streetcars and Salt Lake City’s S-Line

Just as the debate over whether Pluto qualifies as a planet continues to rage, so rages the debate over whether Salt Lake City’s S-Line qualifies as a streetcar or as light rail.  Yesterday Matt Johnson of Greater Greater Washington published an article titled “See America’s streetcar systems at the same scale” which featured the following beautiful diagram.
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Noticeably missing from the list is Salt Lake City.  Matt was nice enough to include the following explanation for its absence.

The Sugar House “Streetcar” in Salt Lake City is really a light rail service, though it’s branded as a streetcar by the agency. Since it runs in an exclusive right-of-way and uses the same vehicles as the rest of Salt Lake’s light rail system, I did not include it in the map.

Well, I still wanted to see how the S-Line compares to the other systems, so I made the following “slight” modification to Matt’s diagram. 😉
S-Line

Update:

Less than an hour after I published this post, Matt tweeted the following:

So here’s what the updated diagram looks like:

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Thanks Matt. 🙂