As in so many other cities around the country, the various city governments of Coral Gables, Miami and Miami Beach decided to operate, on various routes, free vehicles mostly for their residents but available to any who care to use them. To get people to ride them they cutesied them up to look like old-time trolley cars and put the word “Trolley” on them in extra-large letters. The only problem is, no matter what you, we or they call them, they are still nothing but a g-d dang bus.
Folks, and this simply put, if it runs on concrete, has rubber tires and is powered by gasoline or another type of fuel such as diesel, it doesn’t matter what word is put on the side of it: it is still a g-d bus.
To understand this misplaced desire to—in “their” minds—make a vehicle more attractive we need to try to understand why this is being done, and the answer, no matter what the politicians want to tell us, is a nostalgia for something that we never should have lost, not here in Greater Miami, in the numerous cities and towns in Florida that had street and electric railways, and throughout the country…