https://reasonstobecheerful.world/el-paso-streetcar-system-transit/
"In 2010, El Paso native and photographer Peter Svarzbein had a vision for
bringing El Paso’s streetcars back to life.
For his graduate thesis at the New York City School of Visual Arts, Svarzbein
created The El Paso Transnational Trolley Project — a conceptual advertising
campaign imagining the return of the iconic streetcar running between El Paso
and its sister city in Mexico, Juarez, as it used to throughout most of the
20th century.
The guerrilla marketing project-cum-installation art included massive posters
pasted on walls on both sides of the border, announcing that the trolley, which
the city abandoned in 1974, would come back in 2015.
“It was a metaphor to and a symbol of what it meant to be a Fronterizo (a
person from the borderland),” says Svarzbein, who served from 2015 to this past
January as a city council member and then Mayor Pro Tempore of El Paso. “It’s
not the walls or any barriers that define us from being from the border. It is
the way that everything passes: Language, food, people, students, music,
culture, and religion.”
Unbeknownst to him, about two years earlier and about 2,200 miles away in his
hometown, El Paso City Council Member Steve Ortega had also been inspired to
bring back the streetcars. By working together and with other local
stakeholders, the pair successfully resurrected El Paso’s original streetcars
in 2019. While the new route doesn’t cross the border into Mexico, it did serve
47,000 riders during the last fiscal year — at zero fare. In April, seven
months into the current fiscal year, 55,000 riders were recorded."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
