On Sunday, August 4th, 1929, between five and ten thousand people packed Burlington’s City Hall Park to watch the death of the street car.

Others squeezed along Main Street or watched from the windows of nearby buildings, while local dignitaries looked on from the balcony of the Hotel Vermont. At 5 o’clock, a military band marched down Main Street playing a funeral dirge, followed by Car 5, the oldest trolley the company owned, draped in black with a wreath on its front, and twenty mourners dressed in black.

The procession stopped beside City Hall Park. Men soaked the car's interior with gasoline, a trumpeter played Taps, and two of the company's oldest employees set it on fire. When the fire burned down, twenty new buses came down Main Street two by two, and the crowd cheered.

Forty-four years earlier, Burlington had thrown a celebration for the opening of Vermont's first street railway. Now the crowd cheered its end.

What the street car built

In 1885, the Winooski and Burlington Horse Railroad became the first street car system in Vermont. It was electrified in 1893, took the name Burlington Traction Company in 1896. In only a few short decades, street car service expanded rapidly, developing in step with the city that was growing around it. Street car lines reached as far north as Ethan Allen Park, as far south as Queen City Park, and as far east as Essex Junction. 

Within town, the street car ran along Main, Pearl, Riverside, Winooski, Church, North, and Union, creating the diverse urban neighborhoods that make Burlington so vibrant today: our bustling, mid-rise downtown and the mixed-use, dense streetcar suburbs that surround it. Residents didn't need to store cars, so lots could be narrow and land went to homes, shops, and public space. The local destinations were walkable, and further destinations could be reached by the street car.

Street car lines are expensive and hard to move. Once tracks are in the street, they're a promise to residents, business owners, and developers that reliable service will be there for years to come. It was a promise that Burlington - and many similar dense cities and villages in Vermont - built its neighborhoods on. By 1907, Rutland, Barre, Montpelier, St. Albans, Brattleboro, Bennington, Springfield, and Bellows Falls had street car lines too. These neighborhoods are familiar, and they follow a similar pattern: homes went up within a short walk of the tracks. Shopkeepers opened corner stores with apartments and offices upstairs, next to narrow-lot houses with barbers and pharmacies sprinkled in. Businesses advertised their closeness to the line: trolley schedules carried ads for shops riders could reach, and real estate listings touted their nearness to the tracks. Residents petitioned to have lines extended into their neighborhoods.

The lines built Burlington’s economy, too. Where they met downtown, a daily flow of riders supported department stores, hotels, banks, and theaters. Burlington became a regional destination. Factories could locate at the edge of the city because their workers had a reliable way to reach them. Ethan Allen Park, out on North Avenue at the end of the line, was popularized as a weekend destination because of the street cars; Burlington families rode the trolley there for end-of-school picnics.

The street car shaped the street itself. A trolley runs on rails, so everyone on the street knows where it will be. They ran at predictable speeds, and predictable frequencies. One street car carried as many people as dozens of horses and buggies, and left space on the rest of the street for everyone else. People crossed wherever they needed to, kids played, vendors sold their wares, and neighbors stopped to talk. The law treated the street as shared public space, too: until the 1920s, people on foot could use any part of the roadway, at any time. The street hadn’t been rebuilt around the car yet, because for people living along the lines, the car offered little they didn’t already have.

When cars first arrived in Vermont, they were mostly novelties. The engineer and historian William Wilgus described their early use as confined to 'individual pleasure and convenience,' and the whole state had only 373 registered in 1906. The street car worked for people who would never own a car. Getting around didn’t depend on buying a vehicle, paying for fuel, or finding a place to park it. In any weather, on any day, you could walk out your door, get on the street car, and get to where you needed to be, because where you needed to be had been built along the line.

Why did the crowd cheer?

The street car helped make Burlington a walkable, livable city. Why would thousands of people cheer its death?

By 1929, the street car had been declining for years. Ridership fell steadily as more people bought cars. By the late 1920s it belonged to the People's Light and Power Corporation of New York. Trolley companies were often formed by electric companies as an outlet for the power they produced. The fare was five cents, about a dollar today, and some riders complained it wasn't worth it. Across the country, privately run transit struggled with constrained fares, and automobiles became ingrained in American culture by the 1920s. Companies responded by cutting service, which drove away more riders. Their tracks and their cars were falling into disrepair and became unrecognizable to the service that residents were proud to ride decades prior.

In 1926, a new kind of transit arrived: the bus. On February 16, the Vermont Public Service Commission allowed William “Bill” Appleyard, owner of the Dodge dealership on South Winooski Avenue, to start Burlington's first local bus route, the “Country Club Loop,” through the Hill Section, where it wouldn't compete with the trolleys. In that same year, the Commission ordered the traction company to close its service to Queen City Park along Shelburne Road, and expand its service further along North Avenue. The traction company refused; such a rapid expansion would be expensive for its already strained budget. The Commission then let Appleyard's Burlington Rapid Transit run buses in direct competition with the trolleys. Over the next few years he added seven competing routes. Buses could add a route without laying track and follow new housing wherever it went. Once buses and cars could reach anywhere with a road, new homes and businesses no longer had to be built near a transit line. With the introduction of cars, and the flexibility of buses, destinations and transportation became disconnected parts.

Then, in November 1927, a flood collapsed the Winooski Bridge, one of the street car system's main routes. The bridge was rebuilt and trolley service restored, but by then the damage was done.

Buses looked like the future. In early 1929, Bill Appleyard bought the remnants of the Burlington Traction Company, running the street cars for a few months, then ended trolley service with the burning on August 4. The crowd in City Hall Park was cheering what looked like an upgrade: newer vehicles, more flexible routes, and a system that was cheaper to adapt to a changing city.

The Age of the Automobile

The next century belonged to the automobile.

The street changed first. A trolley stays on its rails, so people could share the street around it. A car could go anywhere on the pavement, and as cars multiplied and went faster, everyone else had to get out of the way. Across the country, the auto industry pushed new traffic codes that confined people on foot to crosswalks and turned crossing mid-block into “jaywalking.” (read: The Conspiracy to Blame the Pedestrian).

With the street cars gone, buses and private cars shared the same roads, and those roads were increasingly rebuilt for cars: more travel lanes, more traffic, higher speeds, and less space for people on foot. Streets that had been places to talk, shop, and play became channels for moving traffic. Over the following decades, a familiar pattern took hold: 

• Sprawl. New homes and stores were built along arterials and in subdivisions - places scaled for car travel, if not outright hostile to pedestrians. The same grocery stores, doctor’s offices, and hardware stores that once sat along the line moved to strip malls and office parks off roads like Shelburne Road and Williston Road, built on the assumption that customers arrive by car.  

• Transit that can't keep up. Buses can easily serve the kind of dense neighborhoods the street cars built, but spread-out suburbs made in the age of the automobile produced too few riders per mile of route to support frequent service. 

• Cost. Now that destinations, jobs, and homes were placed where only cars could reach them, cars quickly shifted from being a luxury to a necessary cost. CarShare Vermont estimates that the average car in Vermont costs over $700 a month to own, a cost many households carry just to reach work, school, groceries, and services.

• Public finances. Cities and towns took on the cost of new miles of road, water mains, plowing, and maintenance, while the low-density development those roads served brought in less tax revenue per acre to pay for them.

Street car suburbs, downtowns, and village centers work because their land use and transportation are in balance with each other, and with the people who live there. Homes, shops, and jobs sit close enough to walk between, and transit carries you to the rest. The car, and how fast we adopted it, threw that balance off. Every new subdivision, widened road, and parking lot made driving easier and everything else a little harder, until much of the region could only be reached comfortably by car. That kind of development was fast and cheap to build because much of its cost landed somewhere else: on people who couldn’t drive or couldn’t afford to, on neighborhoods split by wider and faster roads, and on the climate. Transportation is now Vermont’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, about 40% of the state’s total in 2022.

Then, as now

In 1973, Burlington Rapid Transit handed operations to the Chittenden County Transportation Authority, which became Green Mountain Transit in 2016. 

Nearly a century later, GMT faces the same kind of existential threat that its predecessor did. Since late 2024, GMT has cut the equivalent of 20% of its bus service in Chittenden County, saving $2 million a year. In June 2026, its board voted to eliminate the No. 4 Essex Center route. GMT still projects a gap of $2.5 to $3 million starting July 2027. Cuts like these arrive as longer waits, fewer evening trips, or routes that stop running. As service gets less frequent and less reliable, fewer people ride. GMT receives about $2 million a year in federal performance awards. Service cuts will shrink those awards, forcing still more cuts.

This time, the loss would land harder. In 1929, people along the old lines who relied on the street car service still lived in neighborhoods built for walking, with daily needs nearby - and Burlington Rapid Transit could help bridge the gaps they couldn’t walk. Today,  much of our region has been built — or rebuilt — for cars. Many jobs, services, and homes can no longer be reached on foot, and walkable neighborhoods are often too expensive for lower-income residents. When a bus route goes, the people who lose the most are those with no other way to reach jobs, stores, and appointments: teenagers, older adults who have stopped driving, workers who can't afford a car, and people with disabilities.

Transportation decides what kinds of places are possible. The street car built Burlington's most walkable neighborhoods because it offered dependable service for decades. Transit that runs often and reliably makes it possible to live without a car, to build homes and shops close together, and to keep a downtown full of people. When we decide what to fund for GMT, we’re deciding whether places like that can keep existing here, and who can live there.

This time, we know what happens when we let the funeral pyre burn. We can't let it happen again.

Take a stand for public transit. Sign the petition. Share your story. Take the bus. Contact your legislator.

Join the Transportation for Vermonters Ride Public movement

Major Sources

Mark Bushnell, "Then Again: Vermont's love affair with the trolley," VTDigger, December 4, 2016 (republished February 18, 2024).
Vermont Historical Society, finding aid for the Burlington Traction Company Records, 1883–1929 (Steven Kung, 2009, revised 2011)

Photo Sources, in both written and video post

St. Albans Streetcar in 1907, Street Car on State St in Montpelier: Image courtesy of the University of Vermont Landscape Change Program.
Burlington 1877, Burlington Postcards: images courtesy of the University of Vermont Historic Preservation Program.
Map of the City of Burlington with Trolley routes, Bill Appleyard getting on a Burlington Rapid Transit bus, Burlington’s open air trolley in 1905: Images shared on the Burlington Area History Facebook group.
"The Menace of the Hour": Image from The Verdict magazine, 1899.