Wanderlust World Wanderlust World On September 23, 1884, horse-drawn streetcars began operating in Seattle. It was the city's first street railway service. Four years later, the city's cable railway opened to the public, and a year after that, its first electric streetcars went into operation.
The city organized a new Seattle Transit System in 1939, and, according to King County Metro Transit, "the conversion to buses and trackless trolleys begins immediately."
On August 10, 1940, Seattle's last cable car line made its final run, making San Francisco the only U.S. city still using cable cars. A year later, on April 13, 1941, the city's streetcar service made its last run. Four decades later, the service would return to Seattle starting with the Waterfront Streetcar inauguration in 1982.
A post-World War II boom in Seattle brought a corresponding boom in new highway construction. The Seattle Freeway, later to become Interstate 5, was first conceived in 1951 and received federal approval and funding in 1957.
Seattle's monorail opened to the public on March 24, 1962, as part of the celebration of the World's Fair. In 1997, voters approved a ballot initiative to extend the monorail system to connect the four corners of the city to downtown.
According to King County Metro Transit, Seattle area public transit ridership had sunk precipitously by 1972, with many of the systems "on the verge of collapse." That year, the public Seattle Transit System was merged with the private Metropolitan Transit Corporation that had served the suburban areas. The new Metro Transit system began operations on January 1, 1973.