Traffic Congestion

Accession Number P75-54-0090g, Hughes Company Glass Negatives Collection,

Courtesy of the Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Streetcars were forced to share the road with automobiles changing traffic within the city. As more people purchased automobiles, the road became a battle between private and public transportation. As a result, traffic congestion was a serious problem downtown. It was estimated that 10,000 people would come in 5,000 cars and 50,000 people came in 1, 000 streetcars. While the traffic jam in the picture may be an outlying case, it reflects a time when the many options for getting around Baltimore were too much for the city roads to handle. Even today, we experience traffic jams on roads and think an increase in the number of roads is the best solution. As the number of automobiles on the road increased this was and still is a constant issue.