Trolley Folly

I grew up on Carrier Street in Grand Rapids, thus named for the trolley line that ran down the street, carrying workers to the furniture factories downtown. Visiting home over the Thanksgiving holiday, I ended up in traffic behind a Grand Rapids Trolley Company "trolley." This faux-streetcar was crammed with holiday shoppers on a  shop-hop around the city.

I would love to live in a world where streetcars populate the city, but wish I didn't live in one in which buses are dressed up as streetcars to capitalize on nostalgia. You can dress a pig in silk, but it's still a pig. The trolley-clad bus belching diesel smoke at the stoplight in front of me was still a bus though, if this picture is a indication, one available for hire for weddings.