The Canal Street Zone is the transit hub of the city.
Canal Street Zone
At the peak of my streetcar riding, in the mid-late 1970s, transfer slips always said, “Good on any connecting line or any line in the Canal Street Zone.” That concept goes back over a century now. The Canal Street Zone morphed into an (almost) all-bus concept in 1964, with the conversion of the Canal (Cemeteries) line to buses. This ad in the Times-Picayune on 15-August-1964 announces the roll-out of bus service in the Canal Street neutral ground:
Canal Street Buses Start Operating on Downtown Neutral Ground Sunday as Major Construction Nears End.”
Cemeteries line service continued with buses immediately after the electric overhead wires vanished at the end of May, 1964. While most streetcar infrastructure moved slowly, NOPSI and the city moved quickly to ensure the change stuck. No going back, similar to the move of passenger rail service to Union Passenger Terminal in 1954. Buses operated in the automobile lanes for the entire length of the line while city crews ripped up the tracks.
Return to the neutral ground
by August, 1964, the city cleared the streetcar tracks on Canal from Claiborne to Liberty Place. For the first time since 1861, no streetcars operated in the neutral ground. Only the one-block loop track for the St. Charles Line (Carondelet-Canal-St. Charles) remained. This is huge. At their peak levels of operation, streetcars ran on four tracks in the neutral ground. Uptown and Downtown lines approached Canal, looped for one or more blocks on the outside pair of tracks, then proceeded on their outbound runs.
So, that one-block loop was all there was from 1964 until the upgrade of the Riverfront line in 1997. While Riverfront opened in 1988, it did not connect to St. Charles. The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (NORTA, which took over from NOPSI in 1984) used the old L&N/Seaboard Coast Line (now-CSX) track. Riverfront grew in popularity to the point where NORTA expanded the line to two-track operation. They ripped up the standard-gauge track, replacing it with two wide-gauge (streetcar) tracks. Additionally, they built a connector from Riverfront to St. Charles. Now the “red ladies” could return to Carrollton Station under their own power.
Street-to-neutral ground
The photos in this ad show how the bus zone operated. Buses for all three Canal lines ran from City Park Avenue to Claiborne in the auto lanes. At Claiborne, they shifted to the inside (left) lane, entering the bus zone. They ran down to the river, turned around, and headed outbound. At Claiborne, they exited the zone, continuing in the auto lanes.
Direct service
The ad states, “Direct service between the river and the lake, with no transferring, is now offered for the same 10-cent fare for local and 15-cent for express.” Prior to all-bus operation on Canal, riders living in Lakeview took the West End bus to City Park Avenue. They transferred to the streetcar at that point. This! This right here is why it was so easy to sell discontinuing streetcar service on Canal. If you lived in Lakeshore or Lake Vista, you could board the extended lines, Canal-Lakeshore via Pontchartrain Blvd, or Canal-Lake Vista via Canal Blvd., by your house and ride into town without transferring. In air-conditioning. At a time when working downtown meant men wore suits and women wore dresses and hose, this was a Big. Deal.
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