A few of them did, but certainly not the majority.
Atlanta’s streetcar system got entirely torn out, paved over and converted to buses. We didn’t get a subway system (on entirely different right-of-way, and much less of it) until decades later.
Similar with Montreal. A whole grid of streetcar lines just got torn up and replaced with buses. We now have a nice metro now at least, but it certainly wasn’t made from pre-existing tramways.
I’m in a small city (Terre Haute, Indiana) which used to have a bunch of streetcars. Then when streetcars got torn up everywhere in the country, they got rid of them. Did they tear up the tracks too? No, they just paved over them. And now, 100 years later, all of those streets are collapsing and it’s costing a huge amount of money to repave them.
Wow, even Terre Haute. Almost went there for college (Rose-Hulman), but decided against it in part because the city itself was so small and sprawling. It must’ve been 1000x livelier back in the streetcar days when things were probably more densely built and less obscenely car-centric.
Also, Trump got elected, so I was like, “Nah, I’m moving to Canada”, which is how I ended up in Montreal instead.
