Of late I have been half-enthusiastically/half-sheepishly starting to call my stretch of Packard “the Interurban Trail” as a nod (prompted by a recent visit from E. Vielmetti) to Packard’s history as the route of the former Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti Street Railway (otherwise the Ypsi-Ann). I figure the Interurban Trail has sufficient throw-back cachet to appeal to the ersatz steam-punk urban development crowd and as noted by local polymath-type Larry Kestenbaum, naming is a good way to raise awareness of your neighborhood — in this case a neighborhood I happen to esteem, occasional underdog though it may be.
(All this prompted somewhat by today’s impulse purchase of Darrin Nordahl’s My Kind of Transit, which waxes eloquent on the subject [inter alia] of San Francisco’s latter-day Market Street streetcar system.)
