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street + car; this compound noun was formed in an era when motorcars didn't yet exist, and it emphasized a type of car on rails that were in the street (along with foot traffic, wagons, and carriages) rather than on a separate, dedicated railroad, as a (so-named) railcar is.
Here, outside, in the light and the shade and the heat, there was a great tinkling of the bells of innumerable streetcars, and a constant strolling and shuffling and rustling of many pedestrians, a large proportion of whom were young women in Pompadour-looking dresses.
Tired as he felt at night, and dark and bitter cold as it was in the morning, Jurgis generally chose to walk; at the hours other workmen were traveling, the streetcar monopoly saw fit to put on so few cars that there would be men hanging to every foot of the backs of them and often crouching upon the snow-covered roof.
1908, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], “Hostages to Momus”, in The Gentle Grafter, New York, N.Y.: The McClure Company, →OCLC:
[…]but after all there's nothing less displeasing to me than a beefsteak smothered in mushrooms on a balcony in sound of the Broadway streetcars, with a hand-organ playing down below, and the boys hollering extras about the latest suicide.
