Public Transport - History

History

Conveyances for public hire are as old as the first ferries, and the earliest public transport was water transport: on land people walked (sometimes in groups and on pilgrimages, as noted in sources such as the Bible and Canterbury Tales) or (at least in the Old World) rode an animal. Ferries are part of Greek mythology – corpses in ancient Greece were buried with a coin underneath their tongue to pay the ferryman Charon to take them to Hades.

Some historical forms of public transport are the stagecoach, traveling a fixed route from coaching inn to coaching inn, and the horse-drawn boat carrying paying passengers, which was a feature of European canals from their 17th-century origins. (The canal itself is a form of infrastructure dating back to antiquity – it was used at least for freight transportation in ancient Egypt to bypass the Aswan cataract – and the Chinese also built canals for transportation as far back as the Warring States period. Whether or not those canals were used for for-hire public transport is unknown; the Grand Canal was primarily used for shipping grain.)

The omnibus, the first organized public transit system within a city, appears to have originated in Paris, France, in 1662, although the service in question failed a few months after its founder died; omnibuses are next known to have appeared in Nantes, France, in 1826. The omnibus was introduced to London in July 1829.

The first passenger horse-drawn railway was opened in 1806 between Swansea and Mumbles in South Wales, United Kingdom. In 1825, George Stephenson built the Locomotion for the Stockton and Darlington Railway, north east England, which was the first public steam railway in the world.