sink-hole at the corner of Third and Jackson. As Gordon Newell noted in 1956, contemporary reports did not seem to consider this particularly unusual. At that time, there were about 25 independent transit lines in Seattle. By 1907, the Seattle Electric Company, owned by Boston-based Stone & Webster, leveraged its foothold in the electric power industry to consolidate these into one operation, known after 1912 as the Puget Sound Traction, Light and Power Company. It cost a nickel to ride. Puget Sound Traction was bought out by the city in 1919 for US$15 million. However, under the city's management, the streetcars chronically ran a loss (even after a 1923 fare increase to three rides for a quarter, a fare of 8-and-a-third cents), and the quality of the system deteriorated. The advent of the automobile sounded the death knell for rail in Seattle. Tacoma–Seattle railway service ended in 1929 and the Everett–Seattle service came to an end in 1939, replaced by automobiles running on the recently developed highway system. When the city received a US$10.2 million federal grant to pay off transit-related debts and modernize its transit system, rails on city streets were paved over or removed, and the opening in 1940 of the Seattle trolleybus system brought the end of streetcar service in Seattle in the early hours of April 12, 1941. This left an extensive network of buses (including of trolleybus lines) under an independent Municipal Transportation Commission as the only mass transit within the city and throughout the region. The new transit system was jammed and profitable during the gasoline and rubber rationing of World War II, but the automobile reigned supreme after the war. Fares rose to 10 cents, the first of many increases that would lead to a present-day regular adult fare of $2.75. Streets, roads, and automobiles Seattle set its first speed limit in the 1880s, in the days of horse-drawn vehicles. At that time, traffic in the Pioneer Square neighborhood was limited to . The city is described in a mid-20th-century civics textbook as "a city of islands—islands created both by water and by abrupt valleys that can be traversed only by bridges." Already by 1948, 221,500 vehicles a day crossed the city's bridges across the Lake Washington Ship Canal and Duwamish River; except for the high Aurora Bridge (officially George Washington Memorial Bridge) across the Ship Canal, these were all drawbridges. This was