This essay will address the history of the place of women in the development of public transit in Istanbul. It will consider the way in which the tramway constituted a public space in which modernist conceptions regarding the role of women in society had to be reckoned with differently than in other public spaces. Instances of this reckoning are found through a wide variety of sources from government agreements, the press, memoirs, cartoons and literature from the tramway’s founding documents in 1869 up through the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1922. The significance of the tramcar as a public space in this period is twofold. First, it was a rare space where Ottomans, and later Turkish republican citizens, would encounter each other on an intimate level, crowding onto platforms and jamming into cars, negotiating personal space, and by extension public mores, on a daily basis. This crowding created a public anxiety about whether the government or the French company controlling the tramcars was capable of properly managing a space that seemed to be increasingly lawless. The second level of significance of the tramcar is the fact that while it was a crowded and intimate space, it was also a segregated one. Until 1924 women and men were seated in opposite spaces, usually the same space separated by a fabric curtain or in rare cases on separate floors of double-decker tramcars, and this generated a further amount of public anxiety regarding male-female relations in the public sphere. Whereas the debate about women’s roles in Ottoman and Turkish republican society played out mostly in the discursive arena of the press, the tramcar was a space in which citizens had to come face to face, quite literally, with the condition of modernity. Drawing from the theoretical work of literature scholar Lauren Berlant, I suggest the tramcar as a public space provoked intense emotional feelings of belonging and desire, often through the confrontation with consumer choices. In this way the contrived space of the tramcar made for explicit and intense interaction between everyday consumers that differed from those that might be had at a greater distance on a boulevard or in a park. This essay will also relate directly to literature on the changing role of Beyo?lu as a site of culture production from the Ottoman to Republican period, since it was a hub for the tramway and modern, western fashion and culture.