PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION: Streetcars making a comeback in American cities but they shouldn’t have left in the first place
Several American cities want to rebuild or rekindle the streetcar public transportation system by either rebuilding the infrastructure or extending and revitalizing existing lines. The streetcar system was once the quintessential means of public transport for many cities. Streetcars connected neighborhoods and were the lifeblood of downtowns across America. There are many advantages to the streetcar system: (1) Streetcars give riders a view of the downtown and its store shops; (2) streetcars can be boarded from both sides; and (3) they are simple to construct, since the “tracks…don’t require deep digging [therefore] city blocks are just closed down to auto traffic for a few weeks [and] Seattle’s line was up and running in December of last year just four years from the time it was conceived.” Furthermore, the Pasadena Star-News notes that “streetcars allow for a downtown that prevents this conundrum: Once you build enough parking garages and parking lots and parking spots for a retail neighborhood to support purely automotive ingress, there’s no reason to go there anymore.” As a result, it can be argued that the death of the streetcar meant the death of the downtowns that depended on them.
So why did the streetcar disappear if it was an advantageous and efficient means of transportation? Patrick Woolford asserts that “while many U.S. cities had streetcars operating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the majority of American cities dismantled their lines in the middle 20th century, making way for the up-and-coming automobile.” However, it wasn’t the American city that dismantled the streetcar, but the death of the streetcar was the result of a conglomerate of special interest groups – “General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum” – that created a subsidiary corporation called National City Lines, which systematically dismantled America’s streetcar and trolley system to impose the automobile on America and inadvertently climate change. From About.com: Environmental Issues:
“Despite public opinion polls that showed 88 percent of the public favoring expansion of the rail lines after World War II, NCL systematically closed its streetcars down until, by 1955, only a few remained,” writes author Jim Motavalli in his 2001 book, Forward Drive.
Buses Were First Step to Ending Streetcar System
GM first replaced trolleys with free-roaming buses, eliminating the need for tracks embedded in the street and clearing the way for cars. As dramatized in a 1996 PBS docudrama, Taken for a Ride, Alfred P. Sloan, GM’s president at the time, said, “We’ve got 90 percent of the market out there that we can…turn into automobile users. If we can eliminate the rail alternatives, we will create a new market for our cars.” And they did just that, with the help of GM subsidiaries Yellow Coach and Greyhound Bus. Sloan predicted that the jolting rides of buses would soon lead people to not want them and to buy GM’s cars instead.
More from The Straight Dope: Did General Motors destroy the LA mass transit system?:
If you think trashing the LA trolleys was the extent of GM’s alleged crimes, Tom, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. In 1974 one Bradford Snell, a staff attorney for the U.S. Senate antitrust subcommittee, advanced the startling proposition that GM had (1) sabotaged energy-efficient electric transit systems in 45 cities around the country, including LA, in order to sell more fuel-guzzling buses and autos; (2) forced the railroads to replace nonpolluting electric locomotives with GM-built diesels by threatening to withhold lucrative auto shipments; and, most astonishing of all, (3) treasonously built armaments for the Nazis during World War II through Opel, its German subsidiary. Not surprisingly, Snell’s charges were widely publicized.
Snell lavished particular attention on the case of the Pacific Electric. Though it’s difficult to believe today, Los Angeles once boasted the largest system of “interurbans” (heavy-duty inter-city trolleys) in the U.S., carrying some 80 million passengers a year in the late 1930s. According to Snell, all this went out the window starting in 1939, when GM got together with Standard Oil of California (now Chevron), Firestone, and other auto-related firms to set up a holding company that bought up trolley lines, dismantled them, and replaced them with buses. “The noisy, foul-smelling buses turned earlier patrons of the high-speed rail system away from public transit and, in effect, sold millions of private automobiles,” Snell said. “Largely as a result, Los Angeles today is an ecological wasteland.”
The death of the streetcar is an example of “ruthless…unrestrained free enterprise.” Subsequently, National City Lines, Inc., was found guilty under the Sherman Anti-trust Act. Al Mankoff provides the finale:
Among the first to recognize the devastation that was taking place, Quinby prepared a detailed manifesto, which he sent to every mayor, city manager and member of Congress – to everyone and anyone, in short, who had anything to do with governance, regulation, politics or transportation. The unholy trinity was quickly indicted under the Sherman Anti-trust Act and eventually found guilty. The corporations paid small fines, and seven key executives, also found guilty, were fined $1 apiece for their involvement. General Motors’ appeal was denied: The convictions stood.
But the controversy persists to this day. GM apologists insist that there was no deliberate attempt to sabotage the electric-railway industry, or to dismantle U.S. trolley systems, yet that was the undeniable result.
And, though some maintain that the trolley systems would have died, anyway, extensive FBI files recently obtained by this writer under the Freedom of Information Act prove that the conspiracy was even more widespread than is generally known.
The wife of the U.S. postmaster general was investigated in St. Louis, as co-owner of a finance company that laundered money passing from GM to National City Lines. Commissioners in a Florida city each received a brand-new Cadillac – and, the very next week, voted to scrap their trolley system, replacing the abandoned cars with GM buses. There is even suspicion of jury tampering, but none of this evidence was made public, either during or after the trial.
On the Net: The Third Rail – U.S. v National City Lines
On the Net: The Third Rail – Street Railways: ‘U.S. vs. National City Lines’ Recalled
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Streetcars, keep in mind, were also the first forms of motive transport that allowed suburban sprawl. Streetcars combined with commuter rail allowed people to expand far past the central city. So are they really what you want?
I dig them, but we can’t afford them like we used to in the US. They’re well over 8-10x as much money that it used to cost society to build the tracks and get the cars compared in inflation based dollars.
With the further bankruptcy of the United States Government we’re not getting any closer to being able to have Government built streetcar system everywhere.
We might though, be saved by business and individual interest in them. But that still begs the question…
How will we pay for them? No matter how much you act the part of the beggar and demand that transit be free, someone, somewhere has to pay for it. NOTHING is free.
I don’t see streetcars as being a huge factor that allowed urban sprawl, because urban sprawl is a very broad concept (that includes suburbia for example). I can grasp streetcars as being a factor that certainly allowed for mobility of populations, but not an overriding factor overall that allowed urban sprawl (therefore it can be a criticism of). Urban sprawl is still happening without the streetcar (well not so much now, because of the recession). The conspiracy to kill the streetcar in order to force people to drive more, in addition to our lack of a sustainable public transportation infrastructure have been major blunders that were made, because people can’t grasp sustainability or the obvious fact that we live in a finite world.
Unfortunately, this article is almost 100% urban legend.
Rails were put down in American cities’ streets in the 19th century because it made it easier for the horses to pull the cars. In the early 20th century diesel engines, balloon tires and automatic transmissions made it possible to replace those streetcars with a cheaper to operate alternative; the bus.
And beginning in the 1920s that’s what started happening. A superior technology replaced an inferior one. Elementary economics.
The anti-trust case was something of a joke. In 1937 National City Lines, who’d been buying buses from GM and several other companies, got the idea that they could get money to expand from their suppliers. They talked GM, Firestone, Standard and Phillips to invest (and offer favorable credit) in NCL, in return for NCL agreeing to buy 85% of their supplies from those investors.
That’s what the anti-trust verdict hinged on. There was no conspiracy to destroy streetcars. Here’s a pretty good history of what happened:
http://www.lava.net/cslater/TQOrigin.pdf