General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

by mmastrac • 4 years ago

199 199 4 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

xhkkffbf• 4 years ago

I realize everyone wants to see this as some conspiracy run by a big business in Detroit. They were certainly part of it. But I think it's important to realize that all of the consumers were making their own choices and their choices were usually to buy their own personal transportation machine, aka car.

Public transportation believers hate to admit it but systems like the streetcar are just slower and more inconvenient. Unless you're lucky enough to live near a stop, they don't go to your doorstep. They're much slower because they're always stopping to pick up or drop off someone else.

I realize that some cities are now so dense that public transport may be the only choice. The roads can't handle too many individual cars. But when this so-called conspiracy went down, many people embraced the idea of owning their own car. It wasn't just some crazy scheme cooked up by a few oligarchs in a smoke-filled backroom.

Retric3• 4 years ago

If you track population growth and the number of people without cars you find street cars died out way too soon in any kind of car transition to be the root cause.

Instead they where largely replaced with busses which where initially more expensive, but also more flexible.

dr-detroit• 4 years ago

The busses ran a few times a day the trolley was every 5-10 minutes. GM had to buy the trolley lines and force them to use their buses in order to sell their unpopular buses.

johannes12343213• 4 years ago

It is true, that it's not only due to a car make conspiracy and it is also true, that contemporary structure of American cities isn't good for public transport. However where city structure is built around public transport and public transport is operated well, I claim you get a way better quality of live. (Less noise, more efficient transport, city structure with reachable shops, ability to use commuting times for rest or reading or something, ... especially, but not only, for the younger, elder or others who can't drive on their own)

sitkack5• 4 years ago

structure of American cities isn't good for public transport.

You might be suffering from circular logic. If this new city is designed for the car, then ...

Cities were previously very well suited for mass transportation and people centered design.

https://washingtonsqpark.org/news/2017/03/07/jane-jacobs-and...

Planned, car centered cities are atrocious.

Dubai is a Joke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJuqe6sre2I

New Egyptian Replacement Capitol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUK0K5mdQ_s

Brasilia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xz7TrRCO_E

Retric3• 4 years ago

Far more busses operated in Chicago/NYC etc in 1970 than streetcars in 1920.

What happened is busses took over and street traffic increased. On otherwise empty streets a buss network could be far more convenient than subways, but that’s not the world we live in.

It’s mostly stoplights and the need for them that makes streetcars and busses suck relative to subways.

sitkack5• 4 years ago

This isn't the take away from the page nor the documentary linked below.

It wasn't just some crazy scheme cooked up by a few oligarchs in a smoke-filled backroom.

It was literally this.

GM, Firestone and Standard Oil literally colluded to buy up streetcars and burn them down and then use their profits to sell a car fueled suburban future of the good life.

Macroscale effects are systemic, projecting individual choice into is mostly always a smoke screen. It is the same tactic that the plastics industry used to shift blame onto the individual "litter bug" and not the prevalence of single use plastic packaging.

Your comment history is littered with similar reinforcing tropes.

jcranmer• 4 years ago

GM, Firestone and Standard Oil literally colluded to buy up streetcars and burn them down and then use their profits to sell a car fueled suburban future of the good life.

No. They colluded to monopolize supply of buses--this is what the court case that involved the conspiracy held. The streetcars were already failing when they were acquired.

bobthepanda7• 4 years ago

It was real, but it's not sufficient to explain the mass movement away from streetcars in general. They didn't even purchase a majority of streetcars in the US, and this movement away from streetcars happened in most of the Western world.

US streetcars had real systemic disadvantages mostly stemming from when they showed up in our society; at the turn of the century in uncongested roads when the dollar was strongly tied to gold. This had a couple effects:

* they showed up at the turn of the century, so just in the '40s and '50s as investment started in highways they needed expensive lifecycle replacement. Buses were seen as more flexible and could use this new infrastructure being built with no additional work, so many municipalities willingly switched to buses to take advantage.

* they showed up at the turn of the century, when having a paved road in a city was not a norm, and so contracts allowing for the construction of streetcar lines also expected the streetcar companies to pay maintenance on the paving. Gas taxes usually only pay for major interstate and state roads, but streetcars paid for local streets. Undoing this was not popular since it would require cities to raise new taxes, and would relieve evil streetcar monopolies of a burden.

* they showed up when roads were not terribly congested, so they weren't built with the expectation of needing to be separated from heavy traffic. Cars changed this equation, but dedicating road space to streetcars was just either not on the radar or seen as a giveaway to evil companies.

* they showed up when the dollar was very strong and tied to gold. Laws authorizing streetcar operation also usually involved explicitly tying their operation to a specified flat fare (usually a nickel). This fare was not tied to inflation, and raising the fare or eliminating limits on fares was politically DOA, a tax on the working man and a giveaway to the evil streetcar monopolies.

LeanderK3• 4 years ago

Public transportation believers hate to admit it but systems like the streetcar are just slower and more inconvenient.

Car lovers hate to admit that public transportation is the not fiction but preferred by many all over the world. This sentence is completely impossible for me to relate to. I even don't have a drivers license! My girlfriend and many of my friends also. I want to live urban and don't want to drive or own a car, I consider it inconvenient. I am also not a "public transportation believer", it's not something I care much about, I just use it. I live in a small student-city in germany, nobody uses a car (I literally know nobody driving to university and I know a lot of people here!). I would say more people bike to university than take the car, by far. Nearly my friends from where I grew up (munich, city of 1.5 million people) also don't drive, many don't own a car and many also don't have a drivers license. The only few I know that use a car live quite suburban, bordering rural.

Many may prefer a car, but that doesn't mean that streetcars are only used because you are forced to.

abawany2• 4 years ago

I live in a city/state where public transportation is actively inconvenient and even then I made a considerable effort to take it and avoid driving when I could. The waste of time and brain capacity sitting behind a steering wheel like a frikking dummy is insane - I was able to get so much reading and work done on a train/bus while the best I could do while driving was listen to an audiobook, assuming it didn't take away too much attention from the waste of time that was driving.

vel0city2• 4 years ago

Munich has been working on its density for 864 years, and back then there weren't many cars. Its pretty different comparing to a lot of the US which literally wasn't built until after cars existed and widely available to most families. Practically all of the city I live in was built after 1950, easily 75% of it was built post 1970, almost half of it built post 1985. I live in a neighborhood in a somewhat "older" part of town, and my house was built in 1988. The road I drive to work wasn't even really paved until the 90s.

When you're building a city at a time when most families can easily own a car and the average family wants to own a car, you build your cities around cars. When you build your city >700 years before cars even exist, you design around other concerns. I do agree building the city around the car was a shortsighted decision, but its kind of a hard genie to put back in the bottle.

kube-system2• 4 years ago

My preferences and your preferences are irrelevant in terms of how our cities are constructed. Many areas on this side of the Atlantic were built after cars become common, and many people who bought new homes in those neighborhoods during post WWII expansion preferred driving their new cars.

I don’t get to change that now, unless we tear my entire neighborhood down.

I suspect the area you live in was settled prior to the ubiquity of cars, and thus, was designed for people without them.

refurb• 4 years ago

I lived in a country with amazing public transport - clean, on-time, accessible everywhere.

What did people do who made a lot of money? Buy a car.

stefantalpalaru• 4 years ago

Excellent documentary about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_for_a_Ride

NegativeLatency• 4 years ago

Another interesting documentary: https://www.pbs.org/video/oregon-experience-streetcar-city/

Damogran6• 4 years ago

As alluded to in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

heliophobicdude• 4 years ago

How can we undo these consequences and promote better public transportation options?

I have some ideas about zoning…

jrockway• 4 years ago

Zoning is a big problem. Right now, there is really no place to live but the city if you want to walk to places. In the suburbs, municipalities demand things like cul-de-sacs, mandatory front yard / back yard sizes, etc. This decreases density to the point where walking simply isn't viable. It's kind of a positive feedback loop too; nobody can walk anywhere, so stores need giant parking lots so people can drive. The giant parking lots make walking even more difficult, which means that people who don't even want a car have to have one.

The question is what will the forcing function be to make things better here. Climate change is one option. I think people feel a little far removed from the consequences, nobody thinks "wow, because I drive to the grocery store twice a week, the UK is having their hottest summer on record". So I don't think it's really changing people's behavior. (Electric cars are hailed as the answer to climate change, but they aren't going to help ancillary concerns like giant roads separating people from businesses that make walking impossible, being stuck in traffic for an hour during rush hour, etc.)

I think the forcing function will be running out of resources that support the suburban lifestyle. Stores and shopping are moving online, reducing city tax revenues. No income means that homeowners will have to pay for parks, roads, sewers, etc. instead of businesses. This will price some people out of their suburban lifestyle, they won't be able to afford the things they get by default (giant yards, living on a quiet cul-de-sac, etc.) I have no idea where these people will go (cities are somehow even more expensive), but at least a market of people that want to buy something more sustainable will develop (to save their own pocketbook, not because they hate cars or love the Earth).

Overall, I see it as a very slow burn, and that not much will change in my lifetime. The incentives aren't there yet. What makes me sad is that financial incentives hurt the most vulnerable people first. When property taxes go up, it just means someone has to uproot their kids, force them to make new friends, and waste an extra hour per day commuting. When I see gas prices go way up because of a war, my first thought is "great, now nobody can afford to drive. RIP, cars." But these people already can't afford to drive, now they just suffer, best case work overtime to be able to afford both gas to get to work and food.

Not sure where I'm going with this but we're basically doomed. The American suburb might be the greatest mistake we've ever made, because it's so hard to undo. A lot of people are going to get hurt as more dire forcing functions uproot their lives.

lumost2• 4 years ago

Changing federal funding rules for suburban infrastructure would be a big head start. Right now, there is a permanent pressure for local governments to "expand". The Federal government doesn't fund maintenance, and new-urbanist expansion is not prioritized enough. If the federal government prioritizes funding for projects which increase density rather than lower it, then there would be some degree of shift.

onionisafruit4• 4 years ago

How will zoning keep a companies from conspiring to gain a monopoly in supplying buses?

legitster4• 4 years ago

Streetcars were pretty awful though. It should not be a conspiracy that they needed to be modernized and replaced with buses.

They were slow, had very low capacity numbers, costly to maintain, and were fairly dangerous.

I know people want to draw a direct comparison to modern light rail, but even today surface streetcars have proven to be expensive and inflexible larks for most cities that have developed them.

(I get that whether the automotive special interests should have be the ones to do it is its own issue).

riffic3• 4 years ago

as awful as they were they allowed all sorts of people the ability to get around without owning a personal car. Interurbans[0] allowed people to get from city to city.

All of this has been thrown out and there are all sorts of negative externalities imposed by massive use of automobiles and automobile-centered planning.

[0] Interurbans were rad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interurban

wollsmoth2• 4 years ago

I don't see how they're better than a bus though. Both need to travel by road. Buses are just easier to swap out and replace as far as I can tell. Also you probably don't need a platform to board a bus.

legitster4• 4 years ago

Again, this is about the replacement of streetcars with buses. Anything streetcars did, buses did better and for more people.

The idea that an interurban was superior to a humble Greyhound bus is a bit of wishful historical fiction.

I grew up riding the bus. I still ride the bus. Buses are the unsung hero of public transit. We don't need them reinvented by people who refuse to ride them.

standardUser3• 4 years ago

SF's cable car system and historic F trains both work fine as public transit.

And people hate buses.

ghaff• 4 years ago

SF's cable car system and historic F trains both work fine as public transit.

SF's cable car system is quaint and fun and all that but it hardly works fine as public transit. There are often lines, it's $8/ride, and I think you may have to pre-pay at the popular end spots. Does any local take the cable car as day-to-day public transit?

legitster4• 4 years ago

I've never heard anyone express this. Both only exist as tourist experiences.

The cable car in particular is a bit of fancy - it can only carry a dozen-ish people, and requires tons of training and equipment. There's a reason it costs so much to ride such a small distance.

Fun, but not a good model for modern public transit.

deepdriver9• 4 years ago

The cable cars do not function as public transit. The long lines of tourists at the stations are notorious. Visible on Google Street View:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8069998,-122.4212914,3a,75y,...

jasonwatkinspdx2• 4 years ago

You are quite mistaken.

I live in Portland, a city famous for having more of a neighborhood feel than similar cities its size. There are a variety of highly desirable turn of the century neighborhoods. Nearly every single one of these neighborhoods centers on one of the old street car routes. A century after they were torn down, these street car lines had such an impact that these streets are among the most desirable properties on the west coast.

Modern light rail in the US suffers from a different distortion: it tends to be used as a tool to force development projects rather than being implemented in a way optimal for transit.

legitster4• 4 years ago

I live in PDX too! You could actually ride streetcars all the way from Milwaukee to Vancouver at the turn of the century (if you didn't mind taking the whole day to do it).

But ironically, MAX is a good example of the negatives of trying to modernize the streetcar concept. The length of a train is limited by the length of the smallest city block served. So there are severe capacity limitations inherent in the system. And you are still slowed down to some extent by street traffic. It boggles my mind how slow the yellow line is.

chrisbrandow• 4 years ago

Ask any elder boomer who is an LA native about this, and be prepared for a looong discussion.

I think that as with so many things the red cars in LA both better and worse than cars. I think they were especially better for younger people. But I think they were inseparable from a pre-car culture, ultimately.

uoaei5• 4 years ago

LA was not a product of a "pre-car culture", quite the opposite. In fact everything about "car culture" could rightly be considered in colonialist framing: immediately after arriving as a common mode of transportation, they shut off streets to anyone else except cars, using up the resources that the people already there had painstakingly refined for their needs and criminalizing their built-up patterns of behavior (jaywalking). LA was the product of an intense need for justification of cars-as-way-of-life by designing a city to be bad for everything except cars. And it worked!

surfaceofthesun• 4 years ago

Adding to the point: After all of that, it’s not like driving in/around LA is fun.

samatman2• 4 years ago

Los Angeles was founded in 1781.

It helps to know such basic things about a city if you want to make confident pronouncements about its history.

missedthecue• 4 years ago

This theory conveniently ignores that streetcar companies also have lobbying power, and lobbying to stay the status quo is much more successful than lobbying for radical change.

bobthepanda7• 4 years ago

Streetcar companies were universally reviled (as most effective monopolies tend to be, like US cable or power companies), and their status quo actually was worse than what was being introduced for cars, because they pretty much all had flat price caps and were expected to pay maintenance for city streets they operated on.

It also doesn't help that a fair amount of streetcars were just land speculation plays (let's sell all this land that's newly accessible!). When they needed full replacement and renewal, they no longer had anything to finance it with.

tannedNerd• 4 years ago

I mean you are also ignoring the externalities that had effects on lobbying power like not being able to set their own fares, might have effected the amount of money they had to lobby?

mushufasa• 4 years ago

I wonder what the difference is compared to subway trains. Similar local lobbying vs national auto lobbying dynamics, and subways didn't suffer the same extinction.

Is it just switching costs being lower for streetcars? Or maybe the fact subways are underground means they don't battle in a zero sum pavement game with cars, so they were more immune to tides of public opinion and city administration?

smm11• 4 years ago

GM also had the electric EV-1 car in the mid-90s, then crushed nearly all of them, and didn't have another electric car again until Tesla was a thing.

Like a lot of people and companies any more, they'd prefer it was 1952 every day forever.

leobg• 4 years ago

Actually one of the reasons Tesla got started. Elon has often mentioned the EV1 “death marches” as having convinced him that electric cars can be a superior product that customers will love.

cronix• 4 years ago

Look at the timeline for Lithium-Ion batteries for the reason and where they were in the 1990's. Using very heavy lead acid batteries that you could only really use the top 50% of capacity were not economical, which is mostly what they had back then. It was practical in a low speed golf cart that had very few daily miles driven and spent most of its time plugged in and charging, but not much bigger. They also couldn't deliver very high amps compared with what the newer cathodes in LIon and LiFePO4 batteries can generate. Also, none of these technologies were being built at scale in the 90's - they were still mostly inventing the tech and changing rapidly between '90 and 2010ish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_bat...

panick21_2• 4 years ago

There were alternative options between Li and lead acid. And even so, the car was liked by the people, pushing the technology from there would have been viable in a number of markets.

google234123• 4 years ago

BTW, I think all prototype cars have to be crushed eventually. It isn't legal to sell them.

bonestamp22• 4 years ago

They don't have to be crushed per se, but yes... that is what is routinely done with prototypes and pilots and yes they can't be sold (and the OEM wouldn't want to sell them due to some other laws that would come into play if they did).

Pilots are the vehicles that come off the line while the line is being developed or retooled for a new model. Some of them go back to engineering for various reasons, some go to suppliers, but most of those eventually get crushed too.

bonestamp22• 4 years ago

I worked at GM during the EV-1 timeframe. Although some of the people who leased an EV-1 wanted to keep their car, the general economics of mass producing cars is that you need about 50,000 people per year that want to buy a specific car model to break even. At that time, a time of all time low gas prices, there weren't 50k people/year who wanted an EV. Too few people saw the benefits and the environmental need at that time. Maybe GM could have done a better job trying to sell it. But, it's not like they didn't try, they even built a huge ride at EPCOT to promote it.

It's unfortunate that it wasn't a success, but GM didn't have some secret agreement with the oil companies (they sued them a couple years later). GM killed the EV-1 because they couldn't make money selling it. The EV game is hard. Tesla has been at it almost 20 years and they just became profitable a couple years ago. GM wouldn't sell the left over EV-1s because if they sold them, they would be legally required to stock parts for years to come, which doesn't make sense when you only have a couple hundred cars.

The EV-1 was not a conspiracy.

Theodores• 4 years ago

It is a conspiracy story that tells itself. There is good and bad.

However, I think the demise of streetcars needs to be seen in the light of the demise of trams in the UK. We got rid of trams in the UK but General Motors were not to blame. However, the costs of rails in the road instead of rubber wheels and then diesel sealed the deal. The trams went to trolleybus services and they became bus services, that were not necessarily as frequent but had route flexibility that the trams and trolleybus never had.

People overwhelmingly chose the car over the tram in the UK, regardless of lobbying, people worked out that they wanted a car. The outcome was inevitable.

But would the outcome have been inevitable in the US where towns developed along streetcar routes? Would American towns have kept the streetcars where British cities, with wiggly roads, would opt for the trolleybus?

The conspiracy never gave us a chance to find out.

panick21_2• 4 years ago

The outcome was not inevitable. If the same level of spending on federal and local level was invested in improved street cars the outcome could have been quite difference.

Its not like this would have been a zero car world, but a more even split of investment would have yielded better results.

m0llusk• 4 years ago

This is false, revisionist history. During the war maintenance was deferred and many operators either went bankrupt or dramatically reduced operations. By the time the war ended the tracks and rolling stock were all in need of replacement.

The public did not love streetcars for many reasons. The ride was rough, they were boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another. Insufficient capacity meant it was not unusual for riders to cling to the sides of cars where that was possible.

When freeways and buses were presented as an alternative the public embraced building new infrastructure over rebuilding the old. Part of that is because the downsides had not yet become clear.

Blaming some corporate bogeyman is always tempting but does not change the facts. The streetcars were replaced because they fell out of favor with the public who wanted to try the new and shiny thing.

subpixel2• 4 years ago

They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another.

I'm convinced this is the root of all animus towards public transport in the USA. Racism plays a huge part, but it's not exclusively racist, it's also classist - my parents for example would never want to be seen on a bus in their midwestern home town.

rch2• 4 years ago

Where I live the classism is reversed, in that arriving by bus means you can afford to live by public transit.

The same goes for showing up to a party with a salad from your backyard garden or fresh baked bread. Having the time and space for these is a luxury now, whereas my mother would prefer to pick something up on the way.

deepdriver9• 4 years ago

This view obscures real problems with safety and hygine on buses and trains. It isn't racist or classist to hate meth smoke blown in your face, or teens setting off fireworks and assaulting passengers on the subway:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220214165552/https://www.seatt...

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/metro-transit-po...

These days, a much bigger problem for public transit than racism/classism is a general lack of public safety on buses on trains, for all passengers no matter their race or class. Most actual public transit passengers know this. For example, the jury that acquitted Bernie Goetz included two black people; half the jurors had been victims of crime on the subway themselves. A black woman who witnessed the shooting said the teenagers "got what they deserved:"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/06/17/j...

adolph• 4 years ago

Along with public transportation there was a time when pools closed rather than integrate.

https://www.npr.org/2007/05/26/10407533/plunging-into-public...

oldjavacoder• 4 years ago

It isn't racist or classist bullshit. It was that people liked cars for the independence they provided. Today's live in their parent's basement generation can't comprehend the concept.

asiachick• 4 years ago

And yet all over the world plenty of cities people rich and less rich ride public transit all the time in close quarters with one another.

Go ride the public transit in Paris, London, Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, just to name a few. Nobody bats an eye. It's just "normal"

Melatonic• 4 years ago

I have mostly seen Los Angeles as the epicenter for this conspiracy which has pretty damn ideal streetcar weather. Subways also went away around the same time which leads me more toward believing the conspiracy side of things given that they would not have a lot of these same problems.

The way I see it street cars are a great solution to local traffic and not very good for long distance travel. Within downtown LA for example they would be awesome or within the city of Santa Monica.

volkl48• 4 years ago

Streetcars in the modern "done right" sense - with a dedicated right of way, signal priority, and other similar treatments for efficiency can be great for local getting around.

Streetcars in the sense of what they were at the time - Stuck in ever increasing traffic with everything else and less able to navigate around issues than a bus, boarding in traffic in the middle of the street, sitting at all the lights - are not.

rmason3• 4 years ago

My father frequently told me the story of mass transit in Detroit. He was a fan of the interurbans which were street cars that travelled between cities, some of them fifty miles from Detroit. Cars and later freeways totally killed off the interurbans. In fact freeways killed off passenger trains as well.

But streetcars still thrived in Detroit. You could get anywhere with them and even in the car capital of the world people went without them. But then in a flash they were gone. My father was a life long believer in the so called conspiracy.

He was regarded as a conspiracy theorist. As a kid I wished he'd just stop talking about it. But then as a young adult the proof started coming out that maybe he was right all along. But now with a big media push it's going the other way. I know one thing in Michigan the politicians go along with whatever GM wants, always.

Michigan has some of the worst roads in America while at the same time having the largest gas taxes. Yet when billions of dollars became available as a result of COVID what did the governor do who ran on the slogan, 'fix the damn roads'? She gave the money to GM for battery plants! This Wikipedia page just looks like more spin to me.

hnuser123456• 4 years ago

Michigander here, can confirm the roads are more pothole than road in some places. The rich neighborhoods get re-paved every 10 years. The poor ones every 20. Some places they'll just fill them in with something that breaks up in under a year. Some places, why even bother with that? Citycars that assume relatively flat roads in downtown centers are misguided here. The state highways are smoother than midtown hubs.

7speter2• 4 years ago

Yet when billions of dollars became available as a result of COVID what did the governor do who ran on the slogan, 'fix the damn roads'? She gave the money to GM for battery plants!

I understand the discontent, but the logic seems to follow. Assuming you have Michiganders working in the battery plants, they get paid producing batteries, and then taxed by the state. The taxes pay for the roads, and workers can buy homes and other things while remaining in Michigan (flight seems to be a bit of a crisis in Detroit, last I read). And the cycle, ideally, repeats year after year.

actually_a_dog4• 4 years ago

It's interesting that you refer to the interurbans as "streetcars." It has me wondering: at what point do you stop thinking of something as a streetcar and start thinking of it as light rail?

jimkleiber2• 4 years ago

I dunno, I'm starting to see the world as more and more complex (aka many inputs contribute to many outputs) and yet maybe too complex for us as humans so we latch onto one input causing one output.

I see lots of side road construction in the northern Detroit suburbs, the interstates have been under major construction for at least 2-3 years, and overall, it seems as if there's lots of construction. Is it from Whitmer? From the feds? From local cities? I don't know, probably a combination of all three and more.

Same with why the street cars disappeared. I think our anger/fear can make us think it was one and only one group or person who made such things happen, I just think that's probably a subjective perspective more than an objective reality.

Edit: also I hadn't heard of Whitmer giving money to GM, could you share a link about that? All I can find is that she helped GM make their own $7B investment in Michigan.

somewhat_drunk• 4 years ago

She gave the money to GM for battery plants!

Link?

And as far as I can tell, a LOT of money has been poured into Michigan's roads in the last few years. Most of the issues that existed when I moved here four years ago have been fixed. Sure there are still some bad areas, but the damn roads do seem to be getting fixed.

JumpCrisscross2• 4 years ago

blaming some corporate bogeyman is always tempting but does not change the facts

The article is well written. It discusses the facts of the antitrust case. And then it goes into detail on the “lingering suspicions” and “urban legend” that you, rightfully, rail against. The Role in decline of the streetcars section practically debunks the conspiracy.

rayiner2• 4 years ago

Even Curbed, a pro-urbanist site, has strongly called into question this theory: https://la.curbed.com/2017/9/20/16340038/los-angeles-streetc.... It notes that by the 1930s, LA’s streetcar system was falling into disrepair and running massive losses.

What people forget is that during the mid-20th century, cars were progressive, forward looking, and egalitarian. They were seen as ushering in a future where ordinary people could leave overcrowded cities and travel in speed and comfort. Faced with the need for massive investment to bring street car systems into good repair, cities chose to invest in what they saw as the future: roads and highways for personal transit. (Remember these are the same people who thought babies in drawers was progress: https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/our-story/our-history/bab....)

It’s also important to note that southern cities that grew rapidly post-1950, such as Atlanta, uniformly adopted a car-centric approach. These cities were outside the alleged scope of the GM conspiracy, but developed on the same track because everyone back then saw individual car ownership as the future.

TylerE4• 4 years ago

Uh, if you actually read the page you linked to it sounds like actual progress? Popular with patients and nurses, increased Breast feeding, cost effective using a standard mass-produced object…

riffic3• 4 years ago

the war was only a period of 4 or 5 years. We've been in many wars for far longer than the one specific war you are talking about.

bobthepanda7• 4 years ago

The streetcars were not around for those other wars though, and the war effort was not nearly as total. The US went through the war unscathed, and even then most goods were highly rationed and citizens were encouraged to make do and use less.

Stopping all maintenance on any kind of complex system for four or five years will almost certainly bring it to a state of ruin.

Spooky23• 4 years ago

That doesn’t really add up. Like many things, wartime deferred maintenance and demand shifts disrupted capital intensive businesses like streetcars and trolleys.

The thing that you’re missing is the multi-trillion dollar investment in free road infrastructure. Streetcars and passenger trains were replaced because you can’t make money selling tickets when your competitors benefit from the unlimited purchasing power of the US government.

The only places that were spared were urban areas like NYC and Boston, but even there the cities were almost destroyed by that massive investment.

I think calling this a conspiracy theory is a way to marginalize and revise reality. It was a strategy that maximized employment and drove a half century of US industrial dominance and prosperity. But it had a cost and fundamental inefficiency that remains difficult to measure.

bombcar5• 4 years ago

It's literally the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit but somehow people think it's gospel. Amusing.

bogomipz3• 4 years ago

Yes but that's because "Cloverleaf Industries" in the movie was based on the National City Lines, the company that bought the trolley service.[1]

It's not hard to imagine a script writer in Los Angeles being stuck in traffic and and mulling this bit of urban lore.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

JeremyNT• 4 years ago

This is false, revisionist history. During the war maintenance was deferred and many operators either went bankrupt or dramatically reduced operations. By the time the war ended the tracks and rolling stock were all in need of replacement.

Just to be clear, when you are stating that "This" is "revisionist history," I believe you aren't actually referring to the contents of the article itself, but rather the conspiracy theory mentioned in the article.

Note that there are two conspiracies mentioned in the article. The first is a conspiracy that did in fact occur: conspiracy to create a monopoly. The second is the theory that this was part of an intentional plan to dismantle public transit (which is effectively refuted on the wikipedia article).

jayd16• 4 years ago

The paradox of 'unpopular because its overcrowded' always cracks me up.

twoodfin2• 4 years ago

In this case it’s not a paradox: These services could not effectively scale to meet demand without sacrificing comfort. Whatever their other problems, automobiles won out here and continue to do so.

onionisafruit4• 4 years ago

As Yogi Berra probably didn't say, "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

Streetcars were also dangerous because you had to cross traffic to get to one: https://66.media.tumblr.com/36d0c242182fea08ecbac621504c2e96...

sbf501• 4 years ago

This is a false dichotomy.

You are telling us how awful streetcars were, as if there was no other choice but to tear them up and convert to a car-based society.

Instead of fixing the problems: fix the track, better cars, more cars, more accessibility, like what was done all over European cities... Instead of doing that, opponents torched it all, invested HEAVILY in car-based infrastructure and helped create the mess we have today. Just like today, dollars were thrown at the car-based solution and the superior mass-transit solutions are left to rot, so that people can make your argument.

Your argument is specious at best.

bogomipz3• 4 years ago

It's odd that you assert this to be "revisionist history" and then go on to make a statement that is itself false. No other event has shaped Los Angeles like World War II. During the war years Los Angeles experienced a population boom as people moved there to work in defense and aviation. These job opportunities were plentiful in order support the war efforts. The people who came to work in those factories depended on the Red Cars and Yellow Cars as did the factories for getting their worker there. In fact Red Car and Yellow Car ridership peaked during the war years. They were most certainly not allowed to go derelict due to lack of maintenance as they were far too important. In fact there was rubber and fuel rationing at that time which only served to make their operations that much more important.

"The public did not love streetcars for many reasons. The ride was rough, they were boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another. Insufficient capacity meant it was not unusual for riders to cling to the sides of cars where that was possible"

There's a lot wrong with this. Southern California has mild winters and cars were also enclosed with windows that could open and close depending on the weather. There's pictures here which clearly document that [1]. Saying that people had to cling to the sides of the cars is also a complete fabrication. There was nothing on the outside of the cars to cling to.

"When freeways and buses were presented as an alternative the public embraced building new infrastructure over rebuilding the old."

This is also untrue. The bus began competing with the electric trolleys as early as the 1920s.[2]

"Blaming some corporate bogeyman is always tempting but does not change the facts."

And yet it's well established fact that National City Lines bought up these mass transit assets and were sued by the DoJ on antitrust grounds for conspiring to monopolize urban transit(they had purchased many other cities transit assets as well.) [3][4]. Conspiracy theory notwithstanding, I don't think it's a stretch to say Detroit and other automotive special interests certainly hastened the decline of the electric trolley.

[1] https://libraries.usc.edu/article/red-cars-and-las-transport...

[2] https://metroprimaryresources.info/our-grand-concourse-histo...

[3] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-02/explaini...

[4] https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-re...

raylad• 4 years ago

They were convicted of antitrust violations in destroying the streetcars to monopolize transportation, but it was overturned basically on technicalities:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/334/573.html

runarberg• 4 years ago

The streetcars were replaced because they fell out of favor with the public who wanted to try the new and shiny thing.

You might be correct, but it is very simplistic view of history to attribute change to the will of the people. Democracy is not such a driving force for change as to become the single factor for it. Historically corporate interests has weight far higher as a driving force (as evidenced by our current global warming crisis; but notable exceptions include e.g. the new deal).

Sometimes the will of the people might align with corporate interest, and that may have been the case here. But I would argue then that is only a bonus for the politician which will reap the returning votes. The main point of the change was first and foremost to serve the interest of the corporation which funded the campaigns.

joe_the_user2• 4 years ago

The Wikipedia article has a considerable number references. Your claims don't.

onionisafruit4• 4 years ago

Their claims don't contradict the wikipedia article either. They are almost entirely unrelated except for the subject matter of streetcars.

cowmix• 4 years ago

Nope, GM total f'd everyone.

Watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4

bamboozled• 4 years ago

I still don't believe any of what you said would make people hate streetcars. Maybe if the ride was ruff, but that's obviously been remedied since.

People didn't have air conditioning in their cars back then, so their cars were hot and cold.

People had very rough suspension in cars back then too, I don't think the ride would've been dramatically better.

intrasight3• 4 years ago

Wikipedia article lists Pittsburgh as having streetcars. In the 30 or so years that I've been here, I've never seen a streetcar. We do have light rail, however.

TylerE4• 4 years ago

Converted to light rail in the mid 80s

greenn• 4 years ago

The T runs mostly on a separate rail, but there are a number of places in city limits where it runs with cars on the street. Check out Arlington Avenue in Allentown (the Pittsburgh neighborhood, not the city).

intrasight3• 4 years ago

I see no T routes down Arlington

bombcar5• 4 years ago

The distinction between light rail and streetcars gets confusing - is the San Diego Trolley a "street car" when it runs down the street? Or because cars aren't supposed to drive in its "lane" is it still light rail?

What about when Amtrak comes rolling down the street? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFk-yeGHn-o

I've always taken them to be "single car trains that run in normal lanes" but that almost covers the electric busses of Seattle.

intrasight3• 4 years ago

Here they are nowhere on the "street" - at least nowhere that I can see. They are on separate rail likes - like a train.

DiogenesKynikos• 4 years ago

Streetcars have made a comeback in many places around the world.

I don't know exactly what has led to this comeback, but one factor may be low-floor trams,[0] where the floor is just a few inches above the street level, which makes boarding much easier.

Trams tend to have smoother rides than buses. For short distances (a few kilometers), they're a pretty nice way to get around.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-floor_tram

bombcar5• 4 years ago

Low-floor trams make a huge difference, because the ADA also attacked many potential streetcar/tram designs, since the tram floor was higher you either needed to raise station platforms so high as to not be a curb anymore, or you had to otherwise add wheelchair lifts, etc - not just simple ramps.

It was done (the old San Diego high-floor trollies had them) but it was a significant stop/delay when it had to be used. The newer ones are barely noticed at all.

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

How many of you have lived on a street with an active street car line? Probably not many of you, not many Americans here anyway, but I have. I lived on Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia for years, with a street car (there called a trolley) running right in front of my house.

Nobody in this thread has mentioned it yet, but the noise was awful! Every time it went past the whole house would shake. Every wall in the building turned into a sub-wuffer as that thing rumbled down the street. Was it at least useful? No, not really. I rode it maybe 30 or 40 times total in those years, usually when grocery shopping and sometimes just as a novelty with guests visiting town.

In principle the trolley would have been useful for my commute, which entailed going to 30th street station to get onto the SEPTA regional rail (which I loved, and still miss.) But in practice, it was always more reliable to walk the ~1.5 miles / 30 minutes to 30th street myself. Street cars are subject to street traffic, which makes them unreliable. To reliably catch a trolley would have required me to leave the house much earlier every day.

Dylovell• 4 years ago

I have lived on a street with a street car for the past 3 years and I disagree with your perspective. I live in a different city, so variables are probably very different in a lot of ways. I find large trucks and motorcycles as the largest disturbances in my daily life (I work from home mostly). The train absolutely makes noise and shakes the house, but it's predictable. I no longer set alarms and I can use it to run my errands. And it is way better for the air around me than cars. Most of the US lives in a mono-culture for transportation and cars are pretty expensive.

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

In my case, the street car noise was roughly comparable to a garbage truck, but much more frequent. Significantly louder than a diesel bus though, and not as flexible. Better than diesel buses are trolley-buses; electric buses that use overhead power lines like the trolley, but with rubber road tires instead of train rails. Those are really quite, but aren't as flexible with rerouting as diesel buses. But between the trolley-buses and diesel buses, I think streetcars don't have much of a niche. I just don't see why a city today would opt to install streetcars if they could use trolley-buses instead.

Motorcycles are definitely the worst offenders though. Not all motorcycles are loud, but the loud ones are really loud.

eneumann• 4 years ago

How old are the tracks and the cars? Anecdotally, the streetcars in Dublin are quiet and don't make any sort of racket. Same for the (single, sad) streetcar in Atlanta.

Streetcars (and buses) work best on dedicated or semi-dedicated routes. The problem with their reliability, in the case you describe, is the cars that are creating the traffic.

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

I'm sure poor track condition probably had a lot to do with it. With respect to reliability, I think buses and even trolley-buses have an advantage over streetcars in traffic because they can go around obstructions in the street, while streetcars really can't. Trolley-buses have to stay on roads with overhead lines of course, but they still have more lateral freedom than trolleys on rails.

4gotunameagain• 4 years ago

I have lived for quite some time in a Straßenbahn (tram) street in Berlin. 2nd floor, the tram only a couple of meters from my window.

Is it that bad? No. They lay the tracks on top of rubber now so the vibrations are not that terrible.

Does it make some noise and can you feel the house shake a bit ? Yes.

Do I prefer it from the isolationist culture of cars, the emissions, the traffic and the everything else that comes with it? 100% yes.

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

But why not a trolley-bus instead?

SergeAx2• 4 years ago

I was sorry to read that. I lived for 3 years on an alley, directly connected to street where the street car line was in Moscow, Russia (we were calling them "trams"). I was able to see and hear trams from my windows on a third floor (which literally means third, we didn't call first floor "ground" or "0" in Moscow). Hearing a tram was a bit troubling for a first week, but then I think I just got used to it and my brain filtered that out. There was no significant vibration, even with older cars, new ones were almost silent.

Commute from my home to the office was about 12 minutes, and the schedule was almost always to the minute, except several days in a year when failures or traffic jams messed things up (in Moscow trams has their own lane most of the time).

General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy

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