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We'd be in a very different place regarding railways if GM and Ford hadn't done their absolute best to kill public transportation in the 50s. In the town where

We'd be in a very different place regarding railways if GM and Ford hadn't done their absolute best to kill public transportation in the 50s. In the town where I live, the well-used streetcar system was purchased by GM and closed after two years.

usaar333 16y ago
I always figured no active process was needed to kill public transit. Suburbia's core design does the deal. Where I live in Sunnyvale, the light rail system is barely quicker than bicycling. This slowness, along with a well-designed road network and free parking everywhere, makes public transit useless for anyone who owns a car.
- code_duck 16y ago
  Yes, they influenced the design of the cities to bring about exactly that effect. It was not something that just happened. Once everyone lived at last 5 miles from work and there was no reasonable public transportation, having a car, and consuming a disproportionate amount of fuel, became a necessity.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    It's quite a stretch and bordering tin-foil-hattiness to claim that the oil and car industry socially engineered society over several decades to a point where they could build-in a need for their products. The process is much more complex than that, and not much social engineering is possible on processes at that scale, especially not the sort of clandestine, subversive social engineering you're implying. (I've worked on systems that model land use in function of economics, demographics, transport and environmental factors for almost 10 years now, my wife has a PhD on it, and so do most of the people (in those fields) I work with daily. I in no way claim to understand these processes, nobody does, but claiming to know that public transport was deliberately destroyed by special interest groups is intellectually dishonest.)
    - code_duck 16y ago
      Claiming that GM purchased streetcar systems and closed them down in order to encourage people to use private automobiles is not a crazy conspiracy theory. As noted, that is what happened in the town in which I live. ----------------------- Apparently, we've reached the threading limit and I can't reply to your comment. I don't think it's far fetched at all to say that the most powerful industries in the US would do, could do and did their best to ensure that roads and cities were constructed in a way that favored them. So, whatever.
      - roel_v 16y ago
        No, but that's not what you were claiming, you were claiming that GM (and/or other auto makers) were responsible for the lack of public transport all over the US. I hadn't heard about these streetcars; so I looked it up. Wikipedia had a fairly comprehensive (for an introduction) article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scanda... . There's a whole section in there debunking the effects of the 'conspiracy', most of which sounds like (as a whole) a much more convincing explanation. Note especially that, according to one author, "nationwide, the ultimate reach of the alleged conspirators extended to only about 10 percent of all transit systems - sixty-odd out of some six hundred - and yet virtually all the other 90 percent also got rid of trolleys (as happened with all the tramcar systems in the British Isles and France)."

usaar333 16y ago

I always figured no active process was needed to kill public transit. Suburbia's core design does the deal. Where I live in Sunnyvale, the light rail system is barely quicker than bicycling. This slowness, along with a well-designed road network and free parking everywhere, makes public transit useless for anyone who owns a car.

code_duck 16y ago
Yes, they influenced the design of the cities to bring about exactly that effect. It was not something that just happened. Once everyone lived at last 5 miles from work and there was no reasonable public transportation, having a car, and consuming a disproportionate amount of fuel, became a necessity.
- roel_v 16y ago
  It's quite a stretch and bordering tin-foil-hattiness to claim that the oil and car industry socially engineered society over several decades to a point where they could build-in a need for their products. The process is much more complex than that, and not much social engineering is possible on processes at that scale, especially not the sort of clandestine, subversive social engineering you're implying. (I've worked on systems that model land use in function of economics, demographics, transport and environmental factors for almost 10 years now, my wife has a PhD on it, and so do most of the people (in those fields) I work with daily. I in no way claim to understand these processes, nobody does, but claiming to know that public transport was deliberately destroyed by special interest groups is intellectually dishonest.)
  - code_duck 16y ago
    Claiming that GM purchased streetcar systems and closed them down in order to encourage people to use private automobiles is not a crazy conspiracy theory. As noted, that is what happened in the town in which I live. ----------------------- Apparently, we've reached the threading limit and I can't reply to your comment. I don't think it's far fetched at all to say that the most powerful industries in the US would do, could do and did their best to ensure that roads and cities were constructed in a way that favored them. So, whatever.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      No, but that's not what you were claiming, you were claiming that GM (and/or other auto makers) were responsible for the lack of public transport all over the US. I hadn't heard about these streetcars; so I looked it up. Wikipedia had a fairly comprehensive (for an introduction) article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scanda... . There's a whole section in there debunking the effects of the 'conspiracy', most of which sounds like (as a whole) a much more convincing explanation. Note especially that, according to one author, "nationwide, the ultimate reach of the alleged conspirators extended to only about 10 percent of all transit systems - sixty-odd out of some six hundred - and yet virtually all the other 90 percent also got rid of trolleys (as happened with all the tramcar systems in the British Isles and France)."