5 ms·

My first guess would be the car lobbyists doing. They are powerful enough to tear down so many street-car rails all over America.

• munk-a 6y ago
  Indeed - car lobbyists and marketing... and likely that torch was picked up and carried further by oil lobbyists. America has been slowly pushed toward viewing walking places as being abnormal so instead of cars being for trips and vacations they are seen as standard and necessary for commutes and runs to the store. There is only a very small segment of the population that benefits from constantly driving everywhere and they aren't the ones in the cars.
• refurb 6y ago
  Makes for a nice conspiracy theory but from what I’ve read many of them were going under and consumers wanted cars, not street cars.
  • bluGill 6y ago
    They went under because they were not allowed to raise fares to the level needed to support them this wasn't the market, it was the law.
  • madamelic 6y ago
    Not a conspiracy theory. Look up the Koch Brothers. They fund PACs that pretend to be grassroots campaigns to shut down public transit expansion and successfully unfortunately. Also the street cars collapse was very much due to automaker lobbying, like someone else said, you don't need to kill it directly; just make it unsustainable. Basically how Republicans govern; you don't kill it directly, you just choke it to death.