14 ms·

General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy

199 points by mmastrac 4y ago

xhkkffbf 4y 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.
- Retric 4y 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 4y 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.
    - Retric 4y ago
      I think that’s overly critical of busses. You could use the same number of busses at the same frequency as a trolly network, but they are optimized differently. Trolley’s had fewer routes because laying track was expensive, busses on the other hand ended up with vastly more routes but fewer busses on most routes. This meant that even with significantly more total busses people would on average wait longer but conversely they walk less. The biggest downside to complex bus routs is they tend to be more difficult to understand and use efficiently. However, apps can really pick up the slack and let people leverage complex systems.
- johannes1234321 4y 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)
  - sitkack 4y 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-the-fight-for-washington-square-park/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJuqe6sre2I New Egyptian Replacement Capitol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUK0K5mdQ_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUK0K5mdQ_s Brasilia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xz7TrRCO_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xz7TrRCO_E
  - Retric 4y 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.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Subways will always tend to be faster, just because they don't have cross traffic enforced by cycling traffic lights. Traffic lights are just a reality of street-based transportation, because the light length needs to be long enough that someone like a grandma with mobility issues needs enough time to cross the street.
- sitkack 4y 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 4y 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.
    - sitkack 4y ago
      Then why were the streetcar lines being bought by what effectively was a shell company owned by the corporations that would profit the most from the sale of those buses?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - bobthepanda 4y 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.
- LeanderK 4y 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.
  - abawany 4y 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.
    - antonymy 4y ago
      I see this as a kind of Stockholm syndrome. Your time is being held hostage by your commute, so you cope with ways to use that time. I was the same way. At first, I was stuck commuting for 75+ minutes to and from work on public transit. Most of this was spent walking, because it was actually faster to bee-line on foot for the office downtown than trying to jump between inner city transit options. I read books on the train or did crosswords when able, but the train ride altogether was maybe 20 minutes long, with maybe 5 minutes spent waiting at the stop (if it wasn't late). So about 25 minutes I could spend "productively" by reading on the way in, and another 25 on the way back. Assuming the train wasn't jam packed by the time it arrived, leaving me hardly any room to even hold a handrail let alone do anything else, which was not a rare occurrence. Then my employer finally got me a free parking pass for the building (there was a waiting list) and I said goodbye to public transport. My 75+ minute commute became a 25 minute drive, saving me 100 minutes a day I could spend on leisure instead of commuting. What undercuts this happy turn of events is that Covid came in a few months later and my prized parking pass became irrelevant as I was working from home. And this made me realize enjoying ANY kind of commute is essentially Stockholm syndrome. What's better than a short drive OR reading on the train? Reading at home, in my big comfy chair with a cup of coffee, right up until it's time to start work, never having to take off my slippers.
stefantalpalaru 4y ago
Excellent documentary about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_for_a_Ride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_for_a_Ride
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  Another interesting documentary: https://www.pbs.org/video/oregon-experience-streetcar-city/ https://www.pbs.org/video/oregon-experience-streetcar-city/
Damogran6 4y ago
As alluded to in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
heliophobicdude 4y ago
How can we undo these consequences and promote better public transportation options? I have some ideas about zoning…
- jrockway 4y 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.
legitster 4y 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).
- riffic 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interurban
  - wollsmoth 4y 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.
    - DickingAround 4y ago
      It does seem to be almost some kind of stigma or classism with buses rather than an actual functional difference in technology. We have electric overhead-line buses and they're just the same as streetcars except you don't need dedicated lanes or putting in rails in the road (which are expensive, limit expansion, and present a real hazard to biking).
      - deepdriver 4y ago
        Have you ridden the bus in a major US city lately? Safety and hygiene are serious issues, depending on the city and sometimes the specific line. Despite owning a car, I used to ride buses whenever remotely feasible as a point of civic pride. That stopped after a number of encounters with other agressive, combative, smelly, and/or visibly ill passengers. This is all tied up with homelessness, drug abuse, and high crime in urban communities which political polarization has prevented the US from addressing. It's disheartening, as the economic and environmental advantages of public transit are numerous. This sort of thing is the problem: https://web.archive.org/web/20220214165552/https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/drugs-on-buses-have-become-an-everyday-hazard-seattle-area-transit-workers-say/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220214165552/https://www.seatt...
chrisbrandow 4y 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.
- uoaei 4y 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 4y ago
    Adding to the point: After all of that, it’s not like driving in/around LA is fun.
  - samatman 4y 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.
    - uoaei 4y ago
      I would advise you, Sam Atman, to review the city limits and landscape as they changed over time, rather than eliminating all context from trite tidbits of information to make an underdeveloped and irrelevant point. City design doesn't stop the moment someone puts a flagpole in the ground.
      - BitwiseFool 4y ago
missedthecue 4y 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.
- tannedNerd 4y 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?
- bobthepanda 4y 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.
- mushufasa 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_bat...
  - panick21_ 4y 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 4y ago
  BTW, I think all prototype cars have to be crushed eventually. It isn't legal to sell them.
  - bonestamp2 4y ago
Theodores 4y 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_ 4y 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 4y 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.
- subpixel 4y 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.
  - rch 4y 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.
    - hammock 4y ago
      > Where I live the classism is reversed, in that arriving by bus means you can afford to live by public transit. Interesting thought, I had to think of what kind of places these are. Maybe urbanized bedroom communities or connected suburbs like Naperville in Illinois? Where do you live?
intrasight 4y 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.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Converted to light rail in the mid 80s
- greenn 4y 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).
  - intrasight 4y ago
    I see no T routes down Arlington
- bombcar 4y 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 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.
  - intrasight 4y 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 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-floor_tram
- bombcar 4y 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.
MichaelCollins 4y 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 4y 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.
  - MichaelCollins 4y 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.

199 points by mmastrac 4y 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.

Retric 4y 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 4y 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.
  - Retric 4y ago
    I think that’s overly critical of busses. You could use the same number of busses at the same frequency as a trolly network, but they are optimized differently. Trolley’s had fewer routes because laying track was expensive, busses on the other hand ended up with vastly more routes but fewer busses on most routes. This meant that even with significantly more total busses people would on average wait longer but conversely they walk less. The biggest downside to complex bus routs is they tend to be more difficult to understand and use efficiently. However, apps can really pick up the slack and let people leverage complex systems.
johannes1234321 4y 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)
- sitkack 4y 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-the-fight-for-washington-square-park/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJuqe6sre2I New Egyptian Replacement Capitol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUK0K5mdQ_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUK0K5mdQ_s Brasilia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xz7TrRCO_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xz7TrRCO_E
- Retric 4y 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.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Subways will always tend to be faster, just because they don't have cross traffic enforced by cycling traffic lights. Traffic lights are just a reality of street-based transportation, because the light length needs to be long enough that someone like a grandma with mobility issues needs enough time to cross the street.
sitkack 4y 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 4y 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.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    Then why were the streetcar lines being bought by what effectively was a shell company owned by the corporations that would profit the most from the sale of those buses?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bobthepanda 4y 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.
LeanderK 4y 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.
- abawany 4y 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.
  - antonymy 4y ago
    I see this as a kind of Stockholm syndrome. Your time is being held hostage by your commute, so you cope with ways to use that time. I was the same way. At first, I was stuck commuting for 75+ minutes to and from work on public transit. Most of this was spent walking, because it was actually faster to bee-line on foot for the office downtown than trying to jump between inner city transit options. I read books on the train or did crosswords when able, but the train ride altogether was maybe 20 minutes long, with maybe 5 minutes spent waiting at the stop (if it wasn't late). So about 25 minutes I could spend "productively" by reading on the way in, and another 25 on the way back. Assuming the train wasn't jam packed by the time it arrived, leaving me hardly any room to even hold a handrail let alone do anything else, which was not a rare occurrence. Then my employer finally got me a free parking pass for the building (there was a waiting list) and I said goodbye to public transport. My 75+ minute commute became a 25 minute drive, saving me 100 minutes a day I could spend on leisure instead of commuting. What undercuts this happy turn of events is that Covid came in a few months later and my prized parking pass became irrelevant as I was working from home. And this made me realize enjoying ANY kind of commute is essentially Stockholm syndrome. What's better than a short drive OR reading on the train? Reading at home, in my big comfy chair with a cup of coffee, right up until it's time to start work, never having to take off my slippers.

stefantalpalaru 4y ago

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

NegativeLatency 4y ago
Another interesting documentary: https://www.pbs.org/video/oregon-experience-streetcar-city/ https://www.pbs.org/video/oregon-experience-streetcar-city/

Damogran6 4y ago

As alluded to in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

heliophobicdude 4y ago

How can we undo these consequences and promote better public transportation options? I have some ideas about zoning…

jrockway 4y 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.

legitster 4y 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).

riffic 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interurban
- wollsmoth 4y 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.
  - DickingAround 4y ago
    It does seem to be almost some kind of stigma or classism with buses rather than an actual functional difference in technology. We have electric overhead-line buses and they're just the same as streetcars except you don't need dedicated lanes or putting in rails in the road (which are expensive, limit expansion, and present a real hazard to biking).
    - deepdriver 4y ago
      Have you ridden the bus in a major US city lately? Safety and hygiene are serious issues, depending on the city and sometimes the specific line. Despite owning a car, I used to ride buses whenever remotely feasible as a point of civic pride. That stopped after a number of encounters with other agressive, combative, smelly, and/or visibly ill passengers. This is all tied up with homelessness, drug abuse, and high crime in urban communities which political polarization has prevented the US from addressing. It's disheartening, as the economic and environmental advantages of public transit are numerous. This sort of thing is the problem: https://web.archive.org/web/20220214165552/https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/drugs-on-buses-have-become-an-everyday-hazard-seattle-area-transit-workers-say/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220214165552/https://www.seatt...

chrisbrandow 4y 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.

uoaei 4y 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 4y ago
  Adding to the point: After all of that, it’s not like driving in/around LA is fun.
- samatman 4y 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.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    I would advise you, Sam Atman, to review the city limits and landscape as they changed over time, rather than eliminating all context from trite tidbits of information to make an underdeveloped and irrelevant point. City design doesn't stop the moment someone puts a flagpole in the ground.
    - BitwiseFool 4y ago

missedthecue 4y 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.

tannedNerd 4y 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?
bobthepanda 4y 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.
mushufasa 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_bat...
- panick21_ 4y 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 4y ago
BTW, I think all prototype cars have to be crushed eventually. It isn't legal to sell them.
- bonestamp2 4y ago

Theodores 4y 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_ 4y 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 4y 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.

subpixel 4y 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.
- rch 4y 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.
  - hammock 4y ago
    > Where I live the classism is reversed, in that arriving by bus means you can afford to live by public transit. Interesting thought, I had to think of what kind of places these are. Maybe urbanized bedroom communities or connected suburbs like Naperville in Illinois? Where do you live?

intrasight 4y 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.

TylerE 4y ago
Converted to light rail in the mid 80s
greenn 4y 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).
- intrasight 4y ago
  I see no T routes down Arlington
bombcar 4y 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 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.
- intrasight 4y 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 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-floor_tram

bombcar 4y 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.

MichaelCollins 4y 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 4y 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.
- MichaelCollins 4y 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.