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> General Motors put itself between people and the desire to move around by buying up public transit only to dismantle it I know this story and for a long time
by gumby 3y ago
> General Motors put itself between people and the desire to move around by buying up public transit only to dismantle it
I know this story and for a long time believed it. But it appears that developers building new towns (urban expansion) in the mid 20th century put in streetcars to get people to move in (connected to city networks etc) and ran them at a loss. As the new town filled up and the developers went on to the next one, the streetcars became the uneconomic responsibility of the town.
- astrange 3y agoThe cities put price caps on streetcars because they thought it would make it cheaper, which ended up bankrupting them, and then more recently cities have infinite amounts of pro-car policies like parking minimums that make it unreasonable to use any other kind of transport. Funny enough, this is being repeated in modern times because a lot of transit activists want to force all transit to be free and instead be funded by theoretical rich peoples' taxes.