[HN Gopher] General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy
___________________________________________________________________
General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy
Author : mmastrac
Score : 144 points
Date : 2022-07-20 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| Theodores wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| 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).
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Eh, I hear ya but there's also multiple ripple on effects.
| Like, the stop density on MAX is just too high. It needs to
| be more arterial between transit centers, rather than
| trying to move people 4 blocks between stops through most
| of downtown. But making that workable means some sort of
| more high density connector fanning out from it than our
| system currently handles. Too much of the city core has
| these redundant routes of multiple modes each trying to
| have the same stop density.
| standardUser wrote:
| SF's cable car system and historic F trains both work fine as
| public transit.
|
| And people hate buses.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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?
| piperswe wrote:
| Muni monthly passes include the cable car, and I would
| assume many intra-SF commuters would have one of these
| passes (I certainly did when I worked there)
| roughly wrote:
| I used to live in north beach and used the cable car for
| transit a decent amount - the busses through Chinatown were
| so slow and often so crowded it was almost faster to walk,
| but the cable car I could usually just step on and then
| step off downtown.
| standardUser wrote:
| Yes, people do, one line goes through a major population
| corridor and ends right in the center of the financial
| district. Thats't the east/west line. North/south line is
| more tourist-oriented.
| deepdriver wrote:
| 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,.
| ..
| kfarr wrote:
| True for Powell/Hyde street route, but the California line
| is a straight shot from the tendernob to financial
| district, plenty of regulars on that route going to work
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| standardUser wrote:
| "Both only exist as tourist experiences."
|
| That's simply false.
|
| My point is that even shitty little streetcar systems like
| the ones in SF get used and are much preferable to cars and
| buses.
| riffic wrote:
| 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
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| riffic wrote:
| The nugget of my reply you're moving past concerns
| automobile-centric planning and its extreme toll on the
| built environment, and those external costs.
|
| https://www.planetizen.com/definition/car-centric-planning
|
| I don't really have time right now but I'm sure you could
| dive pretty deeply into things like racial prejudices in
| destroying neighborhoods to build freeways, or in how
| people who live near busy roads have increased rates of
| asthma or other health related issues. I really don't have
| time to do this but I'll leave the convo open for others to
| jump in if they'd like.
|
| I like buses too but I'm pretty pissed off how short-minded
| planners were in the early to mid-20th century when they
| decided to trash some really valuable infra.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.se
| att...
| wollsmoth wrote:
| Okay but this is as fixable on buses as it is on street
| cars. Street cars may seem cleaner but I think it's
| because they are generally just kind of impractical for
| daily commuting and are sort of kept around as a tourist
| activity in some cities.
| deepdriver wrote:
| Yes, I agree that the problem is fundamental to both
| modes of transit. If street cars were more common, the
| same stigma would apply for the same reasons.
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _does seem to be almost some kind of stigma or classism
| with buses rather than an actual functional difference in
| technology_
|
| I attended a talk on the effects of new bus versus light
| rail routes on property values. The fact that rail is
| fixed increases them much more. The switching cost is a
| feature. Nobody moves to a neighbourhood because the city
| opened a new bus route to it.
|
| Something similar might occur with citizens' give-a-shit
| factors. I get furious when my local subway station gets
| messy. I have no idea which bus routes go by. If a bus
| route became problematic, I imagine my neighbours would
| petition to move or cancel it before considering cleaning
| it up. You can't do that with laid track.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can look at it like this: a light rail line is a
| _promise_ that transit will serve that area for decades
| to come.
|
| And so when a light rail line comes through, the areas
| around the stations begin to develop, and quite rapidly,
| too. An example can be found here:
| https://goo.gl/maps/kEkn615bp5nUGVmv6 - that trolley stop
| was literally in the middle of an empty field when it was
| built, and there wasn't much around on the nearby roads,
| either.
|
| A bus line gets added to where people already are, and
| can disappear as quickly as it came; there's no
| permanency.
| uoaei wrote:
| The infrastructure necessary for streetcars naturally
| assigns priority to them on roads, demoting motor vehicles
| to waiting for streetcar signals and not the other way
| around. This grants efficiency guarantees assuming no
| sabotage.
| smm11 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| 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.
| google234123 wrote:
| BTW, I think all prototype cars have to be crushed eventually.
| It isn't legal to sell them.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| 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.
| cronix wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| As alluded to in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's not that simple.
|
| Trolley's had fewer routes because laying track was
| expensive, busses on the other hand had vastly more routes
| because adding new ones what's cheap. This meant that even
| with significantly more total busses people would on
| average wait longer but conversely they would walk less.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| > Far more busses operated in Chicago/NYC etc in 1970 than
| streetcars in 1920.
|
| Different times, the system now evolved from a state where
| streetcars were removed so they can't be compared in that
| way. Chicago/NYC was a very different place than it was in
| 1920, itself would change in ways _because_ of a bus system
| vs streetcars.
| [deleted]
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Traffic lights can be tied to bus traffic - if a bus
| approaches give it way (both by letting other traffic
| flow away as well as keeping green till the bus crossed)
| Doesn't work for all situations but can give 80% green
| wave, even where bus lines cross.
|
| However then bus is still slower than a subway on long
| distance. A subway can take a more or less straight line,
| while busses have to follow roads. Also passengers
| typically expect denser stops with busses. Also by being
| alone on the track a subway can go faster as max speed.
|
| But even with subway on long distance, bus can connect
| with high density to subway, so that more people can
| reach the station.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > On otherwise empty streets a buss network could be far
| more convenient than subways, but that's not the world we
| live in.
|
| I live in a world with relatively good subway system for
| travelling across the city and a relatively dense bus
| system to solve "the last mile" thus quite a good
| combination. (While the system is close to collapse due to
| missing investment over also few decades and new projects
| being too slow in completion)
| dr-detroit wrote:
| sitkack wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| I am not making any statement about streetcars in general.
| You also don't have to purchase the majority of something
| to then show it as a PR piece, "LA is modernizing its
| transportation system with the fast and flexible bus" ...
|
| The commons then as now had a bunch of selfish people
| pushing their own agendas and mass transportation is one of
| those things that suffers under capitalism, it doesn't
| extract the most profit from the system. It maximizes
| efficiency, which isn't the same thing.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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]
| LeanderK wrote:
| > 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| abawany wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| abawany wrote:
| I agree with you there - commuting, especially in the
| form of "everyone needs to be in the office by 9am",
| which leads to gridlock on the transport mechanisms and a
| completely avoidable collective waste of time, is a
| pretty cruel farce imposed on the workforce. For most
| jobs, a no-commute situation is pretty great and
| staggered work start times would be very helpful for
| those jobs that require (edited) in-office presence.
| vel0city wrote:
| 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.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Most cities are less dense today because they got re-
| modeled to be more car friendly in the 60ies and 70ies.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| samatman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This response is dripping with contempt.
| uoaei wrote:
| I'm only responding in kind. People ought to recognize
| how they come across in discourse, for the purposes of
| good faith discussion all around. What better way than to
| hold up a mirror?
|
| Or do we expect egos to be so domineering that they
| cannot recognize their own behavior in the reflection?
|
| I don't think it's imperative to disguise contempt for
| those who are obviously not engaging in good faith.
| surfaceofthesun wrote:
| Adding to the point: After all of that, it's not like driving
| in/around LA is fun.
| intrasight wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Converted to light rail in the mid 80s
| greenn wrote:
| 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).
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| missedthecue wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| tannedNerd wrote:
| 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?
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| m0llusk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| deepdriver wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > It isn't racist or classist to hate meth smoke blown in
| your face
|
| Cases of crime on public transit are a symptom of the lack
| of investment in them.
| deepdriver wrote:
| Lack of investment in metro cops, maybe. By every other
| metric, American mass transit costs more and
| underperforms compared to European and Asian systems:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-26/the-u-
| s-g...
| autoexec wrote:
| Just like with healthcare and internet service, America
| often pays a lot more while getting a lot less. Just
| because America paid more for its mass transit doesn't
| mean they were better designed, more pleasant to ride on,
| or that those system are well maintained. It could also
| mean things like our public transportation had to cover
| more ground, that unique challenges in geography
| increased expenses, that politicians were wasting tax
| payer money in exchange for kickbacks and favors (no-bid
| contracts), or companies were simply overcharging
| Americans for the work.
|
| Real, meaningful investment in infrastructure and
| improvements to the environments people spend their time
| in can do a hell of a lot more to prevent crime than cops
| do. There is a lot of research to support this. I don't
| doubt that if we invested more in making our mass transit
| systems better and more enjoyable to use crime rates
| would drop.
|
| Here's a start if you want more information on the
| impacts of our environments on crime:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hKWLY1lZrs
|
| https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/cut-philly-
| shootings-93-p...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUAuuJ-hGPI
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zktWPAZ6Es
|
| https://www.manhattan-institute.org/cleaning-up-vacant-
| lots-...
| deepdriver wrote:
| Planting trees is not a serious solution to gun violence
| or mass transit safety.
|
| The correlation between increased, _properly-utilized_
| police presence and a decrease in crime is one of the
| most well-researched, replicable, and best-understood
| conclusions of social science.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Planting trees is not a serious solution to gun
| violence or mass transit safety.
|
| again, lots of research would disagree with you. It
| absolutely does work. On the other hand, more and more
| cops doesn't always do the job.
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/us/police-crime.html)
|
| I've been on mass transit in a few countries now, and I
| saw more police presence in the US than anywhere else,
| but it never made me feel any safer and somehow other
| countries with better, cleaner, public transit systems
| don't have the kinds of crime problems the US has.
|
| You want enough police around so that they can respond
| when there is a problem, but not so much that the
| environment becomes oppressive.
|
| I'd rather reduce crime by improving the public
| transpiration system and surrounding neighborhoods than
| waste tax payer money on having cops sitting around all
| day on trains and subway cars.
| t-3 wrote:
| Counterpoint: Detroit. It's jam-packed with trees and gun
| violence. Maybe planting trees where they weren't
| correlates with improvement, but I seriously doubt trees
| are causal to peace.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I sincerely wonder what mechanism makes planting trees
| reduce crime more effectively than increased policing. If
| true, that lends credence to Broken Windows Theory, no?
| krallja wrote:
| some plausible theories:
|
| * policing is broken, investing in communities works
| better than destroying communities via mass incarceration
| and the criminalization of existence.
|
| * trees provide shade, lowering air temperature. hot
| people act crazier.
|
| * being around nature (even urban nature) improves mental
| health, and increases peoples' sense of well-being,
| making them less likely to do crimes.
| autoexec wrote:
| The main problem I have with Broken Windows Theory is
| that rather than being used to improve the environments
| (fixing the broken windows) it's often used to justify
| flooding the streets with police and aggressively
| harassing people. It identifies the source of the problem
| (the run down areas of a city), but then ignores it
| because overaggressive policing is an easier sell than
| spending that money improving the living environments of
| "the wrong kinds of people". Making those spaces into
| more oppressive environments won't tend to do much to
| solve the crime problem because it was an oppressive
| environment that caused the problem in the first place.
|
| Cleaning up and maintaining the run down areas
| communicates to everyone that the area and the people
| living in it have value. People start to expect more from
| the area and from each other. It also makes those spaces
| less attractive to people looking to cause trouble and
| more attractive to businesses and to people from outside
| of that community. The health and mental well-being of
| the community improves and so does their economy.
| Shooting jaywalkers and setting up stop and frisk
| checkpoints just makes everyone feel like criminals and
| sure enough that's what you get.
|
| Broken Windows Theory isn't wrong, but Broken Windows
| Policing is a problem because what these areas need
| aren't just police, but rather urban developers,
| landscapers, and construction crews. Cities that clean
| up, improve, and maintain the run down parts of town see
| crime drop. Cities that simply use run down areas to
| designate "problem populations" and send in the police
| harass those communities over every possible minor
| infraction don't get those kinds of results.
| deepdriver wrote:
| Broken windows policing isn't necessarily the same as
| stop-and-frisk, although they are sometimes related:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-
| poli...
| autoexec wrote:
| True, stop and frisk is just one of many ways broken
| windows policing can aggressively target the people, when
| what's actually needed is to target the environment.
| Policing has a role in cleaning up run down areas, but
| it's a small one compared to the infrastructure, urban
| planning, and landscaping improvements needed to reduce
| crime. Too much/aggressive policing is just another
| broken window that needs fixing. It signifies that the
| area is a bad part of town and sets that area apart from
| the nicer parts of the city.
| namesbc wrote:
| I ride public transit everyday. You are way safer on BART
| than you are in a car on the freeway. Your fear mongering
| is just not based in reality.
| achenatx wrote:
| kids are much safer in school than they are in a car or
| at home, yet parents are incredibly fearful of school
| shootings.
|
| What makes people afraid is driven by the media, not by
| statistics.
| orionion wrote:
| BART fares to increase July 1, 2022
| https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220614
|
| Rich liberals choo choo train. Some of those BART routes
| cost $13.00 one way? At least Rosa Parks could afford a
| seat on the back of the bus.
|
| The Clipper Start card offers only a 20% discount on BART
| to those below 200% of the Federal Poverty level.
|
| Why is it not a free pass? Hey Google, Facebook, Twitter,
| Apple could you help foot the bill for the poor whose
| data you exploit?
| deepdriver wrote:
| My public transit experience is mostly DC and New York.
| The few times I've ridden BART, cleanliness was
| nonexistent (fabric seats were not the best design
| choice!) and safety was at best questionable. Some
| examples from the news:
|
| https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/asian-woman-attacked-
| on-...
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/drug-users-san-
| fra...
|
| https://abc7news.com/bart-robberies-teens-rob-oakland-
| train-...
|
| The chance of an incident on any given day is low, but
| palpable. When it happens to somenone else, it happens
| right in your face with no physical separation. Maybe
| that's why many choose to drive instead, despite the
| higher actual risk of accident per mile. That in itself
| is a tragedy, but people want the perception of safety
| just as much as safety by-the-numbers. Hygiene and
| comfort matter too.
| 7speter wrote:
| >cleanliness was nonexistent (fabric seats were not the
| best design choice!)
|
| I'm a New Yorker and before you say you think I want to
| do away with cars, I think the ideal is a combination of
| mass transit and private vehicle ownership if you need
| it. That being said, my mind is always amazed at how
| clean and well maintained the DC Metro seems to remain.
| The cars have cloth seats! But the trains are always
| clean! New Yorkers were so surprised in 2020 when city
| subway stations got regular bleachdowns. It humors me to
| no end.
| deepdriver wrote:
| I love the DC Metro for all the reasons you list. That's
| what made its recent missteps all the more frustrating.
| The Yellow Line which serves Reagan National Airport will
| shut down for maintenance soon for eight (8!) months,
| even after it was shut down all summer in 2019.
| Meanwhile, the new 7000 series cars continue to have
| serious safety problems, which are not well-understood
| but may be inherent to their design. They've just
| recently been brought back into service following a
| serious derailment last year.
|
| This is to say nothing of the dysfunction and alleged
| racism in the WMATA union, or public safety on the
| trains, which while generally still good has lately
| deteriorated. Masking was never enforced during the
| height of COVID. Buses are and have always been worse. I
| hate driving in the DC area, but Metro seems like they're
| doing their very best to keep me on the road.
|
| "Unsuck DC Metro" used to be my go-to source for Metro
| reporting. Sadly, the man behind that account passed away
| last week:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/19/matt
| -hi...
| gumby wrote:
| I remember the NYC subways in the 1980s (which wasn't as
| bad as the 1970s). BART, today's NYC subways etc are clean
| and safe by comparison. I love them, where they work.
|
| Melbourne still has a thriving and beloved streetcar
| system.
| adolph wrote:
| 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...
| rch wrote:
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Perhaps if you have the << choice >> for public transit.
|
| What we saw in toronto for example during Covid is that
| ridership dropped in higher income neighborhood (especially
| the ones that have access to the subway). The highest
| ridership lines were bus routes in low income
| neighbourhood, where people still had to go to work as some
| type of essential workers and did not have a car.
|
| Let's not make a blanket statement that transit is for the
| rich, the reality is that the rich takes it when it gets
| good enough but they always have other choices. Some people
| just don't have that choice and transit is their only way
| to go to work, that's why it's essential to the economy.
| throw0101a wrote:
| So the rich people of Toronto first wanted picket fences
| and built the inner-suburbs, and drove everywhere, plus
| forced the elimination of transit payment zones.
|
| And now the rich are living more in Old Toronto and the
| poor(er) folks are forced to the inner-suburbs where the
| design does not condone efficient transit.
| rch wrote:
| I wouldn't say transit is for the wealthy... Only that
| that transit should be more ubiquitous within population
| centers and widespread regionally, with high enough
| frequency to be a workable option for everyone.
| hammock wrote:
| > 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?
| [deleted]
| raylad wrote:
| 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
| rmason wrote:
| 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.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| 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.
| 7speter wrote:
| >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.
| rmason wrote:
| Except the government math is kind of hazy. Google promised
| 1000 jobs in Ann Arbor and the deal helped get then Gov.
| Jennifer Granholm reelected, that's why politicians of both
| parties do it.
|
| But Google only ever created 500 jobs. Yet rarely if ever
| do any of these companies have to pay back part of the
| money if the jobs never get created.
| johnday wrote:
| If we give these tax dollars to General Motors, they could
| turn into anything! Even tax dollars!
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| 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?
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's _literally_ the plot of _Who Framed Roger Rabbit_ but
| somehow people think it 's gospel. Amusing.
| bogomipz wrote:
| Yes Cloverleaf Industries in the movie was based on the
| National City Lines.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| 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...
| rayiner wrote:
| So do cars! But many folks of the same folks who now
| consider cars regressive also consider baby drawers and
| bottle feeding to be regressive.
| TylerE wrote:
| But baby drawers were created precisely to decrease
| bottle feeding and encourage breastfeeding (and did).
| mmastrac wrote:
| Not sure why you are being downvoted. The baby-in-a-drawer
| sounds like a win for the mother, the baby, and the care
| physicians.
| bombcar wrote:
| People aren't reading it, but it's amusing that the
| solution was designed around _reducing_ the workload on
| the nurses, etc (now they just leave the baby in the room
| with mom in a rolling bassinet that the nurses check on
| /can roll out when necessary).
| TylerE wrote:
| Not so surprising for the time, since things like heart
| monitors and pulse/ox didn't exist, so they'd keep all
| the newborns in a communal nursery with nurses literally
| watching over them 24 hours a day.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Streetcars were also dangerous because you had to cross traffic
| to get to one:
| https://66.media.tumblr.com/36d0c242182fea08ecbac621504c2e96...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| sbf501 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jayd16 wrote:
| The paradox of 'unpopular because its overcrowded' always
| cracks me up.
| twoodfin wrote:
| 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.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| How can you not effectively scale a streetcar system when
| you can just attach more carts?
| Melatonic wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _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).
| riffic wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| bogomipz wrote:
| 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...
| heliophobicdude wrote:
| How can we undo these consequences and promote better public
| transportation options?
|
| I have some ideas about zoning...
| jrockway wrote:
| 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.
| lumost wrote:
| 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.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Changing federal funding rules for suburban
| infrastructure would be a big head start.
|
| That would be political suicide. The suburbs are the chief
| battle ground. The big difference between 2016 and 2020
| were the suburbs.
| lumost wrote:
| Incentivizing dense(r) suburbs is something that could be
| messaged in a few different ways. In the US, low-density
| suburbs are only supported by federal funds for
| infrastructure expansion. If the federal government
| simply chose to not fund expansions that decreased
| density then local governments might take on the
| political burden of selling density increasing
| investments.
| WebbWeaver wrote:
| The suburbs are subsidized by banks and could be wiped
| out because many cant buy a house anyway.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| Excellent documentary about this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_for_a_Ride
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Another interesting documentary:
| https://www.pbs.org/video/oregon-experience-streetcar-city/
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