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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

There's an old conspiracy, although its accuracy is debatable, google the "General Motors streetcar conspiracy." Another potential possibility is many cities scrapped their streetcars for spare metal during WWII. Along with that, market forces and lobbying and policy by people like Robert Moses, the current form of America was created.

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These things all happened. But a huge part is simply that people live in suburbs built at a time when people could afford cars. So they did. Just as their grandparents moved out to districts served by streetcars as soon as they could, for the same reasons -- affordable floor area, cleaner air, less noise.

The central part of most EU cities is pre-1914, when cars were a curiosity. And for decades after that, cars were nowhere near as affordable to citizens as they were in the US, because the US was just much richer in (say) 1960.

They lost court cases over it, I don't think it is fair to call its accuracy debatable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

The debatable aspect is how much of an impact it had. Many other cities without a similar conspiracy also got rid of their streetcars.

The veracity of the story notwithstanding, the core of the conspiracy, though, was to push buses over streetcars, not cars.

...Because (per the conspiracy) the manufacturers of cars knew that busses were unpleasant to ride in (compared to trolley cars) and that most people would prefer to own a car over riding in one.

The market forces element is the one that people tend to ignore in these types of conversations. Americans couldn't wait to move out to the suburbs.

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