General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

>"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...

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/334/573.html

You might be correct, but it is very simplistic view of history to attribute change to the will of the people. Democracy is not such a driving force for change as to become the single factor for it. Historically corporate interests has weight far higher as a driving force (as evidenced by our current global warming crisis; but notable exceptions include e.g. the new deal).

Sometimes the will of the people might align with corporate interest, and that may have been the case here. But I would argue then that is only a bonus for the politician which will reap the returning votes. The main point of the change was first and foremost to serve the interest of the corporation which funded the campaigns.

Watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4

People didn't have air conditioning in their cars back then, so their cars were hot and cold.

People had very rough suspension in cars back then too, I don't think the ride would've been dramatically better.

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.

Streetcars (and buses) work best on dedicated or semi-dedicated routes. The problem with their reliability, in the case you describe, is the cars that are creating the traffic.

Is it that bad? No. They lay the tracks on top of rubber now so the vibrations are not that terrible.

Does it make some noise and can you feel the house shake a bit ? Yes.

Do I prefer it from the isolationist culture of cars, the emissions, the traffic and the everything else that comes with it? 100% yes.

Commute from my home to the office was about 12 minutes, and the schedule was almost always to the minute, except several days in a year when failures or traffic jams messed things up (in Moscow trams has their own lane most of the time).

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_bat...

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.

Instead they where largely replaced with busses which where initially more expensive, but also more flexible.

> 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.

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.

Its not like this would have been a zero car world, but a more even split of investment would have yielded better results.

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.

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.

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?

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

And people hate buses.

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.