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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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)

> 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

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.

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.

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.

> 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)

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most cities are less dense today because they got re-modeled to be more car friendly in the 60ies and 70ies.

and way bigger. Those cities are mostly new, relatively seen, the population exploded not so long ago. Medieval cities were small towns in comparison.

The big part though is the urban core existed hundreds before many US cities even had a name. Sure, Munich's borders looked very different 800 years ago, but the rest of the city largely continued to expand and rebuild around that core central idea. Dallas literally didn't exist until the 1850s, and at that point it was essentially just a train stop and a place to load and unload small barges on the small river. By 1850 Munich was definitely a large city with an obvious urban area. Dallas wouldn't even approach something like Munich until well into the 1900s, well into the oil boom and it grew further from just oil fields.

Also it's practically always been cheaper to own and operate an automobile in the US compared to most of Europe. We're really only starting to get to the point where US people are actually evaluating if driving a car is really worth it, if the US had high oil prices since the 1970s oil shocks I imagine our current cities would look a lot different.

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.

I think those systems are undergoing continuous change, so change is always possible. I also don't think that the area I lived in grew up in fact designed before the ubiquity of cars (I grew up suburban but not rural), although I currently live in the old-city of a small student town, since I want to live more urban. But yeah, it's easier if there's a structure suited to public transit (if the suburban towns have a "core" that's connected by rail to the city and nut just evenly spread out, or enough density anyway etc.).

But I originally just wanted to get at that public transportation not a myth, not forced on people, but preferred by many all over the world.

They’re under continuous incremental change. The problem is that infrastructure has momentum that lasts centuries. The infrastructure that works well is the infrastructure that people want to use and it’s the infrastructure that people want to invest in, and people make their living decisions around the current state.

US suburbs are often sprawled out enough that they aren’t really walkable. There’s a millennia of incremental changes that you’d have to make to an area like Phoenix to make it look anything like a walkable dense city.

I lived in a country with amazing public transport - clean, on-time, accessible everywhere.

What did people do who made a lot of money? Buy a car.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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