Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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I researched this one pretty deeply once, and the full story was a bit more complicated than at surface level:

- Streetcars of the time were very uneconomical and surprisingly dangerous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tram_accidents They were not very comparable to modern light rail.

- Upgrading/modernizing them would not have been as straightforward as people would think. Think SF's cable cars - everything was small scale, regional, and not-interoperable.

- GM et al establishing a trust was not about killing public transit per se, but locking in a profitable bus manufacturing and routes. Transit was still seen as a lucrative industry after the war.

- Regardless of the trusts, most cities (even in Europe) moved to buses anyway because the lower operating costs, larger number of riders, more flexible routing, and safety issues.

So while they did some shady crap, the idea that we would all be living in dense cities riding subways would it not be for some GM executives somewhere is probably not realistic.

I guess the big question here is what makes the USofA so poor at delivering functional public transport?

It's not like tram | streetcar services can't be built to run safely an profitably.

    Trams have operated continuously in Melbourne since 1885 ...

    The tramway network is centred around the Melbourne central business district (CBD) and consists of approximately 1,700 tram stops across 24 routes.

    It is the largest operational urban tram network in the world and one of the most used,[3] with more than 500 trams and 250 kilometres (160 miles) of double tram track.

    It served a patronage of 206 million over the year 2017-2018.

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

Hybrid public transport with trains | trams for major hub routing with buses fanning out from stations work well about the globe.

One notable feature of the US was the post war spread of tying personal freedom to car ownership and then to bigger and bigger cars.

> I guess the big question here is what makes the USofA so poor at delivering functional public transport?

There are I think lots of reasons, but the most salient right now is I think a combination of two reasons. The first is that a lot of public transit enthusiasm is driven by nostalgia for "the good old days" of transit, without much serious analysis as to why those transit systems failed (e.g., blaming GM for killing streetcars rather than realizing they were largely unable to afford maintenance of their systems). And the second is that the US as a whole seems unable or unwilling to look to foreign countries to study examples of successful transit systems, and push for innovations in the past 100 years of transit to be brought to US transit systems.

Racism was blamed for helping killed Atlanta's streetcars network, as well as automobiles increasingly blocking the right of ways of trams.

Well, at the time busses and highways were the hot new thing, and the US was celebrated for their massive investment in "progress".

It's only in modern hindsight that the cities who stuck with their old things and improved on them over time got the last laugh.

Melbourne, at the time trams were laid, was a rich city at the forefront of future technology, awash with money from the Victorian Goldfields.

Before Hollywood Melbourne had the worlds single largest film production studio, turning out 300 films in 18 years and supporting an ecology of smaller film producers and the first feature length film ( before the US KKK offering ).

Trams were bleeding edge tech, laid out with foresight, and well maintained and extended over a century.

With the post 1970s example of the Koch Brother funded US think tanks pushing fuel consumption and freedom, blocking public transport development, and spinning climate FUD (yes, that early in history) the case might be made that the US public was led by vested media and { bribed | "generously supported" } public officials making policy decisions.

Digging back further would probably reveal that Standard Oil et al. were also investing big in shaping opinion.

It's wise to be wary of big money shaping opinion towards that which brings them more profit, it's not automatically a good thing to be guided by an opaque hand.

Are people any wiser today?

> It's not like tram | streetcar services can't be built to run safely an profitably.

During the era of private subways in New York City, regulations fixed the price of subway fares and it would be political suicide to change this. After decades of inflation, subway companies were forced to operate at a loss and eventually had to be taken over by the city.

> I guess the big question here is what makes the USofA so poor at delivering functional public transport?

I suspect that the reason the government is so inefficient at a lot of things is a curse of the country having to much money. Most of the smart people work in lucrative careers, and most of the very passionate people become entrepreneurs. The are politicians who are both, but they're incentivized to politick rather than write effective policy.

I don't like calling the dual contracts "the era of private subways". The history of the subway is such that every time it starts to look like it fits an ideological narrative (be it pro-capitalism or pro-socialism), you learn some detail that completely pulls the rug out.

Yes the price of a subway fare was originally fixed at 5 cents. But that wasn't some top down "regulation" imposed on otherwise successful private ventures by lefty city government. The reality is the subway was never wholly public or private. In modern terms it was built as a P3.

The city contracted to have the subway built, but it did not have all the funds it needed for this project, so part of the payment was that the contractors would be granted a monopoly to also run the service and collect the fares for 50 years. The 5 cent fare cap was one of the stipulations which the city put into the contracts so that the private companies couldn't turn around and gouge the public using their monopoly on something built with large public subsidy in the first place.

Among all the other problems: lack of imagination.

This especially comes up in discussions with those who do not live in the dense, Tier-1 cities of the USA.

The ability to imagine and envision what a dense, urban city serviced by public transit, connected to outlying communities via regional rail, in a way that is reliable, timely, and convenient is hard to come by if all you have ever experienced is the average sized, suburban sprawl in the USA. One example: I was talking to a transplant to Los Angeles, and they objected to removing some parking in favor of more transit stations because "where would all the customers park?" To which I responded, "there will be even more customers just walking in because of the nearby transit station." To which they accused me of outlandishness.

>To which they accused me of outlandishness.

The response to this is to do the math for them. Let's make modest assumptions. Crappy headways of 8 trains per hour (7.5 min), 800 people passing through per train, 1% of passengers getting on/off at that stop, simple 2 track system (trains in both directions). Multiplying it all out that comes out to 128 people per hour via the train line. If we generously assume that customers who arrive and park via car only stick around for an average of 20 min, each parking space is delivering 3 people per hour. Therefore ripping out up to 42 parking spots to put in a train line instead is worth it (and that's with assumptions generous to the car). 42 parking spaces is like what, one row of a parking lot?

For less analytical people, the simple visual version of the argument is this picture:

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_9F9_RUESS2E/S7tbclwxiPI/AAAAAAAACmw/uI...

Businesses run on cashflow.

If you take away parking spaces in 2024 to begin construction for a transit station that will open in 2028, it's easy for me to see the 2024 businessperson's objection.

> what makes the USofA so poor at delivering functional public transport?

Not a complete answer but it is notable that several subway systems (Istanbul, Bogota, Hanoi, Singapore) were built by Chinese companies. Countries which have a far less adversarial relationship with China.

Of course inviting the Chinese into America to dig holes under our cities would be a political nonstarter. So part of the answer is, we insist on building things ourselves and we’re not very good at it.

> Singapore

Singapore's MRT has been mostly built not by the Chinese, but by a mix of British, German, Japanese, Korean, and Singaporean construction companies, who generally employ construction workers and headmen from South Asia (specifically, Tamil Nadu and Bangladesh). Only the rolling stock has recently begun to move to CRRC Qingdao-Sifang, and even then these are limited to joint ventures with Japanese, French, and German companies. Many lines run Alstom, Bombardier, Kawasaki, Nippon-Sharyo, and Siemens rolling stock.

For the record, to see Singapore's real stance on geopolitics, look at its armed forces: all NATO standard, with HIMARS, Aster, Sidewinders, and a glut of F-16s, F-15Es (Singapore has its own designation, the F-15SG), and new orders for the F-35B.

>Of course inviting the Chinese into America to dig holes under our cities would be a political nonstarter. So part of the answer is, we insist on building things ourselves and we’re not very good at it.

I don't think this is really accurate. Surely Chinese companies didn't bring tens of thousands of Chinese laborers to dig subway tunnels in Turkey and Colombia; they hired local labor, right? The Chinese companies' jobs would have been with engineering and such.

If the US wanted, they could get Japanese companies to build subway systems. The Japanese have far longer experience at it than the Chinese, and there surely wouldn't be a political problem with Japanese companies doing such infrastructure projects under American cities as with Chinese companies. But I don't think Japanese companies would do much better than American companies. They'd still have to hire local labor and subcontractors and deal with all the crazy laws and regulations that exist in the US (and probably don't exist in Bogota). So it's not that "America isn't very good at building things", I think it's that America has intentionally made itself a place where it's very difficult and expensive for anyone to build things, no matter where the construction company is located.

Interesting tangent: it was largely Chinese workers who built the original US rail network.

It's worth noting that in Melbourne in 2016 19% of travel to work was via public transport.

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

There was a census in 2021 during Covid lockdowns. However, since then public transport use is 20% down on what it was previously.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/mar/13/new-no...

The Farebox recovery ratio in Melbourne was 30% pre Covid and the big rise in work from home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#Oceania

There were attempts to remove Melbourne's trams like what happened across other Australian states.

It was saved thanks to the work of Sir Robert Risson [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Risson#Legacy

Australia as a whole is largely forced to hug the eastern coast of the country. 70% of the country is arid desert, so the population is scattered linearly, which is actually quite perfect for rail based transport.

The population distribution of the U.S. is far more spread out, so to build enough rail or bus lines to make it so that you don't have to walk more than a quarter mile to a station is impractical for all but the densest cities or denses parts of urban corridors.

Sydney is a large dense city surrounded by suburbs, Melbourne the same, Brisbane kind of but different, ditto Perth.

Thats most of the population of Australia right there, in cities, not desert.

What works for cities in Australia could just as easily work in US cities - th topic is urban transport, not intercity transport.

This is a story about urban public transit, not inter-city rail. The size of the country or spread between cities is not really relevant.

(And the low density of post-war American city sprawl is a consequence of our car-based urban planning, not the cause of it.)

And yet, the US had succeeded in building that dense, interconnected network of rail lines and stations by 1930.

Followup: Here is an animated map showing the process of un-building enough rail. It starts at 1962, which was itself already past the peak for passenger rail frequency.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/54/a9/f0/54a9f0a4593b55fee838...

To that last note, it is always astounding just how costly subway systems are. I am amazed any of them make it to completion simply because the up front cost is so high. But once they are in, the improvement to transport standards in the system is wonderful.

for example , in my home town we are currently spending $9-11 billion to make a 9KM - 5 station tunnel link. A big investment but a good long term solution.

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

I don't know how it is in Melbourne, but in the US, subways are significantly more expensive to build per-kilometer than in Europe.

Also, the most famous example of streetcars that were "killed" by GM was the Pacific Electric cars in the LA metro area. These weren't really public transit but were owned by a company that also owned land for development. They built the streetcar networks to raise the value of the land (because in the early 20th century before widespread car ownership, people needed a way out to the land whether it was housing or commercial). Once the land was sold and developed, there wasn't much point in a company investing money in the system and it began to decay. I have an old LA guidebook from the 1930s and it even suggests avoiding the streetcars and taking a taxi instead because of the streetcar system's unreliability.

It’s not a Michelin guide by any means is it? Or otherwise provided by a party with a conflict of interest.

It's actually one of the FWP American Guides -- this was a New Deal US government program to employ unemployed writers and journalists to create a series of travel guides in the late 1930s. I have collected several from used book stores and they are fun to compare with current books to see what things of interest are still there after nearly a century.

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

Neat! Never heard of this.

Cable cars are a poor and misleading analogy for interoperability -- that is truly a difficult, one of a kind system, with significant mechanical and switching limitations that don't apply to streetcar systems.

For streetcar systems, by contrast, most cities used the standard PCC car from the mid-30s onward, with minor variations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCC_streetcar

As for dangerous? During the multi-decade period in question, your link lists two accidents in the US. One is the crash of a gasoline tanker that also destroyed five buildings, which I don't think we can lay at the feet of the streetcar itself.

The reason there was a federal streetcar design in the first place was because of the well documented need for standardized equipment by that point.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Electric_Railways_Co...

By the 1920s, the tracks for many streetcars and interurbans were already being dismantled because there was no perceived utility to them - even for future rail systems. Very few of them would have been capable of even supporting the weight of a PCC streetcar.

As for the danger, besides the well-publicized disasters, fatalities and accidents involving trolleys was a very well perceived danger of the time:

https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-grim-reality-of-troll...

If you really want to summarize the situation quickly:

GM et al did conspire to monopolize the bus industry. They didn't conspire to destroy streetcar lines: those were already largely failing due to decades of underinvestment.

Given that bus transit themselves has now fallen (especially in the US) into decline because of persistent underinvestment, there's been a resurgence of romantic attachment to streetcars, and so the conspiracy has been transformed in popular imagination into a more sinister conspiracy than ever actually existed.

The decades of underinvestment were driven by the fact that they were money losing operations, on whole.

I lived in Europe back in the '80s, and streetcars were quite common at the time. I spent at least as much time on them as I did on buses. (Whether it's different now, I don't know.)

Were streetcars more or less dangerous than cars? The accident and death rate was probably a lot lower than cars although I'm not sure, maybe during that era cars were slower.

Yeah the problem in my opinion mostly lies in the fact that so much of the United States is quite habitable and real estate is (and especially 70-100 years ago) relatively plentiful. Without a forcing function to live in a dense city people with families tend to opt to live on a piece of land they own with a nice house. It's a major source of wealth for Americans as well.

There's definitely major tradeoffs with the suburban lifestyle. I do think dynamic cities with dense urban cores and lots of foot traffic and clean public transport are really fun and interesting, but I can also see the appeal of carving out your own slice of the American dream as well.

Regardless of how dangerous they actually were, there was a public perception that they were rickety death traps that hit pedestrians and made little old ladies run and jump to get on.

but I can also see the appeal of carving out your own slice of the American dream as well.

Meh, been there, done that, traded the detached house for a townhouse in a denser area as soon as I could. Now I park mu car 4-5 days/week and walk/cycle instead.

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