It is not mentioned in "Fighting Traffic", which would be quite an oversight!
It is not mentioned in "Fighting Traffic", which would be quite an oversight!
"From the first discoveries, teamsters, lashing their horses, had clogged the roads of the Oil Regions with their loads of barrels. They were more than just a physical bottleneck. Holding a monopoly position, they charged exorbitant rates; it cost more to move a barrel over a few miles of muddy road to a railway stop than to transport it by rail from western Pennsylvania all the way to New York. The teamsters’ stranglehold on transportation led to an ingenious effort to develop an alternative—transportation by pipeline."
Interestingly, the Teamsters (IBT) represents a lot of oil pipeline workers today.
https://teamster.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/6617pipeline...
Oil was solely a lighting product at this point. The Teamsters were clearly not thinking 70 years into the future to stop automobiles. But I think the "monopoly" part of the quote is somewhat germain, even if it's just opinion of the author.