Before car was king

Radio National, from Australia's ABC, has a great program on the struggle between streetcars and automobiles.

At one time, streetcars (or trams as they were known in some other countries) dominated the roads. The show noted It's not very well known, especially when people think about the US and think about this pre-eminent car culture that at one time in the early 1920s, one person in ten had an automobile in the US and everyone else used rail, and particularly in the cities, everyone used street rail or streetcars.

What's most interesting is that the documentary focused the city of Los Angeles.

So how did a US city that once had one of the most extensive rail networks in the world become synonymous with the car culture, bad air and traffic gridlock?

What happened was a conspiracy.

National City Lines was a company that was basically formed with the money from General Motors; it was owned and ostensibly led by a group of three brothers from northern Minnesota that had a small bus company, but essentially the money came from General Motors, and General Motors subsidiaries. It began in the mid-'30s, 1935, they began buying up systems in the Midwest and in the southeast. Then more systems came for sale and General Motors pulled in some other companies to help fund this venture. They went to Standard Oil, California, Phillips Petroleum, Firestone Tyre, Mack Truck, and pretty soon these companies were investing in buying up streetcar systems through the Midwest and coming out into the west

Essentially, all the companies that had an interest in promoting the car culture conspired to buy up the streetcar systems and rip them up. GM produced motorcars which ran on oil (trams used electricity) and used rubber tires. Mack produced trucks, which now transport most of the nation's freight... in contrast to the 19th and early 20th centuries when freight was hauled by, you guessed it, rail.

In the late 1940s, GM and its partners were actually convicted of criminal conspiracy but were fined a derisory $5000 and GM executives were fined a token $1. Hardly a disincentive to future conspirators.

But by then, the damage was already done and the car culture quickly suffocated the country, both metaphorically and, in places like Los Angeles, literally too.

Streetcars ran on electricty. Had they been maintained, research might well have led to technological advancements that would have led to mass produced electric-powered vehicles.

Instead, research money went elsewhere with nefarious consequences. Some bad. Some really bad. Others even worse.