Through the first half of the 20th century Los Angeles had one of the best public transport systems in the world with an electric street car network. Then a company named National City Lines formed to shape future transport for Los Angeles Now it is just a maze of multi lane fly overs, cross unders and the city has one of the worst pollution ratings in the US.
Ohh by the way, the companies which formed National City Lines included General Motors, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Trucks, and other companies who stood to benefit from getting rid of the electrified public transport system.
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Interesting theory but it's been proven false:
"There's this widespread conspiracy theory that the streetcars were bought up by a company
National City Lines, which was effectively controlled by GM, so that they could be torn up and converted into bus lines," says
Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of
Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.
But that's not the full story, he says. "By the time National City Lines bought up these streetcar companies, they were already bankrupt."
"The real reasons for the streetcar's demise are much less nefarious than a GM-driven conspiracy — they include gridlock and city rules that kept fares artificially low — but they're fascinating in their own right, and if you're a transit fan, they're even more frustrating," writes Stromberg.
The real problem was that once cars appeared on the road, they could drive on streetcar tracks — and the streetcars could no longer operate efficiently. "Once just 10 percent or so of people were driving, the tracks were so crowded that [the streetcars] weren't making their schedules," Norton says.
While it's true that National City continued ripping up lines and replacing them with buses — and that, long-term, GM benefited from the decline of mass transit — it's tough to argue that National City killed the streetcar on its own. Streetcar systems went bankrupt and were dismantled in virtually every metro area in the United States, and National City was only involved in about 10 percent of cases.
