General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars”
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Comments on “General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars” "I've been advertising it widely ... I'm distributing Xerox copies to anyone who'll read it." Melvin Webber, Professor Emeritus of Planning, University of California, Berkeley. "I have long felt the need for such a paper." Professor John Kain, Chairman of the Economics Department at Harvard University. "Congratulations. It belongs on the syllabi of urban transportation courses." Professor Peter Gordon, School of Urban Planning, USC. "Thoroughly researched and superbly written." Professor Louis Rose, Dept. of Economics, University of Hawaii. "We owe you a great deal for carefully documenting the real history of these events." Dr. Alan E. Pisarski, author of "Commuting in America." “… an excellent retrospective evaluation of the misrepresentations in the Snell Report … a sound historical perspective on the decline of the streetcar …” Dr. George W. Hilton, Professor Emeritus of Economics, UCLA. "Slater has debunked at least one article of faith by demonstrating that the streetcar, like the horse car it replaced, was a victim of progress and not of corporate greed." Wendell Cox, Wendell Cox Consultancy, international transportation consultant. "I've assigned it for student reading." Martin Wachs, Chair, School of Urban and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley “… a superb piece on the decline of the trolleys.” Peter Samuel, Editor, Tollroads magazine. GENERAL MOTORS AND THE DEMISE OF STREETCARS General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars In February 1974, Bradford Snell, a young government attorney, helped create the myth that General Motors caused the demise of America's streetcar system and that without GM's interference streetcars would be alive and well today. GM may have conspired with others to sell more of their automotive products to transporta- tion companies, but that is irrelevant to his contention that GM helped replace streetcars with economically inferior buses. That they had done—just as they had earlier sought to replace the horse and buggy with the automobile. The issue is whether or not the buses that replaced the electric streetcars were economically superior. Without GM's interference would the United States today have a viable streetcar system? This article makes the case that, GM or not, under a less onerous regulatory environment, buses would have replaced streetcars even ear- lier than they actually did. by Cliff Slater In August 1996, public televi- for the Arts, the Corporation for sion stations aired Taken for a Public Broadcasting, a consortium of Ride, a documentary that told four major public television stations how once upon a time... including WGBH/Boston and, of I 2 course, "viewers like you." ...smooth, clean, and comfortable Leading public television executives streetcars ruled America's cities. How—and, significantly, why—America's viable public around the country reviewed it ahead of transit system vanished...a dystopian night- the airing and put their national reputa- mare that didn't have to happen...a chilling tions behind it. National newspapers commentary on GM's infamous slogan. picked up the press release that preceded What's good for General Motors is good for the showing and retold the story verba- America.1 tim on their front pages.3 Three years earlier PBS had aired another documen- This documentary about the de- tary covering the same materials.4 The struction of the streetcar lines was story even formed the core plot of the funded by the National Endowment 1988 movie Who © Transportation Quarterly, Vol. 51. No. 3 Summer 1997 (45-66) 1997 Eno Transportation Foundation. Inc., Lansdowne, Virginia 45 TRANSPORTATION QUARTERLY Framed Roger Rabbit? which told of a Mayor Alioto, himself a nationally sinister plot to buy out Los Angeles' two prominent antitrust attorney, congratu- streetcar lines in order to dismantle lated Snell on the "excellence" of his them. "very fine monograph." Alioto testified The Charges Against GM that, "General Motors and the automo- bile industry generally exhibit a kind of The story began in 1974 when Snell, monopoly evil" and that GM "has car- a newly hired antitrust attorney for the ried on a deliberate concerted action U.S. Senate, stated that the government with the oil companies and tire compa- had criminally charged "...General Mo- nies...for the purpose of destroying a tors and allied highway interests for vital form of competition; namely, elec- their involvement in the destruction of tric rapid transit."10 100 electric rail...systems... throughout Mayor Alioto also testified that if the the country."5 San Francisco Bay Area Key System Snell also noted that a "federal jury had "not been uprooted" a transbay convicted GM of having criminally con- BART tunnel would have been unneces- spired with...others to replace electric sary.11 transportation with gas- or diesel- Mayor Bradley testified in absentia powered buses."6 in the same vein. GM, through its He further claimed that the former American City Lines and Pacific City streetcar systems had been "vastly supe- Lines affiliates, "scrapped" the Pacific rior in terms of speed and comfort7 to Electric and Los Angeles streetcar sys- the GM buses that replaced them and tems to "motorize" Los Angeles. After that: GM was through, the "electric train sys- 12 The noisy, foul-smelling buses tem was totally destroyed." All this caught the imagination of the turned earlier patrons of the high- 13 speed rail systems away from public press and the public. That it was utter transit, and, in effect, sold millions of nonsense would take careful explaining private automobiles...General Mo- and even then the analytical rebuttal tors' destruction of electric transit would never make the headlines the way systems across the country left mil- the original charges did. lions of urban residents without an Believers ignored the debunking of attractive alternative to automotive 8 Snell's argument during the Senate hear- travel. ings. The testimony of UCLA's Profes- Snell had been a scholar with the sor George Hilton, a former chair of the Brookings Institution and an attorney president's task force on transportation with Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro, the policy, the Smithsonian's acting curator prestigious San Francisco law firm. His of rail transportation, and one of the na- research had been funded by the Stern tion's most respected transportation au- Fund,9 a public policy group currently thorities was highly critical of Snell. It controlled by Ralph Nader's Public Citi- was particularly significant since Hil- zen organization. ton's The Electric Interurban Railways Snell's highly detailed testimony was in America was the most important followed by those of Mayor Thomas scholarly work cited by Snell.14 Hilton Bradley of Los Angeles and Mayor Jo- testified at the seph L. Alioto of San Francisco. 46 GENERAL MOTORS AND THE DEMISE OF STREETCARS time that parts of the Snell report were wreck electric transportation"24 and that "so completely oversimplified that it is the "conspiracy" was "much more seri- difficult to take seriously." At the con- ous than Watergate...."25 clusion of his lengthy testimony, Hilton Microsoft, through its highly popular emphasized, "I haven't exhausted the Bookshelf CD-ROM, says GM was misrepresentations in [Snell's] report."15 "...convicted of criminal conspiracy to Believers have also ignored the de- replace electric transit lines with gaso- bunking by U.S. Federal Transit Ad- line or diesel buses."26 Microsoft makes ministration policy analyst, Brian innumerable references to "criminal Cudahy,16 Los Angeles historian Scott conspiracy conviction" whenever the Bottles,17 and even the pro-rail New decline of streetcars or interurban rail Electric Railway Journal,18 among lines is addressed. many others. They have also ignored the writings of virtually every single aca- The Myth demic transportation economist who This is the myth that is now lodged believes that the replacement of street- deep in American public transportation cars by buses was a normal economic folklore: GM conspired to destroy the event. streetcar systems that once ran quietly People still want to believe that GM and efficiently in American cities. "had assiduously worked toward the GM had actually been convicted of 19 systematic extermination" of street- conspiring with others in the automotive 20 cars—even some serious researchers. industry "to monopolize the sale of sup- And so the Snell-generated myth keeps plies used by the local transportation being passed along. As one writer com- companies controlled by the City Lines mented recently, "Conspiracy theories defendants."27 That is a far cry from are seductive—even, it seems, to the conspiring to wreck economically viable 21 highly credentialed." transit systems. One can understand an antibusiness But the story now seems as unstop- 22 Tom Hayden believing the conspiracy pable as H. L. Mencken's Bathtub Hoax, idea, but less so are the responses of a tongue-in-cheek editorial piece written respected journalists like Jonathan as "a burlesque history of the bathtub" Kwitny and Nicholas Von Hoffman. about the first real bathtub being in- Kwitny wrote: vented in 1842 in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was total fiction but it took on a life of In many places, mass transit didn't its own that, try as he might, Mencken just die—it was mur- was never able to kill.28 The streetcar dered....Electrified trains and track- conspiracy is just such a myth. less trolleys are not only cheaper to It is important that we understand the run than automobiles, they are sub- Snell incident. Mencken's Bathtub Hoax stantially cheaper to run than diesel was amusing but did no harm. The Snell buses. Riders tend to prefer them to incident, on the other hand, was damag- buses...what the transit conspirators did was destroy mass transit systems ing to a full understanding of the devel- that today could benefit millions of opment of urban transportation.