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Did GM really kill the streetcar in Los Angeles?
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Judge Doom’s plan to buy out LA’s streetcar system and build freeways is not fiction, or not totally fiction. It’s based on a US Senate report in 1974 that detailed General Motors’ takeover of the Pacific Electric Railroad, the company that ran Los Angeles’ streetcars. GM replaced the streetcars with buses and the removal of the streetcars paved the way for LA’s famous freeways. That’s the story, anyway. But did it really happen that way? What’s the real story?
A. Adler, Sy. "The Transformation of the Pacific Electric Railway: Bradford Snell, Roger Rabbit, and the Politics of Transportation in Los Angeles." Urban Affairs Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1991): 51-86.
B. US Census
C.Jackson, Kenneth. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press.
D. Ibid.
E. M. Wachs, Chapter 5. "The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles: Images of Past Policy and Future Prospects" in Allen J. Scott and Edward Soja, eds., The City: Los Angeles And Urban Theory At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 106-159.
F. Ibid.
G. The Electric Railway Historical Association. www.erha.org/la...
H. www.1134.org/st...
Produced in sunny, Sacramento, California.
For those interested, I filmed this at the Red Car Museum in Seal Beach, California. The entire museum is just the single red car, but it's still pretty cool to check out if you happen to be in the LA area. It's also close to the beach.
Red car? I thought Bob Hoskins was saying 'Rent' car! Like you're renting the use of this car... in a way. I'm going to blame your funny American accents.
The story/myth was at least evil enough, it could have been true .. it has some Monsanto smell to it.
National City Lines DID keep some profitable streetcar lines in service in L.A., even bought new equipment, and they weren't shut down until the public transit agency took over. Also, Pacific Electric interurban lines were separate from Los Angeles Railway which was the city system. National City Lines was not involved in Pacific Electric.
Henry Ford's and Rudolph Diesel's first engines ran off of refined hemp seed oil.
The real reason we drill for oil is to supply the pharmaceutical industry (aka Big Pharma) with millions of barrels of crude oil. Those pills you take are made from petrochemicals.
We were conned into thinking we need crude oil. We could run everything off of natural gas and hemp.
@spikedpsycho
And as your name suggests, you are psychotic.
The facts are...
1.) N. America sits atop the largest natural gas reserves in the known universe. We could easily run all of our vehicles, trains, power plants, etc. off of the same fuel we use to heat our homes.
2.) Big Pharma is the major consumer of petrochemicals in the world. Said petrochemicals are fashioned into "meds" that have FDA labels warning of weight gain and brain damage. Proof of this can be found in the fact that over half of all US adults are on these "meds", and over half of all US adults are obese and stupid.
3.) Hemp is a weed that does not need fertilizer. Fertilizers/pesticides are responsible for the world's insect population declining by about 75% over the past 30 years. Hemp fibre is stronger than synthetic hemp fibre. (Nylon) Refined hempseed oil is less expensive to produce vs. the cost of producing gasoline or diesel fuels. And, it burns clean as wood. No pollutants other than naturally one: Smoke
4.) Virtually all of America's mass murderers over the past few decades have been men or boys addicted to petrochemicals ...(meds such as synthetic heroin called "Oxycontin" nationwide opioid Rx painkiller epidemic)... that have FDA labels warning of suicidal / homicidal ideation along with permanent brain damage.
Point? The use of crude oil causes damages to earth and to it's inhabitants. Damages that would not exist if we used hemp and natural gas instead of crude oil. And if we stopped practicing Rx druggery and went back to using homeopathic remedies like we did before America became a bunch of fat idiots.
When I was a college student back in the 1970's, I spent a summer studying in Sarajevo (in what was then Yugoslavia). Streetcars had long since vanished in the U.S. So I was very surprised while riding one in Sarajevo that still had a brass plate inside saying that it had been the property of the Washington, D.C. transit system. Apparently the Europeans saw an opportunity to pick up some cheap rolling stock as we were falling love with the automobile.
Lucky them hope they still have them as vintage streetcars/trams still running
@@bonda_racing3579 Where i lived when I was young (northern France) there was old german streeets cars used. They are now replaced by more modern cars but they kept one or two of the older ones and some days, they drive them like a parade of some sort.
I visited downtown LA for the first time a few months ago and was pleasantly surprised by the public transit -- the buses were clean and felt safe, the light rail and subway lines actually went places I wanted to go -- LA's public transit far exceeded my expectations.
The main issue was service frequency. Waiting 15 minutes for a bus in a major city won't be a deal breaker for someone on a vacation but I could see that being a deal breaker for a daily commuter.
thing is los angeles is always on vacation
Finally someone who acknowledges our rail system. Yeah, it takes 20 min. (a.k.a. forever) to arrive and it's not a spider's web like NY or Chicago, but it exists and it does take you to important places, though not everywhere. And it doesn't run 24/7. You can go to Hollywood, K-Town, Old Town Pasadena, and even the beaches (but that takes forever). Downtown is the hub for rail and transit in general. Amtrak cuts through there too.
DTLA is the best place in the LA metro area to live without a car.
That's true of lines and trips closer to DTLA, but not for people living in the sprawl (i.e. most of us). If you live in the San Fernando Valley, the LA Metro is basically nonexistent.
@Raymond Cai I'd argue that if the metro/bus move people exactly from where they live to where they work, a 5-10min wait isn't that bad. It's also better to have more metro line that aren't over capacity all the time than having fewer lines always at full capacity. The busiest metro line in Montreal, Canada have a train every 3 to 5min during rush hour and 4 to 10min outside of rush hour. The line is at over capacity and is slowing down people because of that.
Its sad we here in California still havent recovered from this, we get a new lightrail maybe every 20 to 30 years, its pretty much impossible to live out here without a car
The light rails are phony alternatives to keep the status quo
Here in San Francisco, we have very good transport and renewed streetcars all over the city.
You should come to SF that has nice public transport.
@@Cyrus992That is until the next huge EARTHQUAKE....
In Antwerp, the second biggest city of Belgium, the streetcars (we call them trams) from 1960 still drive every day!
No, it shows that government entities won't respond to consumer demand, and will instead leave rickety old structures in place.
@Craig F. Thompson
No they really don't
Some of those Belgian cars were made with recycled PCC guts from the U.S.
@@christianlibertarian5488 If they work why change it. In Vienna they still have their old ones as well as modern ones. I like the old ones and they are technically a lot better to handle and very easy to maintain. When replaced by a newer generation, you can still sell them into eastern countries like Lettland or Romania.
A lot of trams disappeared in Belgium too. There used to be lines everywhere in the countryside and in almost every big city. That is definitely not the case anymore.
This is a perfect arguement why public transport should be publically funded and run by local govetnment like it is pretty much everywhere outside of America.
Instead, the ONLY "public transit" this country is willing to subsidize are more and more stuperhighways.
Yes! More public transport planning videos! Keep ‘em coming!
Here in San Francisco the automotive lobbies also pushed the city’s politicians more towards road construction and the dismantlement of public transit. But they didn’t get nearly as far as they did in Los Angeles. And here much of the freeways that were built in the 50’s were eventually demolished during the ‘89 earthquake and never rebuilt.
This proves that, although occupying much less physical space, San Francisco is at the very least, a true, real city, unlike Los Angeles, which is nothing but a huge death camp with traffic lights!
Harusnya Pemerintah Amerika Membantah Undang-Undang Bodoh contohnya Meluas Parkiran hingga 3 Kali Lipat itu Salah harusnya Seluruh Kota Amerika Didesain Buat Jalan Kaki Hingga Pesepeda Bukan Buat Mobil Harusnya Persulit Kepunyaan Mobil Pribadi Terus Adakan jalan berbayar Biar Orang ogah Naik Mobil Pribadi Terus Orang Beralih Ke Sepeda Atau Public Transport
Sees video title, thinks "Heh, just like in Roger Rabbit."
Presses play, "Hey! Remember Roger Rabbit!? "
Transit companies were privately owned and had to make all their profits from the farebox. The rise of the automobile was facilitated by government-sponsored roads and later on, freeways. Interurban railways like Pacific Electric couldn't compete against that and eventually had to abandon their lines. This video doesn't take into account how the government favoured the development of the automobile especially in suburban areas that were designed for auto traffic only to the exclusion of public transit, forcing people to drive. The General Motors conspiracy was multi-faceted, in some cities they were able to bring in consultants to influence the city councils. In many other cities they came in as the National City Lines management group to find a solution to falling revenues of transit systems, especially after the war. That would always involve GM buses. GM knew people didn't like riding buses especially after NCL cut the schedules, so more people bought automobiles which played right into the hand of GM and the other auto makers. Forcing people to buy more autos was the long term goal of GM. We are now busy rebuilding the systems at great cost. Had we kept the systems and upgraded them over the years the cost would be a fraction of what we are paying to build from scratch.
I've made a living as a bus driver for years. I'd still much rather be a trolley motorman: Much classier, and the position often came with a very sharp hat and uniform
Aside: I hope The Sound of Transit converts the one remaining PNT interurban (Car No.55) and those two Melborne W-Class trams from the George Benson line to 700Kv and run them on weekends like Portland does
We still should have kept the streetcar.
It's unethical to ask a company that's losing money to keep losing money just for the sake of having them around. LA should have purchased and subsidized these money-losing lines (since we generally aren't concerned if public transit is turning a profit so long as it gets its funding somehow) and it could have followed in the footsteps of SF, who owned their streetcars, but that screw-up is on LA, not on the private companies who were just trying to survive and not go bankrupt.
But in the end, you can ride LA's new-from-scratch light rail network and ride SF's modernized yet somehow still antiquated light rail network, and at the end of the day LA got the better network of the two, even if it took half a century. The Muni just plain sucks.
@@Am-Not-Jarvis You just described every Public Authority ever. Lot Angeles could have taken over if they wanted.
@@Am-Not-JarvisSSHHEEEITT!
If you want to talk about what travel mode loses the most money, let's look at hose wasteful and inefficient stuperhighways that Eisenhower imported from Nazi Germany; those "Hitler strips" cost the nation more than $700 billion dollars annually, and have NEVER in the entire history of their existence have they collected so much as one red cent!!
Pacific Electric ran the Los Angeles area interurban electric rail network. Los Angeles Railways ran the streetcar system in the city. The
two systems were completely different and even had different track gauges.
As much as I want to vilify the demise of the LA stretcar, your facts are too compelling. (Though, I reserve the right to continue shaking my fist for the loss of streetcars up here in Seattle)
Yes, however I strongly recommend getting more facts. I always believed the story that America's highway system was developed at the end of the water at the beginning of the nuclear age in order to evacuate our cities and move our military around, until I learned more.
The DC Streetcar is literally slower than walking. Downtown Seattle is already decently walkable, so it is better to save the transit budget for something better like more funding for light rail.
@@richardthrust1126 It's a 2.2 mile starter line. Give it time to develop more ridership and service frequency will be increased. When the starter segment of the Red Line opened in 1976, it had merely 5 stations, frequency was a joke, and you'd toss two quarters into a barrel when you entered a station. It's a "little" different now.
@@timothyahoffman Pretty sure its both. The government was motivated to build a highway network for military mobility and evacuation during a nuclear exchange. This was taken advantage of by car companies by lobbying states to take advantage of this highway boom.
@@neurofiedyamato8763That military has been used as an excuse for the existence of the stuperhighways; these "Hitler strips" can't even support the weight of just ONE M-1 Abrams tank without suffering irreparable damage.
Blame Eisenhower and General Motors for the present disaster we're now stuck with!
It's a shame, I couldve taken a train from Allentown to Philly of our line still existed past the late 50s
I also wish for an Allentown to NY route as well.
It's actually called Liberty Bell line and followed the Northeast Extension from Norristown exit 20 to exit 56 Allentown. If it had survived to this day it would look like the 101 and 102 trolley routes in Philadelphia suburbs because they were original pre 1945 trolley lines that have modernization in the 1980s.
Yes, and how long would that have taken you, door to door? The answer is somewhere around 2-3 times as long as in an automobile. The rail lines died for a good strong reason--they are extraordinarily expensive when one includes the value of people's time.
Christian Libertarian it was an express
Doesn't really change things all that much.
You're leaving out how the Brightline in Florida is a private passenger rail operator and unlike Pacific Electric, they rent the property around their house train stations to keep the trains tuning just like how they operate transit in Japan.
Places in the north east that once had street cars covering entire communities today do not even have busses or any public transportation. Let that sink in. Make America Great Again.
Frost that's sad that some places have gone so far with the car that if you happen to be there and without a car, you're basically screwed!
@James Davis Of course people want space for their families. However, it can't be a good thing to just give it to everyone, because of the huge sprawl it creates. Maybe this is great for the individuals, but the government has to pay for the maintenance, isolated people and high costs to reverse this in the end to more healthy levels.
Koninkrijk der Nederlanden--Government has to pay for mass transit, and has to continually subsidize it, forever. There is no need to pay to "reverse" it--it should not be reversed. "Great for individuals" is right--that is the point. Individuals are what counts, not government.
@Craig F. Thompson
People are to blame for this exact thing.
Some of the later streetcars, such as the pcc cars, also had only one operator as the busses did.
I'm reading a book right now that goes into depth on this topic. It's called "Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". It starts at the beginning of the 19th century and works it's way forward. IT'S FASCINATING. I especially love how the author, Kenneth T Jackson, compares development in Europe to that in America in order to illustrate the cause and effect of why we have urban sprawl and Europe doesn't.
In short, the United States is a new country, and a big one. We have lots of empty land, something Europe doesn't have. The fact their cities are so old means many of them were originally built as walking cities, and so are very dense. This means mass transit development happened under very different circumstances there than here, especially when considering the effect of the World Wars, which happened right in the middle of newer mass transit technology developments.
There was definitely concerted effort to convert streetcar lines to buslines, and to build our road infrastructure, for the express purpose of profit. But it's also a fact that in the 19th century, this country was almost completely undeveloped. It shouldn't be surprising, as a result, that there was such a drive to develop. Which, of course, can potentially lead to sloppy results.
My point here is that our infrastructure and urban design both have so much untapped potential. Whats the term...retrofitting???
@Craig F. Thompson
Except that China has a higher population density than the U.S. And most Russians live in cities, unlike Americans.
@Craig F. Thompson
Again no problem here.
80% in cities is 'mostly rural', Ike?
"And never will be". Cities are organisms that respond to good and bad policy, they are not stuck in a time paradox for eternity XD
My city Auckland, an auto-dependent city, for example is changing away from sprawl by using good policy.
@Craig F. Thompson This ignores the issue of pedestrianization. People don't love Paris because of the Paris Metro. They deal with the Paris Metro as a necessary evil to like in a walkable city like Paris. As this video notes, the rail system itself led to LA becoming suburbanized.
There is a problem with your facts. National City Lines which was backed by GM, Standard Oil, Mack Truck and others and never had anything to do with Pacific Electric. National City Lines did purchase the Los Angeles Railway from the Huntington Estate in 1946. LARY was the yellow cars which ran on 42" gage track. The passenger service of Pacific Electric was sold to Metropolitan Coach lines, a company in San Diego run by Jesse Haugh in 1953. Southern Pacific continued to own all rights of way and trackage of the standard gage Pacific Electric as it used those lines for freight distribution and collection. Both PE and LARY were once owned by H. E. Huntington.
Good video. It's true, what happened in LA, happened almost everywhere in the mid to late 1950's. As a former Dallas streetcar motorman, I can add streetcars although reliable, need constant expensive maintenance, especially the older wood frame cars which many streetcar lines still had in their fleets. Streetcar lines themselves were suffering decay from decades of wear and most needed millions in refurbishment that most streetcar companies simply did not have. Miles of street level rails, overhead cables, and rectifiers, (large electrical transformers that converted the city AC to DC current) were among the many things that needed constant upkeep and replacement. Electricity itself was also an issue, because the cost of supplying power to miles of 600v lines was huge and often was the largest expenses streetcar companies had to bear.
But later on, you discovered that buses need much more maintenance, ruin and destroy the streets on which they roll (leaving another agency to foot the bill), and get caught up in traffic jams and stuck at red lights (but for bus drivers, I suppose this represents "free money" since no actual work is being performed on their part).
Streetcars could've helped Los Angeles residents be less dependent on the car, instead they removed them.
They need skytrain lines or subways. Unless the streetcar has its own corridor and doesn't interfere with traffic, sure, but having those stupid wires hanging all over the place and rails everywhere is very messy , outdated and causes lots of traffic.
to be honest though, people back then thought the streetcar was awful. For one thing, it was the first cause of major congestion in LA, it actually traveled extremely slow (back then pedestrians typically walked in the streets as well further delaying jt), the companies didn't really have incentive to keep proper maintenance of the streetcars, it was noisy, and often made working people late (very late) so something had to be done. It's a shame that cars were the solution back then, and everyone actually believed the car would be the perfect solution to stop traffic in LA. For a while (a few years) that was true, but now obviously not anymore. LA back then would not have ever guessed the problems we have as a result of the car today. But if we took some other action instead, who knows what problems we would be facing today. The technology just wasn't advanced enough back then to develop renewable and energy efficient transportation sadly. Though I really do wish we had a better public transportation in place cause we do desperately need it. I suppose LA was just too zealous about the car to consider the benefit of keeping more rail lines in place (but not an economic benefit back then). I don't know what the solution is, but action needs to be taken for sure to fix our broken and doomed to fail transportation system.
Toronto still has many streetcars; I enjoy streetcars.
Brian The Explorer my 90 year old mother, who actually remembers riding them, does. Everybody else like myself just knows it from Roger Rabbit.
@@bmw803SSHHEEEITT!
Those wires are what assist in helping to keep the air clear. Who cares about vision being blocked?!
Great video as always. There’s also a great segment on the streetcars and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” in the fantastic documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself.”
The sad part is the old PE right of ways were repurposed essentially preventing any real intercity extension of the network.
I lived by the old PE route in Stanton. When I started driving in 1981 the tracks still crossed Katella, east of Beach Boulevard. Now they're long gone. That route would be perfect for connecting OC back to downtown LA and LAX. The cost of re-acquisition precludes that goal.
lohphat as long as OCTA and Metro both exist, its probably not going to happen until some sort of merger, but the OC Streetcar is in the talks of being extended to Stanton upon the streetcars completion (which i hope it will:) )
Some of the rights of way were preserved and purchased by Metro from the Southern Pacific specifically for the purpose of using them for MetroRail. The Expo Line in particular comes to mind.
The tram lines in Milwaukee were often not removed but simply paved over. Winter ice allows them to pop up in defiance of our auto-dominated streets.
Same reasons that active streetcar tracks and the pavement around them are hell to maintain.
Good storytelling -- generally accurate, except: the Fitzgerald interests (not GM) owned National City Lines. GM bought NCL stock to help NCL finance purchases of GM buses. GM's main competitor for making Diesel buses at that time, Mack, also bought NCL stock, and NCL also bought Mack buses. Also, NCL didn't buy the Pacific Electric red car; it bought the company that ran narrow-gauge yellow cars in the city. The PE red car was standard gauge, mostly one city to another; the Haugh interests bought PE in 1953. A public agency bought both systems in 1958, when both were still running many rail lines. The last red cars and yellow cars ran until the early 1960's.
The stock purchases and financing were really what the "convictions" were all about. I really don't see what is wrong with that kind of setup, and neither did the judge. It is like having to buy supplies only from McDonald's when you own a McDonald's franchise.
Fascinating subject, it's a similar story to what happened to the tram lines in the UK.
yeah I watched Jay Forman's videos on some of the lines that weren't finished and found a lot of the tactics of the LA streetcars to be suspiciously similar
THE BATLORD nothing too surprising, cars in general became popular almost everywhere including in Europe and the UK. Jay talked about the ringway of London that was planned just like the US interstate but London is big, dense and old so the idea was scrapped or transformed into something different (sort of like the reason why there are no freeways in the heart of NYC thank goodness).
Btw I love Jay Foreman's videos, I wish these two channels could collab on one video
He did a video on the unfinished bits of the Northern Line and that's the video that I was referring to. The two motorways videos suceeded that video.
Unfortunately, the same thing happened in Rio de Janeiro. Our streetcar system was replaced by a cartel of bus companies.
Sounds similar to Adelaide South Australia, (home of the tesla big battery). Before 1958, our entire metro area was covered in Trams, (street cars). Around every corner was one and you didn't need a car. Around late 50s. GM's subsidiary, Holden was going to build a new manufacturing plant in the new city of Elizabeth. GM grabbed a design that they didn't want and were going to use it to manufacturer the first ones. By 1958, every single tram, except for one and all the trolley bus were pulled up and replaced with Diesel Buses spewing their toxic fumes into the air forcing people to buy a new car from GM, H.
And those buses were also manufactured by GM!
Ask Baltimore how viable streetcar would be right now?... all of that over-paving and track removal proved costly 50 years later. Government stupidity.
I'm 81 years old, and have followed that National Cities Lines story since I learned about it from a Navy shipmate at the ETA school in San Francisco on Treasure Island. At that time GM had lobbied to convinced the California legislature to spend a young fortune in taxpayer highway money to remove the streetcar lines of the lower deck of the SF Bay Bridge, and also ro lower the upper deck of the tunnel at Goat Island (to which the man-made Treasure Island is connected mid-bridge) so that large trucks could use the upper deck. Before that, only private cars could be clear of the curved roof of the tunnel. Removing the tracks was a necessity to have trucks on both decks so that five lanes in each direction for road traffic could be accommodated. That modification cost more, in 1962 dollars, than it originally cost to build that bridge in 1938.
In those days there was a saying " If it's good for GM its good for the USA". One example of the willful destruction of the streetcar network, is The near new condition of many of the PCC cars now in Trolley museums that were bought to upgrade streetcars nationwide after the heavy useage during WWII. We fought that war with more than 50% of our workers going to work on public transit since less than 50% of American families even owned a car.
The kicker for me, that great advantage was taken by GM, their allies in oil companies and the other automakers was not actually President Eisenhower's creation of the Interstate highways, though that was a Government subsidy based on the premise that moving ballistic missiles and our troops around the country needed such roads with a minimum clearance of 15 ft at each and every underpass, it was when Reagan became president that the long, long court battle over the lawsuit against National City lines was finally settled.
Good video as usual, Roads take up a gross amount of viable land, every city should be have solid mass transport systems instead of sprawling
Did you watch the video? The Trams were the reason for the first urban sprawl in LA
True, but the fact that public transit takes up less space than freeways (especially subways, obviously) is also true.
Why? Because you don't like the sprawl, so you want to force everyone else to your way of thinking? Maybe families like to have a yard for the children to play in, instead of an elevator lobby.
Craig F. Thompson--Nobody forced people to abandon streetcars in the 50's. Rather, they became too expensive to maintain relative to buses (see the video, above). That hasn't changed. Yet even now, nobody who has a choice will take a bus instead of a car. The unreliability of scheduling is a prime factor. Automobiles give a person control, and freedom, and luxury compared to a bus.
Japan's transportation is good and terrible at the same time. The average simple bus trip is 230yen ($2.20US) one way. The lowest train ticket from one station to the next couple is 200Yen ($1.91), however it grows the further you travel. If your dependent on these system everyday that close to $5+ a trip everyday. Save from a few discounts, there really is none in place unless your a foreigner. This is on top of being subsidized by the Japanese government.
The population density is just to much for everyone to have a car, but people are still spending close enough to have a vehicle on public transportation alone. And relying on public transportation has severe penalties for the economy. It limits what people can buy. They don't have a car to transport personal items.
Even High Speed rail has limits. The first bullet train opened from Tokyo to Osaka in 1964, today that service cost 22000Yen round trip. A ticket on Peach Aviation cost 20000Yen round trip. How about Osaka to Sendai close to 40000Yen round trip on the bullet train, and 20000Yen with Peach Aviation.
The point that high speed rail is better than air travel is 350-400Km, then air travel not only become cheaper, it also faster by terms exponentially. There are very few places in the United States that are within that range for high speed rail.
The biggest reason that the PE went into decline was that Henry Huntington died. Huntington was one of the best managers of his era. He is largely responsible for the success of the building of the western part of the Transcontinental Railroad. Henry married his Uncle's 2nd wife so that he would have control over the Southern Pacific Railroad (the 3 major heirs were Henry, Arabella (Uncle Collis's wife) and her son with Collis (Archer, who was both Henry's cousin and his step son). Henry made sure that Archer had no role in the management of the PE as once Arabella died Archer had more ownership of Southern Pacific but no say. Archer did not like Henry and when Henry died, Archer turned the profitable PE into a mess. This was revenge on Henry as it represented Henry's image. Archer was happy to sell to GM because he got the money and it ended the PE. All this I learned at UCLA which was built in Westwood, one of the Huntington real estate developments
Southern Pacific had grown weary of the annual monetary losses of Pacific Electric so as of 1938 SP had told then PE president O. A. Smith here is 10 million dollars, do what you wish with it, but never ask for another cent. The construction of the San Bernardino freeway and it's interchange with the Santa Ana and Hollywood freeways provided a way to stop all passenger service to the San Gabriel, Pomona and San Bernardino valleys because the Aliso Street bridge had to be vacated by PE.
Yup; Hitler's autobahn was very heavily oversubsidized,while passenger rail was forced into an almost "nonexistence".
I wish that my city could have streetcars! Johannesburg used to have streetcars like Los Angeles, but cars caused them to go out of business.
Precisely. Because people choose cars, every time.
Craig F. Thompson--There are no more viable alternatives. There are only worse alternatives. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy a car, but there are many who try to force people out of their cars.
Christian Libertarian in a way you are forced to purchase a car because in a lot of American cities there is simply no alternative. In most American cities you might have a barebones bus network and that's it. No rail transit, or good bike paths, and in the suburbs if you want to walk it's very difficult because there are no sidewalks in a lot of suburbs
@@Pixelnova_ You are right, but you also get to choose where you live. The trick of course, is that we want to have a half acre lot within walking distance of everything.
Christian Libertarian true but it's not so simple to move to a new place where you have to leave behind your family, friends, job, and the city/town you're used to. And idk with a smaller lot you have less to mow and people don't really use their front lawn for anything lol backyard maybe but I dont do a lot in it so there's no need for a big backyard
The story you just told does match everything I have read, that was not written by someone with excessive rail nostalgia, or a modern "only cars made sprawl" writer. The sprawl all over the western world was already there before the 1920s. Streetcars and light rail created it as the horse streetcar was replaced with motorized ones.
Pacific Electric and their parent company The Southern Pacific RR were a monopoly that LA residents and the Tribune called "The Octopus". They pushed car lines out to worthless land they owned, making that land attractive. Similar companies did the same thing in NY, Chicago, New Orleans, Mobile, Pittsburgh,... They even built amusement parks at line ends to lure out prospective home buyers. They discouraged business and residency in Central City.
Following WWII most of that land had been sold by Pacific Electric or sold as military bases in WWII (especially the now worthless amusement parks). Streetcar riding in the US was seldom as nice as most imagine. My Dad said it was usually slow, erratic, overcrowded, dirty and fights would break out. In the 1950s Pacific Electric (a private company) wanted a tax from the people to revive the broken down system, but they would keep the profits from ridership. The people voted that down in favor of street widening projects and freeways.
For a few years the car method relieved a lot of stress caused by the insane valley to ocean sprawl of unrelated cities. By the late 69s though, the success of Southern California again caught up with its infrastructure.
The Red Car could probably not be saved as the cost of extending lines, buying new equipment, union operators AS WELL AS paving roads to these same places could not be sustained. The line had deteriorated too far, and too many people felt it was the conspiracy. Cars were how the wealthy had travelled, and so average people wanted that too.
As to the joys of overpopulated streetcar riding in the olden days, take a look at the silent film "It", about 15 minutes in. Ask yourself, would you ride the streetcar or bus, if a car was waiting?
Ask the people tha were trapped in cars for two days in the snow in Virginia
@@wednesdayschild3627 ask the people that sat on RR sidings for days in WW2 as cargo moved to priority 1.
Ask the people drowned in ferries.
Ask the people killed in the Amtrak wreck over the swamps of Alabama at 2AM back in the 90s.
Ask the people in the overturned Amtrak train a month ago in the corn field.
Ask the commuters pushed in front of subway trains in NYC, those stabbed, assaulted, beaten just heading home.
Ask the passengers that were flown into the Twin Towers, Pentagon and the ground in Pennsylvania 21 years ago last week.
I could go on, and it can get more gruesome.
Something very similar happened to the streetcar lines in the Minneapolis/ Saint Paul area, in the 1950's. In fact, several people went to jail as a result of what happened there in the conversion from streetcars two buses only. Again, the big beneficiary was General Motors. All coincidence I guess.
I believe that you have the red cars (PE) and the normal streetcars confused in several ways. HH created the PE, and eventually sold it to the Southern Pacific Railroad. It was a standard gage line (4' 8.5"), and was an inter-urban, not an urban line. After he sold the PE, he used the money to buy a number of normal urban streetcar lines, which were 3' narrow gage, and only ran in LA and very nearby cities. It was this line that was eventually sold in the way you describe.
Both the PE and the streetcar lines were used to open new lands to development, and both suffered as you described. The PE had additional problems. It actually made most of its revenue carrying freight, not passengers. But it was now owned by one of its direct competitors, the SP Railroad. As you might expect, the SP was not happy with the competition, and treated the PE as a poor stepchild. As you note, maintenance suffered, and the ancient cars became less desirable to ride. The closed off divisions as quickly as they could. The Northern divisions were finished when the 10 Freeway was built just south of Union Station, cutting the PE line from the Northern division to the PE building on 6th Street. The Southern divisions lasted a few years longer, but not much.
The PE attempted to replace routes with busses with minimal success. The green car streetcar line had better luck with first trolley buses and then regular busses. Eventually these lines all became the MTA, which still runs a few bus lines, but for decades tried their best not to.
In a practical sense the cars and trucks doomed all of these street-running rail lines simply by creating so much congestion on the streets that the rail-based assets simply had no room to move. That had come as a problem fairly early for the PE, resulting in the mile-long subway from 6th street to the northwest, getting a significant number of cars off 6th street.
The fact that they decided to sell the land instead of renting it out, like, come on
Fortunately Europe didn't abandon that much streetcars, excpecially Central and Eastern Europe. I now moved to Eastern Germany. I think there is no other region on Earth with more streetcarlines even in very small cities with only 50.000 or so. I am an absolute tramway enthusiast and I love exploring the systems and ride it. It is such a shame so many lines where abandoned. But fortunately streetcars are making a comeback. There is no better way of transport in the city. Thanks for all your extremely interesting videos.
God bless you man, I hope life is still treating you well.
So what’s the future for American cities? Light rail, street cars, hydrogen/LNG busses, autonomous taxis, hyperloop? Whatever path we take, please let’s get away from a strictly auto centric sedentary lifestyle and more towards a pedestrian friendly urban environment. Jane Jacobs kept the flame alive, let’s make sure it doesn’t get extinguished.
I think we have all of the technology we need: trains and buses. We just need the political willpower to prioritize them over cars.
That'll take a while. Cars have an enormous infrastructure behind them, and re-purposing roads will take more money and patience than most people have.
True! Any changes would be slow and costly. Most people have a hard time seeing beyond the immediate cost to the long term benefit. I would definitely pay more in taxes in my state (california, so that's no small thing as we pay a butt ton for everything and nothing) if that money was gonna go to expanding metrotrain lines.
It's going to be a long road ahead(no pun intended) Repurposing roadway space, trading in parking spaces for buses and bikes is going to be the first step to make car travel less appealing in metropolitan areas. Next step would then building transit lines that would allow people in the suburbs and outer areas be able to travel in with ease
Maybe what we need to do is gather together the politicians and take them on a trip to Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, Lisbon, or Madrid. Just somewhere, anywhere, to show them what public transportation and pedestrian friendly cities can look like and ask how it can be ported to the United States.
As City Beautiful mentioned above its about political will and that means first educating the people who vote about rebuilding our cities and towns to be more people oriented. For me it was first Jane Jacobs, Kunstler, and Speck (their books or TedTalks ). Maybe its time to build new cities from scratch instead of waiting for old cities to change.
The fact that the streetcars ran on electricity makes they way more sustainable. If only they were publicly funded and with our technology now those rail lines and cars would be amazing
Who wants to ride a bus or train that's a long walk away in heat or rain or whatever, if they can get a car pretty cheap or on payments that's parked right in the driveway? Gas was cheap, and the rail-lines didn't run as much on the weekends for people to get out with their family. And why pay for four or more tickets when you could put everyone in a car. THAT"S WHAT caused the demise of the rail lines. If the LA rail and bus system were not subsidized today, it would have the same problems.
You can't help but consider how short sighted, and wasteful it was to accept the automobile as THE mode of transport within major city centers like LA. I remember all the issues of smog in the 70s and 80s... Everyone talks about being "green" ... well, dear friends, rail transit really IS green. And we sold our souls for convenience and laziness...
National City Lines bought Los Angeles Railway, not Pacific Electric. Henry Huntington was booted out of Pacific Electric in 1911 (PE was more like commuter rail than a streetcar system) and was left with Los Angeles Railway. PE and LARy jointed formed Los Angeles Motor Bus/Motor Coach and launched 5 bus lines in 1923. The whole conspiracy theory falls apart in LA in its timing and the nature of the city of the time. Wilshire Blvd still has a city law in the City Code that prevents street level rail on it. It would have been the most profitable line has it been allowed in the early 1900s.
I appreciate that you actually went into detail on this, instead of the usual internet circlejerk of "cOrPoRaTiOnS bAd hUrr DurR". The fact is that Americans WANTED to ditch public transport for cars, anything else that happened was the result of that consumer behavior first and foremost.
People forget that there were no buses back then. You look at these old streetcar networks and think, with our modern lens, "that's a good rail network", until you remember that the bus routes that criss-cross modern cities didn't exist back then, and if you weren't served by these streetcars, you weren't served by anything.
Here is my unpopular opinion as a measly undergraduate city planning major: streetcars are overrated and buses are underrated. It is unfair to show a map of old streetcar networks vs. modern light rail networks if you leave out the bus routes that were added. And while we tend to think of trains as more "luxurious" than buses, try riding in a PCC streetcar, except imagine them *not* refurbished and clean like the current ones are. They're kind of cramped and uncomfortable. Yet modern buses, when actual money is invested into them, are air-conditioned and comfortable. Why pay so much more for a streetcar network when a properly maintained and invested (key words) bus network serves a wider area for a much lower cost?
@Craig F. Thompson what the hell are you talking about? Everybody's always known that
I agree with you, but one of the greatest advantages of bus lines is also one of the greatest disadvantages. They can be moved. The permanency of Streetcar lines, for all of their faults, do raise property values and encourages small businesses to move in to a Much Greater degree than bus stops do.
Rawr, down kitty
"The permanency of Streetcar lines, for all of their faults, do raise property values and encourages small businesses to move in to a Much Greater degree than bus stops do."
This reasoning gets a little too close to social engineering and economic outcome tinkering for me.
@@MilwaukeeF40C It's... not really?
I mean, the second part is more true (or at least it is in pulling business towards the streetcar), but how is it social engineering?
I always did wanted to know what happened to the railways before I was born. Could have kept the railways today and revive them.
Was not expecting that segue. Well played City Beautiful, well played...
SAS 7-10 He definitely that out well, hehe
The real death spiral of the red cars began back in 1911 when Southern Pacific bought them. While Henry Huntington and others used them to develop outlying real estate, SP wanted the PE for its coast access (the wharves from Santa Monica to Newport Beach) and as a freight originator from the (new) ports of LA and Long Beach. This is why virtually all the improvements after 1918 (the Hollywood Subway, the PCC cars for Glendale, the overpasses in West LA, etc) were ordered by the State Railroad Commission (now the PUC). SP never developed the land near the stops into neighborhoods like Huntington did, and they built freight depots instead of stops with parking for cars like Philadelphia and other cities did. They also started substituting buses before 1920 on their lightest lines. Even at the end in the 1950s, their lines ran through miles of empty fields instead of transit-friendly neighborhoods that would have generated fares.
You really captured the complexity of all the influences that go into how a city evolves. technology, economics, public sentiment... all play into how a cities' mass transit grows or wilts. Well done.
Even if streetcars weren't 86ed, sharing trams or light rail with normal traffic would be a real accident nightmare. Even in cities like Denver where the light rail system has its own right of way, there are still a ton of accidents at grade crossings.
Down in DC they've had SO MANY accidents between trams and cars
Blame MOTORIST STUPIDITY, Not the tram!
Thank You! 🙏🏼 I grew up repeatedly hearing the myth that car companies directly killed the Red Car. As you say, ‘It’s more nuanced than that’. GM merely took advantage of an already weakened system, and the post-war eras desire for personal freedom. Unfortunately, the rundown & ungainly Pacific Electric system was already dying of its own accord. If it had had the will to shed the outlying trackage, and concentrated on an LA City-only system, it might have survived.
California has no coking coal. Only recycled steel from California.
If the automobile (car, BUS, and TRUCK) only PAID ITS OWN WAY instead of being oversubsidized to the hilt, there'd still be good, efficient municipal rail systems in this country....
Not only that, but if the automotive industry back then didn't demand that the cities in which these railways existed order those railways to pave the streets in which they had trackage AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE, and if that same automotive industry didn't lobby to get the Public Utilities Holding Company Trust Act passed in 1935, this nation would have the good, high-quality public transit it deserves!!
In Spokane WA you can still see the paths of the old trolley lines because 100 years later there's still gaps between the buildings leading out to the northwest, right through where the Arena is now. In 1936 they took the last trolley car, packed it with hay bales, and burned it in a festival
Great video! Streetcars are one of the best means of mass transit. It’s extremely effective and relatively cheap.
Relatively cheap to build and maintain. Please explain how could it possibly be the reason for that.
The only reason it died is the suburbanization and car craze in the 1950-60s. Back then cars were considered the future of transportation, hence all the efforts were put into infrastructure for them. However, now we understand that cars are extremely inefficient for cities: they transport too few people (~1.2 people in one car on an average) and take too much space. That’s why right now numerous cities all around the world are building or planning a brand new streetcar system (7 are under construction in the US) and many have already built a one since the beginning of this century (London, Paris, just take a look at the list of tram systems on Wikipedia).
And finally. You know what sucks up even more money then public transportation (less then 2% of the US 2019 budget)? Healthcare, education and housing (each 5%)! Outrageous! How can we spend so much money on that garbage! That’s your logic, right?
There are necessary things we must invest lots of money in. Public transportation is one of them. And streetcars are one of the greatest means of public transportation. That’s it. PERIOD.
@@citiesskyscrapers4561 what's the difference between a bus and a street car?
@@davenicholson7645Let me answer that question for you; a bus is an automobile and a streetcar is a rail vehicle.
The loss of the streetcars wasn't the problem, it was the loss of the right of ways that could have been kept by LA and Orange counties.
I'm from Los Angeles and I always wondered why we removed our streetcars
Public transit must be in public hands, the city or county should have seized and operated the streetcar system as soon as the owner failed to maintain it.
I don't know about LA, but in Cleveland the transit lines were privately owned in the 19th century, but consolidation and labor unrest brought them under public control in the early 20th century; costs continued to escalate while maintenance was neglected, and the automobile showed up around 1910 and gradually took over commuter traffic leading to their ultimate demise around 1950.
The city where I live had a streetcar system beginning in 1901...but it ended all streetcars in 1941. They were replaced by both regular buses and electric buses (trolley buses), which in turn ended in 1957. GM was never involved in any of this. So why did it happen? A number of reasons:
1) An electric system required, first, a separate generating plant, as well as the network of overhead wires for every route; the streetcars also required tracks to be installed and maintained. Why deal with all this expense when a fleet of diesel buses just runs on the same roads as everything else, and doesn't need any additional equipment?
2) Streetcars on tracks are absolutely fixed in place. They cannot go around an unexpected obstacle (like a fallen tree) nor can they stop quickly or swerve to avoid a collision. And when such a thing happens, all other streetcars on this route will eventually be forced to stop till the problem is cleared up. They can't be detoured to avoid it. Electric buses at least can move from the center of the street to the sidewalk to pick or drop off riders, but they too are forced to stay attached to the overhead wires. If that connection is lost, they're stopped dead.
3) Streetcars run in the center of the street. All passengers therefore have to cross active lanes of traffic to get to them. Originally there was no accommodation for this; in some cases people were forced to literally stand on the road among moving vehicles to wait to be picked up. And getting off was extremely dangerous in that a passing car could run a person over in a flash when they stepped into the street unexpectedly from the stopped streetcar.
4) Unlike elevated systems or subways, streetcars are subject to the same stopped traffic as everything else if they aren't in a dedicated right of way that's separated from other vehicles. And that became a major problem for streetcars in many American cities, in some cases even before there were any cars at all. In downtown Los Angeles in the 1920s, parking was banned specifically because it was interfering with the operation of the streetcars; this was immediately denounced and rejected by all the merchants who suffered a quick loss of customers who stopped coming since there was nowhere to park. So the traffic returned to being jammed.
This is not to say that electric streetcars are worthless - but their demise in most American cities isn't mysterious when you consider everything I just wrote.
The big three Auto makers killed alot of mass transit. Just so they could sell cars
@City Beautiful, sometimes your analysis of complex issues is good- but your analysis completely missed the elephant in the room. The reason the streetcars were struggling financially, as you point out (3:30) is NOT because the transit mode was inherently more expensive than the car (in fact, streetcars were much, much cheaper to operate than personal automobile/road networks) but because they were competing against the SUBSIDIZED roadways automobiles drove on.
Consider this: the owner of an automobile didn't have to pay for the roadways (or the cost of road-improvements to make existing roads more driveable and higher-capacity), nor did he have to pay for automobile parking. The roadways were paid for by the local government, which raised the money from property taxes. This meant that, especially in the early days where automobiles still had low market-share in Los Angeles, the government was essentially TAKING money from people who rode the streetcar every day, and GIVING it to the drivers of automobiles- who both drove the demand for, and were the main beneficiaries of, publicly-funded road improvements. This was essentially Theft (as taxation for purposes in neither an individual's interest nor the public good always is), and helped neither the streetcar commuters (who then both had less money to spend on higher streetcar fares to keep the rails and trains in better condition) nor the community as a whole (as subsidizing automobiles by improving roads at public expense massively increased automobile usage, and pollution in the process, despite the streetcar system being cheaper and more cost-effective overall), and drove economic inefficiency.
Parking, as I mentioned, also constituted a FURTHER subsidy on automobiles. By instituting zoning laws REQUIRING businesses to add a certain amount of parking, the government created a MASSIVE Unfunded Subsidy on automobiles (only owners of cars benefitted from having this parking- the requirements for which forced far more to be constructed than economic forces of Supply, Demand, and Pricing ever would have caused to have been built- causing most of thos parking to be offered "free"). Many of these laws were first added in the 1920's and 30's, and the government further compounded the problem by adding often FREE streetside-parking (usually constructed at public expense) in some areas.
In short, automobiles DID NOT beat out streetcars because they were a better system or had market-forces on their side. In fact, the streetcars were initially the dominant player in the market and had significant momentum behind their usage: it would have been much simpler and cheaper to have just raised streetcar fares to a point where they were sufficient to adequately maintain the system and turn a tidy profit. The automobiles won out in the end because the government picked and choose winners and losers- the government SUBSIDIZED automobiles (a non-subsidized solution, by contrast, would have placed a heavy tax on car sales and gasoline, and used those revenues to pay for any road improvements and maintenance- of course in that case, few people would have ever bought cars due to their ACTUAL, as opposed to subsidized, cost- and streetcars would have remained dominant) and the price-pressure on streetcars this created prevented their owners from being able to raise fares enough to adequately maintain the system and still turn a respectable profit.
Um...car owners DO "pay for the roadways". They pay via taxes in different forms, but primarily in car registrations and gasoline taxes. They also do pay for parking via parking meters along with charges in parking lots or buildings in more urbanized areas, not to mention through what they pay when they buy products and services from buildings which provide space for cars.
All taxes paid by everyone are unfair in the sense that you claim, in that no individual gets to choose what particular things will be funded through his or her tax payments. Public schools are a major example of this; I have to pay for other people's kids to go to school while I have no children myself.
Nice video man. whenever I see all those former right of ways (since i live in los angeles) as empty fields in a direction it reminds me of the redcar, but also gives me hope that Metro will someday rebuild the former PE lines
bequeef queefs well they shouldn't build ALL of them (because then they become unprofitable and the same happens again), they did a good job on the expo line so yes they should do more of them and try to integrate them more with the Surfliner/Metrolink commuter trains
@@NeighborSenpai"Unprofitable"?! Want to talk about "unprofitable"?! Look at all those damned stuperhighways ("Hitler strips") that have never earned one red cent since Eisenhower imported them from Nazi Germany!
Selling housing reminds me of how most of the private companies that run most of Japan's transit network operates: capturing the value transit adds to real estate. However, the Japanese model of renting out retail, office, and apartment space near stations is more sustainable long term than selling houses next to the line and being done with it.
Yeah, selling a house doesn’t do anything for long term if they sold apartments or mixed use buildings we’d probably still have private transit lines in the US.
You are mixing up the Pacific Electric with Los Angeles Transit Lines/Los Angeles Railway.
Los Angeles Railway (The Yellow Car):
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Railway
Pacific Electric (Red Interurban Car):
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric
So the first story actually is closer to the real story?
Not just L.A., but all of America's city electric public transport was purchased and dismantled by corporations replacing them with diesel powered buses like we use today. The world's first automobiles were electric powered as well.
Problem is that the Pacific Electric would've been losing money and workers hard during the depression & WW2. GM still planned on taking them out, only except they didn't have much standing anymore, especially during the post war era when politicians thought of rail as old fashioned and envisioned everyone driving, alongside having close ties and good bribery money with road lobbying companies. In a perfect world, LA's city council should've taken over the public transit lines in the city, not only keeping lines that served busy communities open but replacing routes that were only there for real estate in favour of buses, rather then allowing a road company like GM to take over
I like this channel because they make interesting videos about my favourite topic, public transport. Keep it up!
Just because GM can't figure out how to make a profit at some enterprise doesn't mean it's not possible. Two recent examples: 1) They sold perennially money-losing Opel to PSA and exited Europe. PSA promptly turned Opel around and made it profitable again. 2) GM built the EV-1 decades before Tesla, but couldn't figure out how to make money selling electric vehicles so they only leased them, and at the end of the lease they had them all destroyed. Tesla saw how popular the EV-1 had been and that persuaded them that there was indeed market potential for electric vehicles. I could go on, the point is that GM is actually a remarkably badly managed company. Most companies do noticeably better. So GM doesn't get a pass for destroying the LA mass transit system just because they couldn't make a profit at it.
At the end of WW2, most of the systems were pretty well worn out. The main thing that NCL did was go to the city fathers in many cities and open a GM bus catalog.
Thank you so much for this video, I’m actually doing a research paper of the trolley system in California in which your video really helped me out.
The problem is that they didn't develop land around the stations and routes for both streetcars AND pedestrians with low density and sprawl rather than density and grids.
Rosewood between Fairfax and Sweetzer was originally built as a one-track streetcar passage, never meant to become a road. But for some reason, it is now a 2-way street, smaller than an alleyway, barely room for 2 vehicles to pass.
I'm glad to see you told the truth on this. I didn't even know the story was kindof misleading
America did enjoy the automobile in the 1930s, but the great depression caused many So-Cal residents to go without cars and ride the red car. AAA proposed to cities and county governments that dismantling the red car would prevent traffic and allow for faster motorways. After WWII, new cars were ordered to reduce the brakeman and conductor positions into one operator role similar to the new buses that PE had to compete with. Railroad unions also had regulations and requirements in place that bus drivers did not have established at the time. City governments and public opinion saw them as a thing of the past and wanted to get rid of them and nevered studied the effects on cities if they were to disappear.
I suggest the next time you venture to discuss the PE, go to the Orange Empire Railway Museum in Perris, CA and have them educate you on other aspects on the story, such as cities refusing to allow MTA yellow cars from using existing rails and chooing to scrap them to prevent any future light rail transit system for LAC citizens again.
because people werent willing to pay more for the tickets to turn a profit and incentivese improvement of the system.
The line could not do anything other than simple repairs during the war.. No new track and wire.. so at the end of the war, with 5 years of zero maintenance, the system was too expensive to repair. Add to the problem the situation with taxes on the line, and you see why it went away....
The production label for my show is called Pacific Electric and honours the Red Cars. It’s motto is “the Red Car Network”
The high-water mark of the Red Cars was 1920, when the population of the City of Los Angeles was only 500K. For the next forty years, one by one, the lines were closed as people preferred private automobiles. Obviously, the freeway system - which began in 1940 - was the nail the the coffin.
Did streetcars have problems during especially hot weather or during snow and freezing rain?
Hot weather can damage tracks just like for trains but it's unusual, streetcar tracks are much shorter with many more turns that will disperse the thermal expansion. Snow is usually not a problem either unless it's large amounts then a plow car is necessary. Freezing rain is crippling, it will stick to trolleys and poles won't have contact.
It's LA, it doesn't snow there
Nothing more than a car, with electricity (unless you want a diesel tram) usually has the plus on the top and the minus on the bottom so arking is almost impossible even in heavy rain, these old trams that were shown probably had no A/C or heating but Ford model T didn't even had windows so......
@Craig F. Thompson
Streetcars had many problems with the weather.
To this day the rapid transit industry still has not developed traction motors and electrical shit that can tolerate fine powered snow.
I'm pretty sure that we disagree, but I'm curious to know what your opinion is about the laissez-faire city planning polices of Houston, TX.
Houston sounds awesome.
Just a slight nitpick - although PE did provide streetcar service within LA city limits, it wasn't LA's main trolley operator, this being Los Angeles Railway with their narrow gauge (42") yellow cars. PE's services were more suburban/interurban in nature, although PE did provide streetcar service in outlying communities (e.g. San Bernardino/Redlands).
Another factor in PE's downfall was absentee ownership - PE was controlled by the Southern Pacific Railroad, who after a time ceased to be interested in PE's fortunes but wouldn't relinquish ownership just in case the company fell into - forsooth! - Santa Fe or Union Pacific control (although mainly a passenger carrier PE also did a tidy freight business in interchange with the "steam" railroads, serving industrial areas which were not served by other companies, which made parts of the system very attractive). SP refused to put up more capital to improve services and also refused to give PE more autonomy in running its affairs (which were essentially dictated from SP HQ in San Francisco), both of which hamstrung the company in fact of the automobile onslaught.
The reality is the destruction of public transit options was really our own fault. The advent of the car was simply too convenient for Americans as it allowed them to build sprawl so that they could sequester themselves away from the "blight" of the cities. When you have a highly individualistic society people are bound to sprint towards car ownership since it allows the upper middle class to segregate themselves away from the rest of the world and the people they deem to be unpalatable. Public transit requires you to share space with other people who you may not like (mostly due to racism & classism), and that is an unfortunate reality people hate to admit.
Southern California has been built for a century on the back of car-based infrastructure. For SoCal or really any of the newer American cities to ever be real cities with actual transit and not just sprawl fields, it would take a major restructuring of the city and land de-development projects which would never happen. The sad part is increasing density is essential to creating an eco-friendly society, and its rather ironic the people who preach about the environment are the same people who live in suburban developments that need to be subsidized by urban taxpayers. I think in a lot of ways cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, etc. are hopeless ventures and we should really be focusing our infrastructure dollars to transit projects in the Bos-Wash cities, Midwestern cities, and San Francisco as those have historic street plans and existing infrastructure that promote density. To make a city like Washington or New York into an efficient city with good public transit would not involve a restructuring of an entire city and way of life; you would only need to improve transit, remove some freeways, change zoning, and add some more green space.
Huntington sold his interest in PE to Southern Pacific in 1910. He continued to own LARY which was profitable. The last 5 LARY lines operated until 1963 when the first MTA shut it down. We couldn't have a government agency operating street cars at a profit because there would be no need to tax. I realise that your video is short but, the devil is in the details. I am 69 years young and rode both PE and LARY as did my ancestors.
These are important details. NCL actually bought new streetcars for LA.
It's not good versus evil. It's business as usual. Everything is business. The is what business owners do for more business when they have to power to do so. It's called increasing/sustaining market share. The more market share you have in your industry, the more profitable your business. It's good for business, and it is to be expected. Time and time again, city planners and regulators are duped by businessmen because they are not trained to go into business for themselves. Business runs the world. City planners and bureaucrats do not.
The world is the way it is because of the collective decisions that we the masses make, not because of "corporate conspiracies". The automobile was a disruptive technology that we, the masses, had been waiting for since the dawn of time, particularly men. Cars sold because they filled an elemental need. The train and trolley systems were many times more expensive to operate and build than busses. Just like cell phones made pay phones obsolete, because they are better, fill important needs and use an ultimately cheaper infrastructure.
Try to visit Venezuela, a country with many problems, but they have very advanced transportation systems: Caracas Metro, Maracaibo Metro, Valencia Metro, Los Teques Metro, Guatire, Guarenas Metro in construction right now, Valles del Tuy Rail system, Caracas Cable train and many cable cars systems and they plan to build the Maglev, electromagnetic train between Maiquetia airport and Caracas, they also have the world largest cable car in Merida City, the main cities of that country has metro system.
Socialism, Libtards want that here too thankfully they lost in 2016
I wonder how much of that trackage is left over today. Paved over by asphalt that is.
Any steel that's been buried for a while gets brittle and rots rapidly as soon as air gets to it.
After President Nixon won Michigan in the 1972 Election he approached the state about building a subway system to serve the Greater Metro-Detroit area. The Big Three Automakers went to Lansing and shut the project down fearing that they would sell less cars.
Actually maintaining tracks and streetcars is way cheaper then maintaining a fleet of buses. Streetcars are almost indestructible. Steel doesn't wear out as fast as rubber tires.
Track wears out. Electric railway equipment is actually also quite fragile and needy.
seems like the Los Angeles railway and the pe got a little mashed in here with some info. The two companies were created in 1911 to stop a turf war between Huntington’s interests and the interests of Southern Pacific’s Harriman. Coming out of the great merger of 1911, Huntington and his estate got the LA yellow cars (Los Angeles railway) and Harriman and the SP got the big red cars. It remained like this until 46 when Huntington’s estate sold their shares in the LA railway and metropolitan coach lines moved in. The PE and their parent company the SP held on until the early 50’s, with the PE having varying amounts of abandonments under their banner, the biggest being the conversions of their northern district (to Pasadena and the foothills) , and the Venice Short Line out to the west side and Santa Monica. Metropolitan coach lines assumed passenger operations for the PE, and further abandoned the last of the eastern district trains, the Hollywood and Santa Monica blvd lines, the line to No Ho, and the lines to Glendale and Burbank. The tracks weren’t immediately torn up, and PE and later SP maintained old PE lines for freight use, many of which passed to Metro later on. Metro’s early predecessor took over in the late 50’s and maintained the remaining streetcar lines of the yellow cars and red cars until the early 60’s when they abandoned them for cost, and reportedly for a dispute between them and the SP ( the Long Beach and San Pedro lines).
Additionally the reason I’ve heard why many early attempts to create a rapid transit network in la between 1925 and 1947 was because each plan basically gave City money to improve the private PE, which wasn’t very popular with voters. After that LA wouldn’t have the desire to pass legislation like that until measure A in 1980. The history of LA transit really reads like a soap opera and is a great thing to look into if you want to see the past and possible future of how to build transit in the USA.
I would watch a alternate reality movie about LA where the premise is that the car never took over and it became a public transportation mecca. The land and climate of LA and Souther California is IMO near perfection - never too hot/humid/cold. What a shame the land is wasted on sprawl.
I’m still happy Karlsruhe didn’t decide to rip out the street car lines after the war, as so many of the medium sized cities in Germany did. Instead they developed a hybrid train, which is a commuter rail on Intercity tracks but can transition to a tram when entering the city. And end of this year, our new subway section under downtown is finally set to open after over 10 years of construction.
Finally, GM was simply the final nail, or rather, spike, in the coffin of PNE, and not the origin of the destruction.
The trams/streetcars were already out of fashion and irreparable.
(Montreal had totally neglected its network too and GM didn’t come here.)
In some ways GM saved some kind of public transit... sort of... since they made busses.
They just seized an opportunity. And maybe pushed it a bit over the cliff over which it was already dangling.
GM simply followed a worldwide fashion trend towards the car by providing the bus as a viable alternative.
Cities everywhere (even Paris and Montreal) just weren’t interested in maintaining streetcars and left them to rot.
Many didn’t even want to provide bus service and left it all to the devices of private companies.
Some of the unlikely heroes who bucked the trend: Brussels and Toronto!
People overstate the involvement of GM. They made buses. They had hardly anything to do with National City Lines.
if this is true, why weren't the street cars of europe all destroyed? The answer is poor American city planning. Sprawl. Cities need a certain population density to become viable and self sustainable. American cities are too spread out which results in a lot of redundant infrastructure without the density to create a viable tax base to maintain said infrastructure and without the density to support public transportation.
People like living on quarter-acre blocks though, it's nice! 🙂
This video clearly missed the mark.
The conundrum of losing the benefit of selling land boosted by positive externalities from rail after it's sold is solved by Land Value Tax + public investment in mass transit
Sounds like the city or county should have taken it over and made it a public utility.
I'm sensing an interesting parallel between this and the death of the freak show. While some in the public were fighting against perceived exploitation (I say perceived because many did not feel that way, in cases it was the only gainful employment they could get, and in at least one case a "freak" became a full partner). While this shift in public sentiment did play a part, the simple economics of carnival rides being cheaper to maintain is what really killed such shows.
Los Angeles actually had two streetcar systems - the Pacific Electric (Red Cars) and the Los Angeles Railway (Yellow Cars). The Pacific Electric was bought by National City Lines, and streetcar passenger service was ended on 1961. The Los Angeles Railway was taken over by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, and streetcar operations were ended in 1963.