(2015-05-07) The Real Story Behind The Demise Of America's Once-mighty Streetcars

The real story behind the demise of America's once-mighty streetcars (trolley systems). 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 actually the full story, he says. "By the time National City Lines was buying up these streetcar companies, they were already in bankruptcy.

Over time, the businessmen who ran the streetcars, called "traction magnates," consolidated ownership of multiple lines, establishing powerful, oftentimes corrupt monopolies in many cities.

Eventually, many of them contracted with city governments for the explicit right to operate as a monopoly in that city. In exchange, they agreed to all sorts of conditions. "Eager to receive guarantees on their large up-front investments, streetcar operators agreed to contract provisions that held fares constant at five cents

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

In some places, like Chicago, streetcars retained dedicated rights of way, and they survived. Pretty much anywhere else, they were doomed

The public had little sympathy for the traction magnates who'd entered into these contracts. Today, many progressives and urbanists are boosters of streetcars, but back then they were often seen as a bastion of corruption — especially because of their owners' history of violent strike-breaking.

Because of these factors, some streetcar companies began going into bankruptcy as early as the 1920s

By the '50s, planners put a priority on bringing cars into cities with new urban highways," Norton says. "That really made streetcars truly impractical to get around on

It's also not exactly right to say the streetcar died because Americans chose the car. In an alternate world where government subsidized each mode equally, it's easy to imagine things playing out quite differently. So what killed the streetcar? The simplest answer is that it couldn't compete with the car — on an extremely uneven playing field.