On-Grade Rails and the Streetcar Conspiracy

I've already blogged about the expense and dangers of light rail, but here's a great video showing the obvious difficulties Houston's light rail system is having while traveling on-the-grade of city streets (ht Paul).

Many, including, not surprisingly, the Houston Metro system, have blamed the drivers for these accidents. Admittedly, as you can see, most accidents involve drivers taking left turns without examining the next lane or just plain ignoring oncoming trains. But since trains arrive much less frequently than cars along a similar lane, there will always be less of an impetus to carefully check the lane when turning to the side. Drivers are also used to dealing with other cars which can brake suddenly and which can swerve out of the way of oncoming traffic. The light rail provides much slimmer reaction time for nearby motorists while turning. As the numbers show, fixed on-grade rail is an obvious safety hazard, no matter who's at fault.

These are just a few of the reasons the country at large abandoned streetcars for buses back in the 1950s and 60s. Everyone at the time understood that they were more costly, more dangerous, and less maneuverable. But by the 1970s a mythology about a golden era of streetcars emerged in their absence. Rabble-rousing attorney Bradford Snell perpetuated the myth, in books and in congressional committee hearings, that General Motors succeeded in a nefarious conspiracy to destroy the once-beloved streetcar industry. After the 1973 oil crisis, these claims gave the public a convenient scapegoat and a comforting story of lost innocence.

In fact, the General Motors subsidiary National City Lines did buy up some streetcar lines in a few cities, but, as Robert Bruegmann points out in Sprawl: A Compact History, cities gave up their streetcars whether or not General Motors bought any of their lines. In L.A., whose myth about the conspiracy was memorialized in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, there were actually two old streetcar lines, the Red and the Yellow. General Motors only bought up one, but both switched to buses in the post-war period. In the famous antitrust case of United States v. National City Lines (1948), much cited by Snell and other conspiracy theorists, GM was convicted of conspiracy and restraint of trade but was charged only $5,000 for their crime. What Snell and many others failed to point out, however, was that GM was not charged with monopolizing or destroying the streetcar industry, but with trying to monopolize the bus industry. It was charged with forcing its subsidiary to buy only GM buses, hardly an unprecedented act for a corporate parent. Also, as Jon Teaford points out in The Rough Road to Renaissance, many of the lines that replaced streetcars with buses were actually municipally owned. The New York City Board of Transportation spent millions in the 1940s to replace its old trolleys with efficient buses, while the Chicago Transit Authority and the Detroit Department of Street Railways removed the last trolleys from their city's streets in the late 1950s. The city of Chicago boasted that "Comfortable, easy-riding buses are being substituted for rattletrap streetcars that should have been derailed at the scrap heap years ago."

But just twenty years later, the combined power of amnesia and faddish planning theories succeeded in bringing the streetcar back, beginning with San Diego's system in 1981. We're all paying for it now.