Great American tram scandal

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Tramcar of the Pacific Electric Railway, stacked in a junkyard, 1956

As General Motors streetcar conspiracy ( english General Motors streetcar conspiracy ) is the systematic destruction of on the tram -based public transport in 45 cities around the United States under the leadership of the largest automobile manufacturer of the United States, General Motors (GM), from the 1930s to the 1960s designated. The transport companies were bought up in order to subsequently achieve a closure of the tram routes in favor of automobile traffic so that vehicles and supplies from their own production could be sold.

history

In the early 1900s, longtime President of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan , began implementing a plan to increase car sales by eliminating trams. In 1922, Sloan established a special department at GM that was responsible, among other things, for replacing electric railroads with cars, trucks and buses. People who then no longer had the opportunity to use trams switched to buses or bought and drove a car themselves. Other automobile manufacturers also had such plans.

Through its subsidiary Motor Transit Corporation , GM was involved in founding Greyhound Corporation , a major provider of intercity bus routes. GM was the sole bus supplier for Greyhound and owned a control package of their stocks until 1948.

In 1936 the National City Lines (NCL) company was reorganized by GM, Yellow Coach and former Greyhound managers. 1955 GM had the trams dismantled in Detroit . In 1963 the last tram finally ran in Los Angeles . Some experts suspect that the trams would have disappeared even without conspiratorial activities.

By the time a 1956 Supreme Court ruling finally outlawed this practice of shutting down trams, the number of trams in the United States had already fallen from 37,000 to 5,300. It was not until 1974 that a broader public became aware of the fact that this was an organized network of automobile companies. Bradford Snell , a US government attorney, drafted a report for the Senate Anti-Monopoly Committee based on the 1956 court records.

National City Lines

The small bus company National City Lines , which had been active since 1920, became a holding company in 1936 in which companies such as General Motors , Firestone Tire , Standard Oil of California , Phillips Petroleum , Mack and the Federal Engineering Corporation invested covertly and in return exclusive supply contracts for vehicles, tires and oil. Other similar companies were the Pacific City Lines (on the west coast of the USA from 1938) and American City Lines (in large cities from 1943). Between 1936 and 1950, bought National City Lines over a hundred electric tram or interurban operations, including Detroit , Cleveland , New York City , Oakland , Philadelphia , St. Louis , Salt Lake City , Tulsa , Baltimore and Los Angeles , and replaced with buses from General Motors. American City Lines merged with National City Lines in 1946 .

In 1950 General Motors , Firestone and Standard Oil were found guilty of a criminal conspiracy for this . The company was fined $ 5,000 and individuals were fined $ 1.

causes

In the 19th century, local transport in US cities began first with horse-drawn railways , later with cable cars . The use of electrical energy in trams began around 1890. The companies built power plants for the electricity they needed . They started selling their excess electricity to consumers and over time the focus of businesses shifted to general energy supplies . The profits made in the transportation business were often invested in power distribution networks. Long-term investments in the route network and vehicle fleet have been postponed. By 1916, vehicle wear and tear on the US average was higher than replacement investment.

James Howard Kunstler says that starting in 1925, after acquiring the Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company, GM began a systematic campaign to displace streetcar lines across America. According to Kunstler, GM set up a complex network of subsidiaries and holdings to buy out trams, remove the rails and convert the routes into bus routes. Yellow Coach was founded in 1923 to build motor coaches for the American market. The company later became the basis of the Group's truck and bus division (renamed in 1943).

Antero Pietila notes that, like everywhere else, NCL has systematically begun replacing the Baltimore Transit Company's trams with GM buses fitted with Firestone tires. These buses consumed fuel, which the two partner oil companies were only too happy to deliver.

The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 , an antitrust law, forbade utility companies, as regulated companies, from operating unregulated businesses. Many tram operators were among them. When choosing between the business areas, preference was given to the profitable energy business and the trams were sold. Regulation of fares and working conditions also restricted the transport companies' ability to act.

The suburbanization that began with mass motorization shifted traffic flows and led to a rapid increase in car users. The profits to be made with tram lines decreased after the end of the Second World War . The zeitgeist of a car-friendly city made it easier to justify closures.

enlightenment

In 1970 Harvard Law School student Robert Eldridge Hicks put the events together to uncover the background to the scandal. The results were first published in Politics of Land in 1973 . With the testimony before the anti-monopoly committee of the United States Senate and the presentation of his report ("American ground transport: ...") , the research of the US government attorney Bradford Snell became known to the public. He emphasized the central role of National City Lines in the closure of the trams.

Effects

After the high-profile statements by Bradford Snell, the scandal was seen by some as a major cause of the disappearance of the tram in the United States. This theory was subsequently processed in the book Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and in the film Bad Game with Roger Rabbit . However, the influence is controversial. Robert C. Post wrote that nationwide only ten percent of the conspiracy, or about 60 out of 600 transport systems, were affected, with almost 90 percent of the remaining trams also ceasing to operate. In his research on traffic history in the USA, Cliff Slater came to the conclusion that buses would have replaced trams even without the action of General Motors. Randal O'Toole of the Cato Institute , a libertarian -oriented think tank , argues that the tram has disappeared due to the development of the combustion engine and the mass motorization.

Comparable developments in Western Europe show that, even without the action of General Motors, a large number of tram lines were threatened with closure due to insufficient profit margins and the decline of the tram had begun. While the trams in major European cities were partly replaced by subways , buses were mainly used in the USA due to the interests of General Motors. Declining supply and rising fares made local public transport less attractive and in many cities it lost its former importance. In addition to the lack of public investment in infrastructure, the Great American Tram Scandal is therefore a cause of the low prevalence of public urban mass transportation in the USA.

It was not until the 1980s that new tram and light rail networks emerged in the USA. So in San Diego (1981), Seattle (1982), Pittsburgh (1984), Portland (1986), Sacramento , San José (both 1987), Dallas (1989), Los Angeles (1990), St. Louis (1993), Denver (1994), Baltimore (1992), Salt Lake City (1999), Houston , Minneapolis (both 2004), Phoenix (2008), Detroit (2017) and Oklahoma City (2018)

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hartmut Esslinger : A fine line: how design strategies are shaping the future of business . Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA 2009, ISBN 0-470-45102-5 , p. 108.
  2. ^ Robert K Musil: Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America's Environment . Rutgers University Press, April 1, 2014, ISBN 978-0-8135-7176-8 , pp. 145-.
  3. ↑ Steven Michels: The case against democracy . Praeger, Santa Barbara, Calif 2013, ISBN 978-1-4408-0282-9 , p. 167.
  4. ↑ Cutler J. Cleveland and Christopher G. Morris: Handbook of Energy: Chronologies, Top Ten Lists, and Word Clouds . Elsevier Science, November 15, 2013, ISBN 978-0-12-417019-3 , pp. 606-.
  5. ↑ Stephen B. Goddard: Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the American Century . University of Chicago Press, November 15, 1996, ISBN 978-0-226-30043-6 , pp. 126-.
  6. ^ Glenn Yago: The Decline of Transit: Urban Transportation in German and US Cities, 1900-1970 . Cambridge University Press, April 27, 1984, ISBN 978-0-521-25633-9 , pp. 59-.
  7. ↑ Peter Cachola Schmal / Annette Becker: Stadtgrün / Urban Green: European Landscape Architecture for the 21st Century / European Landscape Architecture for the 21st century . Walter de Gruyter, January 1, 2010, ISBN 978-3-0346-1133-6 , p. 90–.
  8. ↑ Los Angeles: Pay homage to the car, ignore the problem . September 20, 2013. Accessed March 12, 2015.
  9. ↑ Armin Thurnher : 20 years ago in the Falter: How Los Angeles got around the largest tram network in the world . Falter , No. 18/09, April 29, 2009, p. 3
  10. ^ Walter C. Lindley: UNITED STATES v. NATIONAL CITY LINES, Inc., et al. . United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. January 31, 1951. Archived from the original on June 8, 2008. Retrieved April 5, 2009.
  11. ^ Robert Eldridge Hicks: Politics of land: Ralph Nader's study group report on land use in California . 1973, pp. 410-412, 488. Compiled by Robert C. Fellmeth, Center for Study of Responsive Law. Grossman Publishers.
  12. ^ A b Cliff Slater: General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars . In: Transportation Quarterly , Vol. 51. No. 3, Summer 1997, pp. 45-66, online ( Memento from March 3, 2001 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ^ Paul Matus: American Ground Transport: Street Railways: “US vs. National City Lines ”Recalled . thethirdrail.net. 4. 1999. Retrieved July 7, 2010.
    Reprinted with permission from September, 1974 issue of Third Rail . Matus quotes from Bradford C. Snell's 1974 report to Congress.
  14. ^ Richard Greenwald: A Very Brief History of Why It's So Hard to Get From Brooklyn to Queens . May 29, 2013. Retrieved March 1, 2015.
  15. ^ Columbus and Transportation Facilities . Ohio State University . Retrieved November 30, 2008.
  16. ^ Susan Hanson, Genevieve Giuliano: The Geography of Urban Transportation . Guilford Press, 3rd ed., 2004, ISBN 1-59385-055-7 , p. 315
  17. ↑ James Kunstler: The geography of nowhere: the rise and decline of America's man-made landscape . Simon & Schuster, New York London 1993, ISBN 0-671-88825-0 , p. 91.
  18. ^ A History of the GM / MCI / Nova Buses . September 16, 2014. Accessed March 1, 2015.
  19. ^ Antero Pietila: Not in my neighborhood: how bigotry shaped a great American city . Ivan R. Dee, Chicago 2010, ISBN 978-1-56663-843-2 , p. 220.
  20. ↑ Chicago Transit & Railfan Web Site: Streetcar and Bus Ownership: Holding Companies . Archived from the original on January 20, 2012. Retrieved January 28, 2010.
  21. ^ Van Wilkins: The Conspiracy Revisited . The New Electric Railway Journal. 1995. Retrieved May 27, 2009.
  22. ^ Bradford C. Snell: American ground transport: a proposal for restructuring the automobile, truck, bus, and rail industries . US Govt. Print. Off., Washington 1974, p. 103.
  23. ↑ Online version American ground transport: a proposal for restructuring the automobile, truck, bus, and rail industries ( Memento of the original dated June 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.worldcarfree.net
  24. ^ Robert C. Post: Urban Mass Transit: The Life Story of a Technology . Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007, ISBN 978-0-313-33916-5 , p. 156.
  25. ↑ Randal O'Toole: A Desire Named Streetcar: How Federal Subsidies Encourage Wasteful Local Transit Systems . the CATO Institute . Retrieved January 1, 2011.