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TRANSPORTATION: STREETCARS: HISTORY:
The Real Story Behind the Demise of America's Once-Mighty Streetcars
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The Real Story Behind the Demise of America's Once-Mighty Streetcars
Updated by Joseph Stromberg
May 7, 2015, 9:20 a.m. ET
Vox
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demise
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This post is part of a series on the past, present, and future of
commuting in America.
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Back in the 1920s, most American city-dwellers took public transportation
to work every day.
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There were 17,000 miles of streetcar lines across the country, running
through virtually every major American city. That included cities we don't
think of as hubs for mass transit today: Atlanta, Raleigh, and Los
Angeles.
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Nowadays, by contrast, just 5 percent or so of workers commute via public
transit, and they're disproportionately clustered in a handful of dense
cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Just a handful of cities still
have extensive streetcar systems and several others are now spending
millions trying to build new, smaller ones.
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So whatever happened to all those streetcars?
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"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.
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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."
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Surprisingly, though, streetcars didn't solely go bankrupt because people
chose cars over rail. The real reasons for the streetcar's demise are much
less nefarious than a GM-driven conspiracy they include gridlock and city
rules that kept fares artificially low but they're fascinating in their
own right, and if you're a transit fan, they're even more frustrating.
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The complete article may be read at the URL above.
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Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
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