The Great American Streetcar Scandal

reply to post by bmandarailfan


Thanks for the comments. I was unaware of trolleys in Philly. I'd like to do some traveling someday and see what other cities have going. We only have the bus system here, with a crappy monorail that services the Strip, and I rarely visit the Strip and only used it once to get part of the way home on a New Years celebration after they blew up the Hacienda, whatever year that was. It really only serves the tourists, not the locals.

I came across some interesting pictures and story of the Cincinnati subway. This was before the Streetcar Scandal, but the outcome was the same. Who knows if pressure from the auto industry helped ruin the chances of this subway system which was never finished nor used.

Eleven days after America entered World War I, Cincinnati voters gave their final approval to build a 16-mile, $6.1 million rapid-transit rail system above and below ground. The war put the project on hold. Work finally began with a ground-breaking ceremony on Jan. 28, 1920. By then, however, inflation had doubled prices of goods and materials.

During construction, a battle raged at City Hall: Seasongood's reformers versus the Cox machine. Seasongood won and eventually stopped work on the subway. He cited inflation and the failing fortunes of the interurban railroads that would be linked to the subway.

Seasongood noted that rising auto sales would reduce potential subway ridership. He failed to look further down the road to see a growing population with more cars, leading to traffic congestion and the need for a subway.

It's a pretty wild story.www.enquirer.com...



































































The pictures and info about them

Cincinnati Subway Story

I read this thread years ago before joining ATS. One of those stories that stuck with me, the hidden conspiracy and all that jazz. I referenced this thread in another a while back and it sorta stuck with me again.

I do have way too much time on my hands these days but no matter. I took a quick search and came up with a lot of info that changes the story the OP had laid out. Since what I came across was written after 2009 the OP somehow missed this part of the story, it seems.

So whatever happened to all those streetcars?

"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.

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."

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 and mandated that rail line owners maintain the pavement around their tracks,"

www.vox.com...

There's a lot more there but I'll throw up a few more links for giggles and such. That link is a really good account of what really happened. Only about 1/10th of the systems were owned by National.

While it's true that National City continued ripping up lines and replacing them with buses — and that, long-term, GM benefited from the decline of mass transit — it's very hard to argue that National City killed the streetcar on its own. Streetcar systems went bankrupt and were dismantled in virtually every metro area in the United States, and National City was only involved in about 10 percent of cases.

www.vox.com...

A little history with this one.

www.thoughtco.com...

99percentinvisible.org...

www.theguardian.com...

Have fun, folks, if you want. Helluva story.