Great American Streetcar Scandal

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The Great American Streetcar Scandal, also known as the General Motors streetcar conspiracy refers to General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum forming National City Lines (NCL) holding company, which acquired most streetcar systems throughout the United States, dismantled them, and replaced them with buses in the early 20th Century. The scandal alleges that NCL's companies had an ulterior motive to forcibly gain mass use of the automobile among the U.S. population by buying up mass light rail transportation and dismantling it.

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[edit] Background

Between 1936 and 1950, National City Lines bought out more than 100 electric surface-traction systems in 45 cities, including Detroit,New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, and replaced them with GM buses. The scandal is rehashed in books like Fast Food Nation; testimony by Government Attorney Bradford Snell to a United States Senate inquiry in 1974 gave the scandal its current prevalence and weight in U.S. popular culture.

Depending on who is telling the story, to one degree or another, the scandal also invokes the Interstate Highway System as an additional culprit, since the system began its initial construction in California after the large-scale dismantling of that state's trolley network. (Some documentation of the California rapid transit interurban systems — some pieces of which survive as local and semi-local transport systems — is provided by amateur historians such as The Electric Railway Historical Association of Southern California.)

Technically, the scandal would rightly be called the National City Lines scandal or the General Motors-Firestone-Standard Oil-National City Lines scandal. However, GM was indeed the most prominent of the companies engaged in this behavior and had engaged in similar behavior before the scandal took place. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., long-time president of GM in the early 20th century, had developed a business strategy to expand auto sales and maximize profits by eliminating streetcars; according to GM's own files[citation needed], Sloan had established a special unit in 1922 within the corporation, charged, among other things, with the task of replacing the United States' electric railways with cars, trucks, and buses.

[edit] Elements

There are several qualifiers to this situation. The trolley industry's problems were also deeply financial and structural (ancient equipment, etc.) in their own right, and these issues did largely predate auto's interest in getting rid of that industry, so some transportation historians argue that the conversion to buses would likely have occurred anyway, given that streetcar ridership was steadily declining through this period due to things like:

  • Deterioration of streetcar systems during World War II, during which no new rolling stock and few replacement parts were manufactured;
  • Politically or socially-motivated opponents of streetcar systems like Robert Moses and New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (Between 1926 and 1936 GM acquired New York Railways, but left it languishing under continued underinvestment and poor service);
  • Federal subsidy of competing systems;
  • Low fare revenues leading to inability to upgrade rolling stock, causing further erosion of ridership;
  • Legislation that prevented power utilities from owning trolley lines;
  • Rising real estate prices, leading to transit companies selling off real estate holdings to remain financially viable;
  • Competition with automobiles for road space, and
  • Suburbanization.

Los Angeles had two separate trolley systems, known as the Red Cars and the Yellow Cars, but National City Lines owned only one of the two systems, yet both ended up being dismantled. It is worth noting that the two systems were often used in conjunction by travelers, and cutting service on one line made the other less convenient as compared to automobiles. Regardless, during this period automobile ownership was rising everywhere in the United States, in cities both with and without GM having purchased the local streetcar systems.

The Great American Streetcar Scandal ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court in United States v. National City Lines Inc. 334 U.S. 573, 596 (1948) ("National City I")[1] which reversed lower court rulings on the case. The proceedings were against General Motors, its subsidiary National City Lines, and seven other corporations. They were indicted on two counts under the US Sherman Antitrust Act. The charges, in summary, were conspiracy to acquire control of a number of transit companies, forming a transportation monopoly (all defendants were acquitted on this charge), and conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies to companies owned by National City Lines (General Motors alone was convicted on this charge). The judge presiding thought that the scandal was of little real consequence. GM was fined 5000 dollars and each executive was ordered to pay a fine of $1.

[edit] Further reading

  • Adler, Sy "The Transformation of the Pacific Electric Railway: Bradford Snell, Roger Rabbit, and the Politics of Transportation in Los Angeles." Urban Affairs Quarterly, Volume 27, Number 1, 1991.
  • Bottles, Scott L. Los Angeles and the Automobile, University of California Press, 1987. ISBN 0-520-05795-3.
  • Black, Edwin "Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives," especially Chapter 10, St. Martins Press 2006
  • Kunstler, James Howard (1994). The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. Free Press. ISBN 0-671-88825-0. 
  • Snell, Bradford C. American Ground Transport: A Proposal for Restructuring the Automobile, Truck, Bus and Rail Industries. Report presented to the Committee of the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, United States Senate, February 26, 1974, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1974, pp. 16-24.
  • Slater, Cliff "General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars" published in Transportation Quarterly vol 51, 1997 [2] puts forth the argument that the streetcar was eliminated by the market.
  • Thompson, Gregory Lee (1993). The Passenger Train in the Motor Age: California's Rail and Bus Industries, 1910–1941. Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH. ISBN 0-814-20609-3. 

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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