National City Lines

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Between 1936 and 1950, National City Lines (NCL), a holding company sponsored and funded by General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum, bought out more than 100 electric streetcar systems in 45 cities (including New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and Los Angeles). Those systems were ultimately dismantled and replaced with GM buses in what became known as the General Motors streetcar conspiracy.

National City Lines was formed in 1936 as a holding company, for the express purpose of acquiring local transit systems throughout the country, mostly in medium-size cities. Many of those transit systems had already converted from streetcars to buses.

Additional factors enabled NCL to acquire streetcar systems. Because streetcars were the earliest heavy users of electricity, many streetcar systems were owned by the electric utility companies themselves. As part of the New Deal, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, required electric utility companies to sell off their businesses not actually providing electricity, so these streetcar systems suddenly became more readily available for takeover by NCL.

The formation of National City Lines had actually been preceded by other actions by GM. The company began investing in streetcar lines in the late 1920s the shortlived United Cities Motor Transit (UCMT), a direct subsidiary of GM which lasted from 1932 until 1935 when the American Transit Association (ATA) censured the company for converting streetcar systems to bus lines.

A company run by E. Roy Fitzgerald, a bus operator from northern Minnesota, was recruited to run NCL. Fitzgerald and his family had run a small bus operation in the small town of Eveleth carrying miners and schoolchildren. This small-town entrepreneurial image was sometimes used as a public relations tactic when communicating with journalists.

In 1949, General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire and others were convicted in the Federal District Court of Northern Illinois for conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies controlled by the defendants. They were fined $5,000. At the same time, they were acquitted in a second count of conspiring to monopolize the ownership of transportation companies with the intent of monopolizing transportation services. The verdicts were upheld on appeal.^[1]

Controversy involves those transit systems which were still running streetcars when acquired by NCL, and whether they ultimately would have been converted to buses.

[edit] NCL in Cleveland

Though National City Lines never owned the Cleveland Railway Company transit system in Cleveland, General Motors did negotiate the sale of buses to the city - resulting in the shut down of the streetcar system. Recent records indicate that Cleveland was on the General Motors' "Hit List" of cities targeted for takeover by National City Lines. Cleveland Mayor Raymond T. Miller had been on the city council’s transportation committee in 1946, when the decision was made to dismantle Cleveland’s streetcars. Four years later, Mayor Miller received a new GMC dealership a month after GM won the contract for supplying new buses to the city of Cleveland. The FBI refused to investigate based on high profile nature of the people targeted. The Cleveland streetcars were sold to the Toronto TTC where they remained in service for 30 years, until 1982.