The dismantling of right of ways have long, long effects.

I don't get why ignoring history is supposed to be a good thing.

Edited by author 04-16-2003 02:43 PM
Ward, I find it disturbing that no solutions have emerged to these tragic events that occurred between 1922 to 1955 (as indicated in your references.) If government officials and urban planners claimed that they couldn’t fix a contemporary problem because World Word II occurred in the 40's, they’d be laughed outta town, wouldn’t they? I'm not advocating that we ignore history. Clearly, I'm in the minority here and will shut up.

Hey, fishrush, taken a look at the Middle East lately? There are _lots_ of problems in the world whose origins go back a long ways. Sometimes, it's worth looking back at how the problem started, if only to avoid letting the same thing happen again.

another problem is that sometimes the problem is way more complex than people think. I'm an architect, and as such, studied city planning in school. A prime example of how complex these problems can be it the effect that carpool lanes have on a city.

OK, so the short of it is like this: Adding carpool lanes makes traffic worse; makes cities worse, and makes for more pollution. How's that so? With Carpool lanes, less people drive, because they share rides, right? Kinda, kinda not. Because, prior to carpool lanes, many people that would have had to find alternitive transport into the city (like public transport) or would have to *live* in the city that they work in (what a concept!). With carpool lanes, more people are willing to drive, and more people are willing to live farther out from the city. So adding carpool lanes increases the number of cars on the road, contributes to suburban sprawl and car-centric city planning, and actually makes things a little worse in the long run, and not better. It also costs more money to add a lane to a freeway then to add to an existing public transit system. However, adding lanes to freeways makes more jobs; makes sprawl grow faster which makes more jobs (some people don't mind the suburbs and sprawl), and the like. This is a complex dynamic system, more like an echosystem than a math problem.

Finally, I ride the bus every day. I live in the same town I work in, because I beleve that it's the way to live. This means it will take a lot longer for me to buy a house than if I was to move out to the suburbs. But this is the way that makes since to me; giving up being able to buy a cheap house to be able to live and work in the same place: a city that's pedestrian-scale.

But, the majority of the buses in San Francisco are from the sixies; they are terribly inefficent, and poorly designed. The muni system demands that the new buses it buys are compatable with the old buses, so that existing problems with the bus system can't be quickly addressed. Add to that the union control of Muni, the city's boondogglin', and the standard corruption of San Francisco public works, and it's a total mess. Big picture, it just might be more environmentally friendly and cheaper for me to drive to work, if I could (i.e. if parking and the additional traffic don't factor in), than to ride the bus.

And we're right back to it being a dynamic problem. Yes GM had something to do with shaping the current public transit system; but it's way more complex than that. What about white flight? What if cars were more efficent? What if everyone lived in the city that they worked in? What if all buses had bike racks on them? What if downtown S.F. was blocked off to cars altogether, and instead they built a MEGA parking garage close by with shuttles?

These things are like echosystems, and there are no easy answers.

In the end, I think I'm gonna get a bike; that way when the 'big one' hits I can still get home. :)

Let's see. I recall seeing this point being made sometime between 1962 and 1965.

Can we get some new news about this please, or must each generation rediscover the big bad capitalism story?

Not that I don't think GM was culpable to a certain extent, but their is less evidence for a conspiracy here that is widely beleived. Here is an article that attempts to debunk the 'myth':

http://www.lava.net/cslater/TQ.HTM

It's interesting reading, even though it, like the sources it attempts to debunk, should be examined with a critical eye and taken with a grain of salt.

Edited by author 04-16-2003 11:05 PM
I would dearly love to live somewhere with public transport as good as San Francisco! I know about it's problems that Sec. Agent Toast discussed, but compared to public transit wastelands like Tucson and Fresno, it's a dream!

I've noticed something about public transit systems, bus lines in particular. There seems to be a tipping point somewhere, that if there are frequent enough buses, on enough different routes, that run late and early enough, then it's not just the downtrodden poor wage slaves that ride them, and the atmosphere isn't completely aweful; you can tell the 2 types apart by whether business people in suits and yuppies make up a decent percentage of ridership.

And they seem to have positive and negative feedback loops respectively. Where they are minimally 'good enough', those more monied constituencies who use them make sure they get (at least) enough resources to remain useful, and often get better.

In the "not good enough" systems, when city/county budgets are tight, they like to cut public transit budgets, because "nobody rides them!", which makes them worse, which makes even fewer people ride them.

I've seen both the positive and negative type feedback loops in multiple cities in North America, and the destruction of the trolleys referenced here surely didn't help any.

Mr. Toast is right, it's dynamic systems at work, and we've been struggling for years here in Tucson to tip it back over into a positive loop, but the Forces of Evil (politically connected auto dealerships and road contractors here) have thwarted the Forces of Good...although the Good Guys got a victory in defeating a ballot measure that would have built more roads, but in a bad way that would have actually INCREASED congestion (and it was successfully explained to the voters by those who defeated the mock 'transportation initiative'. It was for some nasty 'grade seperated interchanges' on surface streets at major intersections that would merely have shifted the bottlenecks at rush hour a mile in each direction, and have destroyed many small businesses that would have been removed via emminent domain, with a truly tiny public transit funding increase); more funding for buses hasn't come through yet either: stalemate!

I always thought that the culpability for this crime went all the way back to Henry Ford, who lobbied for highway systems to improve the likelihood of sales of his Model T. Perhaps, (though there's no telling) if the public investments had gone into rail development instead of road development, we'd all be riding the overhead monorail nowadays.

Edited by author 04-17-2003 10:14 PM
I make my living as a transportation writer, historian, and consultant, and part of my volunteer duties are as a librarian of the Maryland Rail Heritage Librarian at the Baltimore (Md.) Streetcar Museum--with occasional forays into hands-on trolley and bus preservation.

I too have seen the multitude of "conspiracy" theories postulated regarding the overall GM/National City Lines actions of the 20th century. Baltimore itself was one of the "victims". However, in the serious analysis of *most* transportation historians, the actions of NCL, GM, etc., though not exactly 100% ethical or above board, did NOT have any serious impact on the long-range fate of the remaining transit systems, or on actual transit planning and development above and beyond the processes already set in motion by other factors. The massive highway development programs, the "democratization" of auto ownership, and basic market forces (American-style personal independence, for example) all played a greater role in killing rail transit than the "GM Conspiracy". In the words of one noted trolley historian, "GM didn't shoot the victim, they were just guilty of digging the grave and building the coffin."

The same historians that I talk to about this basically accuse the parties that continue to hype the "conspiracy" at this late date as being driven primarily by either hopeless nostalgia for old rail transit (a distinct minority) or by anti-capitalist, pro-socialistic sentiment, with a decent dose of "conspiracy loving" thrown in for good measure (think Dale Gribble of the show "King of the Hill").

I have even heard this conspiracy mutated into a cabal that "forced" the railroads to purchase the new diesel locomotives of GM's Electro-Motive Division and scuttle the "efficient" (read: nostalgically loved) steam locomotives, or GM would have diverted its huge raw materials, parts, and product traffic to trucks. Anyone that crunches the economics numbers that really affected the issues--like I have for years--will laugh this proposition right into the pages of the Weekly World News or Nostradamus.

LNER4472: Can you provide references (links) to your publications?

Unfortunately, most of the conclusions referenced to above reside in the analyses (both subjective and objective) of scholars who have spent 20-50 years researching the history of transit and transportation, not on websites where I can just type in a URL. In addition, I don't have the shelves of the Md. Rail Heritage Library behind me right now, and most of MY work is non-transit rail-transport related. Among the researchers I would refer you to are George W. Hilton and his book "The Electric Interurban Railways in America" (available at Amazon and other places), George M. Smerk's "The Federal Role in Urban Mass Transportation", Michael R. Farrell's "The History of Baltimore's Streetcars" (with a specific city case analysis of National City Line's impact), and many other transit books. Let me note that the vast majority of rail transit systems in North America were either gone before World War II or else in irreversible decline well BEFORE the efforts of "the GM/Firestone/etc. conspiracy".

If anyone really and truly wishes to pursue this discussion further, I would be most willing to ask the scholars in question to refer me to specific examples, texts, articles, and the like. However, given the nature of most people on forums such as this to engage in sound-bite exchange and quick links as opposed to in-depth analysis that requires real work, I will hold off until I have responses from people willing to take the effort to seek out the refuting evidence (warning--this may mean going to a library or buying a book with views that may not meet your preconceptions).

Please do not view this as sarcasm or "ducking the debate". I don't have any links handy to any "refutal" websites; a proper refutal of the "GM conspiracy" of my own might take me a full day's work; and I am loath to undertake that work for people who may just dismiss my hypotheses simply because they disagree with them on a basis of emotion. You may feel free to ask me for more details or references at LNER4472@juno.com .

Oh, wait, did you mean MY publications?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...40?v=glance&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...40?v=glance&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...40?v=glance&s=books

In addition, many articles, photos, news reports, and book reviews in the following magazines over the past 20 years: Trains, Railfan & Railroad, Railpace, Passenger Train Journal, Locomotive & Railway Preservation, and others. Most recent major articles were in the May 2003 Railfan & Railroad on the snowstorm collapse of Baltimore's landmark B&O Railroad Museum; before that, see November 2001 R&R for a major report on the Howard Street Tunnel derailment and fire in Baltimore, an article cited by many government reports on the incident.

Responses already to my requests to the other scholars for hard data or other arguments against the "Great GM Conspiracy":

http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/courses/geog100/CarCult-Big3.htm was cited to me as an example of the accusations of Bradford Snell. I can say right off the bat that the *railroad* side of the argument--the one I have the background in--is so badly distorted and selectively presented as to make me actually break out in laughter. Snell COMPLETELY ignores the MAJOR motive power of railroading pre-WW2--steam locomotives--to compare diesels to electrics, which itself fails to factor in the enormous initial infrastructure requirements necessary to implement electric locomotives (compare this to comparing gas and electric automobiles without factoring in the cost of gasoline while factoring in the cost of electricity--an equally invalid comparision). Steam locomotives, also a valid competitor to diesels at the time, fell victim to its far higher maintenance and labor costs and inferior public image (think sooty, smoky, smelly, and noisy). GM also had a host of diesel competitors initially, including American Locomotive Company, Baldwin (both decades-old steam locomotive builders), Lima-Hamilton, General Electric, and others; all but GE were eventually rendered extinct by superior GM products and customer support and financing, and by the failure of the other competitors to switch production from steam to diesel fast enough (see Anthony Churella's "From Steam to Diesel" for an excellent overview of the transition from a business analysis). Indeed, GM retains its Goliath share of major freight traffic to this day, but was almost rendered extinct as a locomotive builder in the 1990s by superior GE locomotives--so superior that railroad officials later remarked that they continued to order GM locos in the late 1980s and early 1990s solely to keep GM in business as a competitor to GE and to prevent a de facto monopoly by GE. So much for the power of massive traffic share to "blackmail" railroads.

If Snell's railroad information is so easily laughed at and refuted, it doesn't bode well for his apparent "witch hunt" for an evildoer in transit, either.

Other analyses:
http://cosmo.pasadena.ca.us/stan/ul/GM-et-al.html
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/4834/gas6.txt

Mind you, I'm stuck in the position of "proving a negative"--all I can do is shoot holes in the prosecutor's evidence and make the prosecutor look half-baked at best and a fool at worst.

Yet another link I've been handed:

http://www.baycrossings.com/Archives/2003/...tcar_conspiracy.htm

To quote:
"Thanks to the Snell report, we now have the makings of a good controversy. Many researchers blindly quote Snell, passing his paranoid, incorrect, and misleading research off as fact. Penny Mintz, who as a student wrote an article for the New York University Environmental Law Journal (1994), fell into this trap and quoted Bradford C. Snell nine times. On the Web, one can find seventeen papers accusing GM of conspiracy based upon Snell’s mendacious imaginings (not including one in Polish and another in French). Interestingly enough, four papers ignore Snell and use other evidence to point to a conspiracy, most notably an excellent article by Al Mankoff. Five others take Snell to task and prove there was no conspiracy, including Professor George Hilton’s thoughtful article in Transportation Quarterly 51, No.3. The Snell report is even the basis for the PBS movie "Taken For A Ride," which does indeed live up to its title.

Competent scholars are outraged at the abuses in Snell’s report and are happy to expose its nature. Once arguing against Snell, they find themselves firmly in the non-conspiracy camp. Pro-conspiracy theorists rely on Snell and look like idiots. Thus it appears as if Snell’s work is more effective at polarizing opinions (generating heat) than it is in adding any light. If someone wants a real conspiracy theory, how about Bradford Snell in the pay of GM to make up preposterous stories so a real conspiracy would be overlooked?"

I wonder how this conspiracy theory explains all the *other* trolleys that went out of business? For example, I'm familiar with trolley systems in Northern New York. Watertown, Alexandria Bay, Ogdensburg, and Plattsburg all had trolleys. None of them do now. Did GM put them out of business, too? It seems unlikely, when you read the history of these trolleys. Cheap cars put them out of business. Was GM responsible for cheap cars? Um, well, yeah, but so was Ford.