Great email discussion about "the decline of urban rail and General Motors"

By the way, H-URBAN, the moderated email discussion group for academics and others interested in urban history, has a great thread on "the decline of urban rail and GM" which started out with a query about the urban myth (that has a modicum of truth) that GM, tire, and gasoline companies banded together to destroy rail in favor of buses made by GM, using tires and gasoline. For many many reasons, that's an oversimplification of what happened.

If you want to read some of these messages, go to the webpage and do a search on "decline of urban rail" in the discussion log search. Every one of the messages is worth reading, and there are scads of reference items offered.

Here's something I wrote last Saturday:

While it is true that GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil of New Jersey joined together to purchase urban rail systems and convert them to bus-based systems, and it is likely that some of these systems mightnot have been converted otherwise, the unfortunate fact is that urban trolley and interurban systems were on the decline long before.

The textbook GEOGRAPHY OF URBAN TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS (3rd. edition) edited by Susan Hanson and Genivieve Giuliano (Guilford Press, 2004) is a must read with excellent chapters on the history of U.S. transportation. Suburban migration out from cities was not a post-WWII phenomenon, it began long before.

Trolley and interurban systems began failing before the Depression, in responseto "deconcentration" of population through the expansion of metropolitan areas, which was assisted by the availability of relatively cheap automobiles. Transit needs population density in order to be financially successful, which was especially important inthe days before government subsidy of such systems. Rybczynski's CITY LIFE (Scribner, 1996) discusses the decline of trolley systems in upstate New York State beginning in the 1920s.

CAPITAL TRANSIT: WASHINGTON'S STREET CARS: THE FINAL YEARS 1933-1962 by Peter Kohler (Colesville, Maryland: National Capital TrolleyMuseum, 2001) discusses these issues with regard to Washington, DC. I think that that Kohler book discusses the impact of the post-Insull Utility Holding Act, which forced electric utilities (often created by trolley systems to provide electricity to their systems) to choose between streetcar systems and the electric utility as their main line of business. The unintended consequence was the elimination of cross-subsidies, which reduced the financial capacity of now independent street car systems. (The same thing happened with regard to antitrust actions against film companies. Separating off the theater chains made it harder for newly independent downtown movie palaces to survive. [Mentioned by Hunter Morrison, former director of planning for the City of Cleveland at a presentation at the National Trust for Historic Preservation conference in 2002.])

There are quotes from Public Service Commission abandonment hearings, and other interesting material (that franchise agreements required various DC trolley systems to build roads, such as Connecticut Avenue, which seeded the failure of the system, etc.). Upon the 50th anniversary of the Ford Motor Company in early 1953, they ran celebratory ads in national magazines such as Look and Saturday Evening Post. (In March and April.)

In doing some research on ads, I came across a two-page ad, in the style of its time (a la Norman Rockwell) with a headline of something like "The City Will Never Be the Same" which was the comment of an older couple, in the1920s, watching a young neighbor driving off in his new Model T. As we all know, the impact of the automobile on traditional center cities is still being felt today. (My joke is that modern-day Detroit is exactly what the auto industry intended to have happen to center cities.)