Sunday, May 15, 2005
Roger Rabbit Unframed
The University of California Institute of Transportation Studies publishes yet another refutation of the myth that General Motors destroyed American streetcar systems in order to force people to drive. It is amazing this myth has lived on for so long, so one more refutation is a good thing.
This one comes from transportation researcher Lyn Long at UC Irvine and she makes a couple of new points. First, she notes that many streetcar lines were originally built by real estate developers to entice people to move to the suburbs. The cost of the streetcar line was not covered by fares but by home sales, so it was not likely that fares would be able to cover the cost of rebuilding the lines a few decades later. More important, by the time the lines needed to be rebuilt, most of the people in the suburbs had acquired automobiles and so they weren't riding the streetcars anyway.
Long also debunks "transit nostalgia," the idea that we once enjoyed a golden age of transit that we let slip through our fingers by buying automobiles. In reality, she says, streetcar companies "were reviled as monopolistic and greedy operators whose trolleys were filthy and so slow that sometimes it was faster to walk."
In the end, Long believes the car is here to stay, and warns that few proposed rail projects in California are likely to succeed. Rail-transit advocates are "fighting a mode that has beat out all other technologies," Long concludes. "We'll never be a transit-dependent society."
This one comes from transportation researcher Lyn Long at UC Irvine and she makes a couple of new points. First, she notes that many streetcar lines were originally built by real estate developers to entice people to move to the suburbs. The cost of the streetcar line was not covered by fares but by home sales, so it was not likely that fares would be able to cover the cost of rebuilding the lines a few decades later. More important, by the time the lines needed to be rebuilt, most of the people in the suburbs had acquired automobiles and so they weren't riding the streetcars anyway.
Long also debunks "transit nostalgia," the idea that we once enjoyed a golden age of transit that we let slip through our fingers by buying automobiles. In reality, she says, streetcar companies "were reviled as monopolistic and greedy operators whose trolleys were filthy and so slow that sometimes it was faster to walk."
In the end, Long believes the car is here to stay, and warns that few proposed rail projects in California are likely to succeed. Rail-transit advocates are "fighting a mode that has beat out all other technologies," Long concludes. "We'll never be a transit-dependent society."
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