General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy

This is false, revisionist history. During the war maintenance was deferred and many operators either went bankrupt or dramatically reduced operations. By the time the war ended the tracks and rolling stock were all in need of replacement. The public did not love streetcars for many reasons. The ride was rough, they were boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another. Insufficient capacity meant it was not…

I researched this one pretty deeply once, and the full story was a bit more complicated than at surface level: - Streetcars of the time were very uneconomical and surprisingly dangerous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tram_accidents They were not very comparable to modern light rail. - Upgrading/modernizing them would not have been as straightforward as people would think. Think SF's cable cars - everything was small scale, regional, and not-interoperable. - GM et al establishing a trust was not about…

A couple of fascinating takeaways from this that don't get brought up very often when the conspiracy is mentioned: - Streetcars were already failing when GM and their cohorts swooped in. They just accelerated the collapse and took advantage of it to enrich themselves. In fact, the reason GM's puppet was able to acquire and shut down all these streetcar companies was because the industry was dying, and the owners of those wanted to sell before the bottom fell out…

Related: the first consumer electric vehicle, the EV1.