Right! Did GM pay for this video

@@agy234 Money like water finds a way .

@@agy234 no. GM is bankrupt.

@@sm3675 again!?

LMAO it’s hilarious leftists don’t care about good urbanism unless u can blame a corporation and absolve individuals of responsibility

I agree. It's public infrastructure. Well meaning urban planners try to place transit projects "in competition" with car travel without reconciling the delta between the two.

Our cities would be much more efficiently built if people had to pay the true cost of the trip. No subsidies, the longer the trip the more you'll pay. Revenue would be used to pay for operator and maintenance wages and the infrastructure, and to make a profit if the system is run privately. This applies to every mode of transport. Transport could still be publicly owned, it would just have to break even in the long term. In a city where jobs are mainly concentrated in a few locations, there would be a limit for the length of a sustainable commute, because after a certain point it would be uneconomical to travel any farther. This would naturally limit the size and sprawl of cities.

@@Tuppoo94 The problem with that is then you have the wealthy being subsidized by the poor. People who live further away are almost universally poorer than those in the city center. Flat fares like in New York or Paris are far more equitable.

you are forgetting its also buses and later airlines played a bigger part to this too. buses especially because getting a fleet a buses looked way more attractive and modern at the time compared to streetcars

@@SeedemFeedemRobots and GM was the manufacturer who built the busses

GM had contacts in LA pay blacks to ride the trains and get in trouble on purpose in white neighborhoods in order to sway public opinion against mass transit in general.

Please read Stanley I. Fischler's "Moving Millions"; this good book will explain what went wrong with passenger rail, especially municipal electric railways. There's a particular focus on Robert Moses, Fiorello LaGuardia, and General Motors and Ford.

@@user-dj7wv5ok2x Pretty sure trolls like that don't read... Just angrily mash keys together until you get a word salad...

this is true and i agree it was mostly market forces but the federal government was putting lots of money into roads/highways but not into mass transit so there is that angle...wasn't 100% fair but also was not 100% conspiracy as roger rabbit claims

Agree with @chromebomb above. There were certainly market forces involved, only the deck was stacked against the street cars. They were gradually eroded by first allowing car traffic on the tracks and then losing signaling priority. All of this was done on a legislative level via lobbying by car companies and oil companies. Eventually, the streetcars became viewed as some oldtimey dinosaur which had to be painlessly put down and forgotten. That's when people stopped riding them and they died a "natural" economic death after that. But the crux of it all is that it was the auto lobby, which then as now included a bunch of private auto enthusiasts, that lobbied the street cars out of relevance. And then of course they went out of business.

@@chromebomb And who was behind that? The private companies making money on the roads. Like bailed out GM a dirty toxic company.

That is not what the fine was for. From Wikipedia's page on the topic: "In 1949, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, GM, and Mack Trucks were convicted of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies controlled by NCL; they were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the ownership of these companies. The verdicts were upheld on appeal in 1951.[40] GM was fined $5,000 and GM treasurer H.C. Grossman was fined $1." They were fined for having a monopoly on BUSES AND BUS PARTS. Nothing directly related to the streetcars, which, as mentioned in the video, were losing money and no longer could function as loss leaders for land sellers.

@@Geotpf That's just semantics. The reality is that GM and their cronies bought up businesses which provided a useful public service and killed them off so that they can have more business and make more money. Would the US streetcar systems have died of their own accord? Certainly possible, but keep in mind that we had much more extensive streetcar networks than many cities in Europe. Those cities still have their streetcars today even though their systems were weaker. We have practically none of these streetcar systems.

Because of General Motors

Seattle’s new NHL team is taking advantage of the location of the Arena(Uptown/Lower Queen Anne neighborhood, where Century21 was held) to promote transit use. Fans transfer from light rail to the monorail. I thought our minor league franchise would have a historic connection, but the Pacific Electric never got to the Coachella Valley.

They should bring them back. LA traffic is the worse.

@@WONtothaG and Ford

@@sm3675 Yup facts

Believe or not Metro's Rail Lines revived part of the system Especially the Blue and Red Lines.....thought there still a ton of lines that are not revived by Metro and sit vacant or has a freeway in it's place.

I hope LA Metro does what’s needed to make that possible and their future plans do look somewhat ambitious (they have room to be even more ambitious though). It seems like LA is banking on light rail which might not be enough to serve LA’s population needs but considering the trouble that the city has experienced trying to just build out one subway line, having a light rail network in place would be far better than having no network at all.

@@jarjarbinks6018 Considering how expansive The Red Car was and how many right-of-ways are left over, the ambition of Metro's plans make sense.

PACIFIC ELECTRIC WAS KILLED BY CORPRATE GREED ! GM , ARCO , FIRESTONE , NCL AND CALTRANS ! THIS IS THE CONSPRIRACY THAT MOST TRY TO DENY , BUT IF YOU READ BETWEEN THE LINES YOU WILL SEE THE TRUTH ! TRUE PE LOST MONEY BUT THAT WAS DUE TO TRAFFIC , LACK OF GOVERNMENT SUPPORT , POOR MAINTENACE OF RIGHTS OF WAY , EQUIPMENT POOR MANAGEMENT , COOPERATION WITH THE FREIGHT RAILROADS THE CITIES THAT PE SERVED , NATIONAL COACH LINES , CALTRANS AND NUMEROUS OTHER LAND DEVELOPERS !

@@johnrobertfox7775 they were glad to see it go but they weren’t the catalyst. Pacific electric was beginning to lose money on routes that were designed for property investment gains in mind and as car traffic became more common streetcars became slower and would often get cut off by private vehicles. Roads were subsidized by property taxes and gas taxes while streetcars were entirely privately funded, taxed by local governments, and frequently targeted/broken up by local government for being regional monopolies. Local governments forced streetcars to not raise fairs meaning that they couldn’t perform the maintenance required to keep the routes running as inflation ate into their purchasing power which culminated in streetcars being perceived as slow, inefficient, dirty, and unsafe due to people frequently having to get off at stops in the middle of car traffic (very dangerous as cars got faster). The streetcar system should have gotten optimized for the future but instead every player wanted to kill it, not just GM

Perhaps he was referring to the failure of every single ballot proposition related to public transit in LA County until Proposition A in November 1980. There were proposals in the 1920s, 1940s, and 1950s. Each was defeated by the voters who didn't want to pay for it.

​@@derek20laThey were swayed by the Los Angeles Times, which has been a decidedly anti-rail newspaper for decades until just recently.

Yet technically it was private transit. Built and owned by private corporations, yet heavily regulated and controlled by the state government. PE was required to provide certain levels of service, required to have two-trainmen per car, but couldn't raise fares to cover costs. Only at the very end of operations did public agencies assume control. When TWA airlines (or Wow! or Primera Air) collapsed due to no money, did anyone demand they continue operations "to serve the public good"? No of course not! Why would PE be any different? Why does everyone keep thinking they should operate as a charity, because "trains are cool"?

​@@derek20laSimple! Trains aren't automobiles like buses are, and if the system(s) were maintained, the area wouldn't be suffering from the effects of too many stuperhighways wasting precious land space where people should be living....

History

It looks like some of the core parts of the system have been rebuilt and the future plans look pretty ambitious too. Seems like the system will be improving over the next decade and more. If they limit the amount of grade separation it will be even better I figure

​@@jarjarbinks6018"Limit grade separation"?! It's precisely the grade separation that keeps the rails and road apart!!

They aren’t

@@justaP42DC that's a bummer

@@2022streetbobwheelies however there is some tracks that are still in use

@@justaP42DC That's not true. The Metro is basically running on a lot of the same rights of way. It's not the same thing, but it is very similar. And they want to expand it to essentially match and exceed the streetcar old system.

​@@TohaBgood2Unfortunately, the system presently under construction would NEVER match the Red and Yellow Car systems....

Standard Oil, not Stander Oil

Not really true either, transit companies were going bankrupt left right and centre. Busses were much cheaper to run and maintain at the time so it looked like everyone would win...

Nope. NCL controlled fewer than 50 streetcar systems of the thousands of systems once operated in the US. Cheap cars and gasoline, and cheaper used cars killed the streetcars. NCL was a vulture, not a lion.

Scrapped, and not scraped....

​@@romanbukins6527And just WHY were they going bankrupt?! Because of municipal legislation demanding that the electric municipal railways pave the streets in which they had trackage AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE without assistance from any governmental levels. Furthermore, those same municipal governments demanded that the electric railways not raise their fares to offset their losses. And then in 1935, the Public Utilities Holding Company Trust Act came along, forcing the electric railways to sell their power plants to established utilities....

Can you really still find the old tram tracks? Would like to see it one day!

@@hassanalihusseini1717 yea you can, a lot of it is paved over

That and many abandoned freight lines that used to go to industrial areas which have since been re-zoned and redeveloped.

@@WoodsBeatle We still have some paved over tracks in downtown Denver. And I remember when we had electric busses too!

It’s not that. In The Bay Area we even have the traffic priority systems installed in some places and in some trains and busses. The car lobby is extremely strong and prevents it from being used. We could literally just turn the system on and it would work on some intersections by tonight. But they just refuse to do it. Even in the hippy-dippy Bay Area!

Not sure why you associate this with intelligence...

That is interesting the last trams here until 2004 was in 1959 with the end of the Howth hill service. There are calls to bring it back.

L.A was never civilized or clean its always been sleazy listen to Orson Wellles interviews.

GM went after Santa Fe passenger trains. They bankrupted the national private rail system Oct 1967 by getting the Post Office to put the mail and packages on TRUCKS. Cut back underfund Amtrak was the result.

Climate change issues too.

@@intercityrailpal climate change will not stop by building streetcars, but pollution will lessen, traffic will lessen, and the streetscape will look better.

@@sm3675 I agree, there just is too much air travel and it causes most of it.

Nah. Not no parking anywhere. Not “no parking anywhere.” Not ruins everything. Not “ruins everything.” /

​@@intercityrailpalAir travel can be greatly reduced if there were more HIGH SPEED RAIL....

@Knife Hunter no they were streetcars but they ran on their own separate tracks like modern light rail does, and because of that they were called interurbans.

The red cars were operated by Pacific Electric, which was a private company. Which meant that unless the county bought the company, tax money couldn't be used to fund the system.

hong kong mtr makes profit to the point it gives money to the hong kong government instead of the other way around

@@jeanmatthews3899 Yeah, but by American standards they are still subsidized just in other ways. For example, they make the bulk of their money from real estate not ticket sales. But if you look at it from another perspective, transit infrastructure usually does not generate enough in use fees to sustain itself. But it does generate tons of benefits in adjacent economies. In Hong Kong they just let transit infrastructure capture those benefits from adjacent economies. This makes the management of the system particularly sensitive to maximizing those benefits and everybody wins. We could do the same in this country, but you would effectively have to give transit systems a bunch of land adjacent to their stations. I assume you would have to eminent domain it, I dunno. Alternatively, you could do what they do in the Bay Area, where BART got special development rights for slightly taller buildings on their properties. So if they buy a property, they can theoretically build more densely and make more money than a private developer could. Not as good as the HK system, but it is at least something. But as you can imagine, the locals are screaming bloody murder (shadows, traffic, undesirables in their communities, etc.) when this happens, so maybe not the most practical system for our current legal and social norms.

Prior to the 1960's (when governments really started to get involved), almost all transit companies were private businesses expecting to turn a profit.

@@Geotpf Wrong. Many cities started publicly owned competitors to existing private transit companies. This was done because after much consolidation cities usually ended up with just one or two major operators which promptly proceeded to use their monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic position to hike up transit fees. There really are a few very distinct phases in the "prior to the 1960's" era. It's not monolithic at all. Also, geographic differences were quite stark in terms of how the various systems id different cities were formed and functioned. I doubt you'll be able to shoehorn everything into "private businesses." In some places these businesses were so heavily regulated that they were essentially a franchise of the government. In other places someone just mounted rails in the middle of major thoroughfares without permission and started running a service!

Dieseleized - Why not just diesel?

​@@cappsginny699most of their freight trains had used the overhead wires

San Francisco is a small bottleneck peninsula compared to Los Angeles, which is a giant sprawl. It makes sense that San Francisco kept them, just like small European towns have. Los Angeles in the other hand out grew the use of trolleys.

@@Blue-jd8jf Actually - real estate investors lobbied for height restrictions and single family zoning as it increased home values. Streetcars were added to get people to these new neighborhoods before cars were affordable. Then came the invention of the assembly line for the automobile in 1913 and the huge federal investment in highways and roads after WW II. There really was no going back to high density, walkable neighborhoods. LA didn't lose their trolleys because they "outgrew them"., This was a planned loss because people wanted to sell higher priced homes and expensive cars. Now, is that a bad thing? Not really technically because the US has always been pro-business. But it's a shame that thousands to millions of people sit through hours of traffic everyday in LA and just continue to live their lives as if this wasn't part of the masterplan devised a century ago.

Bullseye!!!!

Two to be precise, with one being extended. And four light rail lines, three of which partly run on the old streetcar rights of way, one being extended, with two new ones under construction. Plus Metrolink commuter rail throughout all of greater LA.

@@Geotpf plus I read they're building a tunnel under the city to connect the southern and western light rail lines with the one in the northeast metro area.

In many German cities, including Hamburg, Aachen and the western half of Berlin, trams were also replaced by buses in the 1960s and 70s

That is true but the UK regrets the it now and many towns and cities across the UK are building new tram systems

Unfortunately, we all participated in this, or at least our counterparts who were alive at the time did. Everyone really thought that we can just all use cars to get everywhere, and that eventually those will be replaced by pods or flying cars or something similarly 50's sci-fi. As it turned out, this only works when a minority of the population can afford cars and we are now forced to go back to public transit. But at the time, this was literally what everybody thought and actively lobbied for. Hopefully, we can return to sanity soon, but some people are not very willing to swallow their pride and dump cars on the trash heap of history.

@@TohaBgood2 No kidding. Gas is $4.50 to the gallon and ppl still refuse to take mass transit or ride a bike and I still see SUVs and big pick up trucks driving around. Our politicians still prioritize the car over anything else though in the last decade things have gotten better.

What did they leave out?

Private companies sold the unprofitable streetcar lines to GM and other companies. The streetcars were never run as a government-operated public service, so the public lost nothing that they owned. In a properly functioning market the destruction of the streetcars was inevitable. The reason why there are so few light rail lines in L.A. today is that at best only a few of them have any chance of breaking even at prices which people are willing to pay.

Go to Europe and tell them you think metro systems are in any way similar to horse and buggies lmao, you'll be laughed back to the US