Most cities had laws requiring trolley systems to have two men operate streetcars. Busses could operate with one man. Also,busses required no overhead wire or track maintinence.This made busses cheaper to operate than trolleys.This is the main reason cities switched over.
GM and the others including their point man, Grossman were found guilty of criminal conspiracy in a federal court of law. GM and their fellow convicted corporate conspirators did not orchestrate and incorporate this front agency just to apply un needed euthenasia to an already terminally ill industry that would have died on it’s own. To anyone who would say electric public transport would have faded away of it’s own accord one would find that the fact is GM and the others would have taken strong
objection to that theory as demonstrated by their subsequent actions. These national corporations went to such great lengths to tilt the odds in their favor, it wasn’t likely they were expecting to win in a fair game. This is history as a moving target inasmuch the final chapter has yet to be written. From the post WW2 era to date only fifty years + have passed. Not much time in the larger frame of our history as a nation… History is still a moving target. Every year a new light rail system comes on line or a major expansion has taken place. Oil is becoming an increasingly precious commodity that takes alot of national security dollars out of this taxpayer’s pockets to insure it’s availability. Put your money on the table and place your bets. GM is barely breaking even these days. Where I live, they practically do everything but give them away to move their inventory. All of us who were there when the North Shore Line was taken to the boneyard in 1963 for a corporate tax windfall and the asking price was the cost of adding a couple of miles of lanes to the interstate, the GM story had a epilog.
Year after year, plan after plan, study after study they ponder reinstalling afew miles of it’s former right of way that they have no money to rebuild. And every day, you can stand on the scar of a path that once hosted 80 mph interurbans and witness the ajacent expressway as a rush hour parking lot that is efficent for burning expensive gas in idle by hundreds if not thousands of cars five days a week that inch t
If you think that’s bad, there is a version of the same photo with colorized flames![:0][B)][}:)][:(!][V][xx(]
http://wendylouwho.com/iblog/B1732772532/C2073835968/E1126670546/index.html
If any of you were IEEE members back then, what was their stance on this? Also, what, if anything, did the electric utility industry do or say about it? They would have lost some revenue with the conversion.
George
The electric utility industry was forced by anti-trust legislation (ironic, considering that organizations like NCL constituted violations of anti-trust legislation in and of themselves) to divest their public-railway holdings. The argument was that if a power company owned a trolley line they could sell them power at a lower rate, thus preventing competition.
An example was Pacific Gas & Electric’s trolley line in Sacramento, CA. On one hand, they were forced to sell their PG&E trolley line to National City Lines’ subsidiary Pacific City Lines in 1943. The newly-created Sacramento City Lines switched from trolleys to buses in 1946, as soon as the end of World War II permitted purchase of new buses.
On the other hand, PG&E bought a number of buses in 1939 and was only running three trolley lines at the time of the sale–buses had taken over the rest of the lines. And, apparently, the trolley line never made a great deal of money anyhow–so its sale was not considered a great loss to PG&E.
One point that was brought up earlier and most of us tend to overlook was how tightly the street railways and rapid transit companies were regulated. Fares and service were determined by franchise requirements and state commerce commission orders, which rarely allowed income to make it to the bottom line. A fair number of operators were making enough money to continue existing operations but not enough to allow for upgrading or replacement of equipment (Depreciation is an expense for a reason). When ridership declined, operating losses grew and conversion to buses or municipalization were all but inevitable.
Private ownership and operation of muncipal public transit without government subsidy probably doesn’t exist in this country any more, and there are lot more reasons for this situation than a dark conspiracy among the powers that be.