Tuesday, 4/29/97 Conspiracy theory doesn’t match up to reality
Truth about streetcar decline more prosaic, complex than commonly
held
By Gene Kim This counterpoint article is written in response to
Jonathan Ritter’s viewpoint piece, "Traffic problems in the L.A.
area can be alleviated by supporting public transportation
projects," which appeared in the Daily Bruin on April 21, 1997. In
this piece, Mr. Ritter offers a pop history of urban transportation
in Los Angeles and problematizes urban transportation in Los
Angeles today … While I would agree with Mr. Ritter’s general
conclusion that L.A. desperately needs a more balanced approach to
urban transportation, his discussion of the historical factors
contributing to the current crisis in urban transportation is
entirely off the mark and misrepresents the essential causes,
consequences and implications of financial decline of the L.A.
streetcar system. According to Mr. Ritter, prior to WWII, L.A. and
every other major city in the United States "moved to the silent
hum of public transportation, usually in the form of electric
streetcars, trains and trolleys. Los Angeles had the largest
electric train system in the world at the time. It linked the
entire metropolitan area and carried some 80 million passengers
…" Mr. Ritter then trots out the official version of "Great
Conspiracy Theory," alleging that General Motors led a silent
conspiracy against "enemy No. 1" (i.e. the streetcar industry) by
forming a holding company whose primary responsibilities were to
buy up streetcar systems, tear up tracks, replace streetcars with
buses, and run these transit systems into the ground. By
systematically destroying the viability of the streetcar system
(presumably by replacing streetcars with inferior diesel buses),
this conspiratorial action established the automobile as the
dominant mode of inter-urban travel in the post-industrial L.A.
After being found guilty of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act,
the powerful automobile lobby then moved on to pressure the federal
government into passing the National Defense and Interstate Highway
Act in 1956, which inaugurated the investment of billions of
dollars into the interstate highway system and the age of
automobile dependence. This history is powerful in its simplicity.
It’s an epic story about a monopolistic corporate cabal
cannibalizing a scarce local public good in the name of greed. It’s
appealing because, at its core, it’s a tragedy with an
unforgettable conclusion: GM, Greyhound Bus Lines, Firestone Tire
and Rubber, Mack Manufacturing, Standard Oil of California and
Phillips Petroleum caused the smog-filled, congested conditions of
our city of Angels. There are two major problems with the story,
however: 1. it lets the rest of society off the hook, and 2. the
Great Transportation Conspiracy (at least as it relates to L.A.) is
a myth. Contrary to Mr. Ritter’s claim, there was no such thing as
"public transit" in L.A. in the pre-war era. The Pacific Electric
(PE) streetcar system – which featured the infamous "Big Red Car" –
was a private venture owned by Harry Huntington, one of
California’s most legendary and notorious real estate barons.
Huntington entered the streetcar business in the 1880s and financed
massive infrastructure investments in outlying areas of L.A. County
as a tool for real estate speculation. It is important to note here
that the private streetcar system, whose rates were regulated by
public utility commissions, was designed primarily to serve private
developmental interests. The folks who operated these streetcars
were not government administrators charged with the task of
providing public transit, like they are today. They were privately
held companies who were in it to make money hand over fist. By the
mid-1920s, the private streetcar system began to experience severe
financial difficulty in part because the PE unleashed the growth of
a low-density, decentralized urban environment whose inhabitants’
travel needs were better served by the increasingly affordable
automobile. Also, because PE was not allowed to raise fares to
compensate for dwindling farebox receipts caused by declining
ridership, it could not maintain and upgrade the physical stock
over time. As ridership continued to fall, farebox receipts
declined, and the quality, frequency and reliability of service
fell. Between 1910 and 1930, the financial health of PE worsened as
this cycle of distress continued. In a desperate attempt to stop
this financial hemorrhaging, PE began to replace its least
profitable routes with diesel buses. This process began 15 years
before GM-backed National City Lines Corporation even came on the
scene. To those involved, substituting buses was believed to be one
alternative strategy that might turn the industry around. It
didn’t, and the industry continued to decline until the last Red
Car ran in 1961. In this context, the story of urban transportation
in L.A. shapes up quite differently than Mr. Ritter’s more heroic
version. While there may have been a conspiracy to destroy transit
nationwide, the evidence clearly suggests that the financial
decline of PE was the result of political, economic and social
factors that, taken together, suggest that the financial collapse
of the streetcar system may have been an inevitable outcome. Even
if we were to accept Mr. Ritter’s proposition that GM did indeed
destroy L.A.’s private streetcar system, the so-called Conspiracy
Theory does not sufficiently explain why L.A. chose not to engage
in efforts to municipalize the failing private industry when
existing rights-of-ways were already in place. The city government
could have chosen to preserve a viable streetcar network, but it
didn’t. In contrast to cities like New York and Chicago, however,
the municipalization movement in L.A. never materialized because
political coalitions in outlying L.A. County cities regarded any
investment in a downtown-oriented rail system as a thinly veiled
attempt to restore the economic vitality of the downtown Central
Business District at the expense of outlying areas. Because this
impasse could not be resolved, L.A. opted instead to secure federal
funds for a more egalitarian roadway network that seemed to offend
none of the important stakeholders. This geopolitical conflict
between outlying jurisdictions and downtown Central Business
District interests has since played itself out in the struggle to
develop a politically viable region-wide rail transit plan, one
that meets with the political approval of influential outlying
constituencies in the San Fernando Valley, the Westside, Pasadena
and East L.A. It is this very geopolitical dynamic that has given
rise to the territorial conflict among competing MTA board members
over routing investments. Mr. Ritter is correct in suggesting that
the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, which gives
urban areas greater funding flexibility, should be reauthorized.
What Mr. Ritter fails to recognize, however, is that MTA’s public
appeal for the reauthorization of Intermodal Surface Transportation
Efficiency Act is little more than a thinly-veiled attempt to
pressure Congress into giving MTA at least as much rail transit
money as it got back in 1991. It should be pointed out that the
federal transportation appropriations bill, while it sets broad
programmatic goals and policies, is about MONEY, i.e. who gets
what, and how much. It’s a high-stakes game in which MTA stands to
win or lose hundreds of millions of dollars over the next five
years. Because MTA has proven that it is unable to build a viable
rail transit system without compromising its bread-and-butter bus
service to central city transit-dependent populations, we should
frame our appeals to Congress very carefully. The harsh reality is
that spending $10 billion on rail transit is not going to fix
L.A.’s traffic problems. As long as we underprice the social costs
of automobility, traffic congestion will always be an inevitable
outcome no matter how much we spend on alternative modes of
transportation. The only way congestion can be alleviated is if
motorists are forced to pay the full social cost of urban travel.
Only then will alternative options like public transit, biking and
walking become more appealing to more folks than just students
living on fixed incomes. For a society so attached to the freedom
of unrestrained automobility, however, this realization is a bitter
pill to swallow, and few are prepared to do so, especially here in
L.A. Kim is a doctoral student in the department of urban planning
in the School of Public Policy and Social Research.