kidmercury

If analytics are to be believed, we have more regular readers from Los Angeles than any other city. So this blog post is for the LA kids.


As most Americans know, even those who like myself have never been to LA, Los Angeles has serious traffic problems. Too many cars, too much smog, too much traffic. It's remarkably inefficient.

How did it get to be this way? CL News explains (emphasis mine):

The rise of the automobile was accompanied by the collapse of public transportation. Public transit did not shrink because of its inability to economically compete with the car. There was a campaign by the auto-industrial complex to defeat and bury public transportation.

At the beginning of the 1920s, 90% of travel was by rail, chiefly electric rail. Only one in 10 Americans owned a car. Virtually every city and town in America with more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system. General Motors used its massive profits over a 30-year period to kill these light rail systems. GM bought up rail companies and ran them into the ground. They also introduced bus lines that would follow the same route as trains and trams, offering lower fares. The extensive light rail systems of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, San Diego and Oakland were all smashed by GM money.

Los Angeles, as the youngest of America’s mega cities, may have fared the worst of all. The Los Angeles Railway operated the majority of the city’s 1500 streetcars. In May 1945, GM’s front organization, American City Lines, bought 59% of LA Railway’s stock. In the same month LA Railway announced its plane to scrap most of its streetcar lines.