Anyone else remember that O. Roy Chalk bought the D.C. trolley system in 1955 and tried to promote it, but the D.C. government, WaPo and the Senate District Committee refused to allow that, and replaced it with buses? Picture D.C. today with an electric above ground system instead of those fuming behemoths - of course, now there's the Metro, but it makes occasional stops only - and we might have still had both.
So last night I chanced by PBS's History Detectives, on a review of how the Cleveland, OH trolleys suffered a similar fate. Then watched in horror as the report pointed out that the very political personages who'd worked to let go of the trolley to the gas belch had later been rewarded by GM. Of course, collusion was never proven, but the pattern occurred in one city after another.
Let me confess, though, I hate to see GM show up as an evil abuser of the environment - I have investments there.
The text is pdf, you can read it if you like, but I'll transcribe the (forgive me) "money" part.
Wes: Black shows me how GM tried to monopolize bus sales around the country.
Edwin: This is an internal document from National City Lines. It says "I am enclosing a GM survey of Tampa, Florida, together with a map of Tampa's streetcar system showing the streetcar routes together with a summary of their schedules." From that they began to map out exactly how many buses it would take to convert them. Tampa was typical of the way GM operated.
Wes: Black says once they understood the local system, GM and its partners would fund the purchase of the streetcar line.
Pant, pant, pant, sorry, I'm not used to all that going back and forth and typing, which is why I don't like pdf documents. But it is as close to proof of complicity as anyone had gotten in all the attempts since 1949, evidently, to establish that streetcars had been targetted for replacement by GM, Standard Oil and Firestone tires to use their products instead, and lock in decades of profits. GM et al. claimed that market forces brought about their demise.
They used graft, paid off politicians willing to exchange the public trust for their own personal gain. The Duke Cunninghams don't just rob the public to fill their trough, they subvert the controls put in place to keep the safety of the public, and their future best interests, protected by our government. Deregulation has more than just the present in mind, it looks to future wastrel practices, and practicers.
Of all the unintended consequences of crimes, global warming is the scariest. Do we have some idea now of why oil, and its related, industries are so adamant against that concept?
(this post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com )
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If corporations can be persons, why not ecosystems?
Then, when a corporation kills an ecosystem, as happened here, we can impose the corporate death penalty. (Sorry about the investment, Ruth -- how would you suggest this be implemented?)
I think the same thing happened to the Big Red cars in Detroit.
Turns out those trolley tracks and the investment were pretty sensible, and we wish we had them back.
If all the interurbans hadn't been destroyed in the 30s, we'd have some alternative to the highways already in place.
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
It happened all over the U.S.
There was an interurban from N.TX to Dallas, it's been torn down, replaced with gasbelchers, and now the DART rail is rebuilding. But in the meantime, the environment sucked up fumes. Hey, I'll lose the money if GM goes down, but until I happened on this mess, I tho't GM was turning around and starting to build more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Damn.
Ruth
Ruth
Since we don't have quotes anymore
(when did that go bye-bye, btw? I know i haven't been around much lately, and am not the most alert person even when i am, but ???) anyway...
and even relevant in a slideways sort of way to the topic at hand, an item I was going to put in the Quotes queue for permanent record but will instead put in ephemeral form here. From an Atrios thread:
Then all of a sudden they fail to see just how these two things are equated.
shrimplate
Heh. indeedy.
Quotes...
Sorry about that. There's something with the throttle; it turns off modules, and then, somehow, they don't get turned back on. It's now back on. Sorry, I haven't been the most alert person in the world on this, either...
Very appropriate
Funny thing, shrimplate told me about a documentary some time back about the elimination of L.A.'s trolley to put in fumespewers, and said "We will rue the day." Oh, yeh.
Ruth
Ruth
If it works, dismantle it
Circa 1927 image of L.A. River & Hyperion Bridge. The view is looking north from up behind Riverside Drive. In the distance are the Verdugo hills and San Gabriel Mountains. On the west is the eastern end of the Santa Monica mountains in Griffith Park.
On the right one can see the Red Car trolley tracks and supports as they cross the river. The tracks are long gone, but the supports (just south of the bridge) remain to this day, an abstract form of Easter Island...?
Today Interstate 5 (aka the Golden State Freeway in these parts) runs parallel (less than forty yards west) to the river in this section of the Silverlake/Los Feliz/Atwater Village
triangle. I live in AV, a short walk from the Hyperion Bridge.
Glendale Blvd. is very wide in AV as the trolley used to pass through on its way towards downtown. Mass Profit vs. Mass Transit = Massive Mistakes.
Original non-cropped image from here.
Trivia: Walt Disney's first animation studio was just a few blocks from the top of the Hyperion Bridge. Outside of Gelson's near Hyperion & Griffith Park Dr. a plaque commemorates this bit of Hollywood history. An exterior scene from "Roger Rabbit" (which wove the dismantling of the trolley line into its story) utilized the bridge itself, whose features still capture 20s and 30s L.A. And just for fun: at least two of our local gangs include "Toonerville" in their monikers.
++++
Yes, that's the magic of the marketplace
Puts me in mind of he latest on the new NOLA levees. First they claim to reduce flooding by 5.5 feet, but then it turns out the real figure is only six inches.
Honestly, it's like they're trying to collect a few billion and destroy the city in the process.
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Book Citation
Edwin Black's _Internal Combustion_ covers the GM/Firestone conspiracy to dismantle the trolley systems all across the country. Among other things. Lotsa stuff in there to get exercised about.
BTW, GM was convicted of conspiracy in the LA case. They were even fined. It was $5000.
Solar is civil defense