Urban
areas have always had a need for mass transit, and competition among different
forms of mass transit has been fierce.
When horse drawn omnibuses first began to run in London, for example,
the government gave preference to the older, established trams and began
enforcing a law which forbade the picking up and dropping off of
passengers. This forced omnibus drivers
to chain themselves to their vehicles to keep the police from arresting them. The pattern of governmental interference and
unfair competition has continued throughout the modern era, but early in this
century took an ominous turn in the United States, a turn which has had
unfortunate consequences that continue through today.
The
United States was a leader in mass transit innovation throughout the nineteenth
and early twentieth century. As a
result, the eastern seaboard and most of the major cities throughout the rest
of the country had transit systems that were the envy of the world.
To
be effective, mass transit depends on large concentrations of people. It should come as no surprise that mass
transit has always been important to New York City. During the 1800's, horse drawn omnibuses were widely used,
becoming so common they clogged the city streets. At one point an omnibus would pass by city hall, every fifteen
seconds. When the horse drawn trains,
known as horsecars, began to compete with the omnibuses for passengers and
rights of way, they were opposed by means of newspaper editorials and attempted
injunctions. Opponents of subways were
more sophisticated; William Marcy "Boss" Tweed, a New York State
senator who received financial support from the omnibus owners, blocked early
attempts at building subways.
While
horsecars were very popular they could not be used on much of a grade; hence
the cable car. Cable cars are propelled
by gripping a continuously moving steel cable, and were developed for use in
hilly areas that were not suitable for horse drawn omnibuses. Cable cars have their drawbacks: the gripmen
have to be vigilant and strong to keep the trolleys from racing down hills and
jumping the tracks, and the cables were subject to breakage. The cable cars enjoyed much success in
cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco, but
newer and better technology soon superseded them.
Inventors
soon began experimenting with running trolleys by means of electricity, with
the first successful trolley line operating in Baltimore. This new technology began to spread like wildfire
and within five years over one hundred fifty electric trolley lines were
running all along the eastern seaboard.
By 1917, around 80,000 trolley cars were running on 45,000 miles of
track all across the country and carrying around 11 billion passengers per
year.
About
this time, the automobile began to be a serious competitor of the trolley. In 1916, only 3.6 million cars were in
use. By 1921, this number had risen to
over 9 million, and reached 16 million by 1924. As automobile use increased, municipalities began to grant
preferential rights of way to them. This
led to disruptions in scheduled trolley service as cars and trolleys competed
for the same space. This coupled with
competition from buses caused trolley ridership to decline.
Realizing
the industry's existence was on the line the trolley owners banded together to
develop a standardized trolley for use throughout the country that would meet
the challenge to the industry. The
result was the PCC car, a quiet and comfortable trolley car that could
outperform the new mass transit alternative, the bus. With the success of the PCC car and other similarly advanced vehicles,
trolley ridership increased 33 percent.
By
this time, no one expected the car to go away, but at the same time, cars were
an expensive luxury. Mass transit was
an inexpensive alternative for the young and the poor. The only real competition for the trolley
system was the bus, but the bus had some real disadvantages. Buses are complex compared to trolleys. An internal combustion engine is made up of
hundreds of moving parts with hundreds of points of wear, while the electric
traction engine has only ten points of wear.
An internal combustion engine develops its maximum torque at a
relatively high rpm and thus requires a transmission; an electric motor
develops maximum torque at zero rpm so an electric vehicle can be much simpler. Buses cost less initially than trolleys but
cost more to maintain. "Diesel
buses have 28 percent shorter economic lives, 40 percent higher operating
costs, and 9 percent lower productivity than electric buses." In the 1920’s, the average economic life of
a bus was 5 years while trolleys lasted for 20 years. By 1971, the useful life of buses has risen from 5 to a maximum
of 20 years, but the useful life of a trolley has risen from 20 to a maximum of
40 years.
In
1955, the Washington D.C. trolley system made $1,600,000 while the D.C. bus
system lost $1,100,000, demonstrating the relative economic viability of the
competing systems. A 1936 survey of
rider preference showed the trolley was preferable to the bus by a 35 to 1
margin. Unlike trolleys, however, buses
require neither tracks nor overhead electric wires, and their routes are easily
changed. Since road construction costs
were subsidized, the capital costs of starting up a bus franchise were
initially much less than that of a trolley system. In addition, buses were newer and had the gleam of progress about
them.
None
of this should have outweighed the mass of data supporting the trolley. It should have been obvious that trolleys
were both economically viable and preferred over buses by huge margins---but
they died anyway. The reasons for their
demise are sometimes complex and vary from city to city, but much of the mass
transit of the United States was intentionally destroyed.
In
the 1920’s, city officials began to grant what had been previously uncontested
rights of way to automobiles. This
effectively ended reliably scheduled service.
In addition, fares were fixed at the old horsecar rate of 5 cents while
expenses kept climbing. Later, in a
series of moves that can only be described as political, city by city began to
restrict or eliminate trolley service.
In Salt Lake City the owners of the trolley franchise were forced as
terms of their franchise to help pay for paving streets. This added enormously to operating costs and
subsidized their competition. In
Pittsburgh, street repair programs were used as an excuse to tear up the tracks
and convert to bus service. Over the
vocal protests of his constituents, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia
ordered the Third Avenue Railroad Company to eliminate its trolleys in favor of
buses or lose its franchise. In
Washington D.C. after years of financial shenanigans on the part of the franchisee,
Capitol Lines, Congress stripped them of the franchise and designed a new
franchise with a provision that it be an all bus system. San Diego, which once ran a mix of bus and
trolley service, converted totally to bus service and began to hemorrhage
money. Cities justified all this based
on "progress." Buses, being
newer, must therefore be better.
In
1932 General Motors organized the United Cities Motor Transit (UCMT) company to
buy trolley systems, convert them to shiny new GM buses and sell the franchises
on the provision that the purchaser by replacements only from GM. UCMT converted three cities to buses by 1935
at which time the American Transit Association censured GM. In 1936, General Motors, Standard Oil of
California, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, B. F. Phillips Petroleum, and
Mack Manufacturing, maker of Mack trucks organized and financed National City
Lines, a holding company. At this time,
the United States still had 40,000 operating trolleys. National City Lines and its subsidiaries
began to operate in the same fashion as UMCT: buying up trolley lines, pulling
the cars out of service, tearing up the tracks, and converting to General
Motors buses. Once the conversion was complete,
the franchise holder would sell out with a provision precluding the return to
electric transportation, and the process would begin again somewhere else. In this manner, National City Lines
eventually eliminated forty-six systems in forty-five cities.
Perhaps
nowhere else was this as blatant and well documented as in California. Los Angeles has one of the worst traffic
problems in the United States; this is not surprising considering the number of
people who live there. What is more
surprising is the extent of what once was the Los Angeles mass transit
system. Los Angeles really had two
systems: the Big Red Cars and the Yellow Cars.
Together they totaled 3,000 cars with 1,160 miles of track radiating out
to fifty cities. The subtext of the
movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" was the destruction of this once
great mass transit system.
In
1938, National City Lines organized Pacific City Lines to eliminate the
electric transportation system. In 1940,
the process began with the acquisition and destruction of portions of the
Pacific Electric System. In 1944 of
National City Lines assigned American City Lines, (another affiliate,) the job
of converting Los Angeles to buses. They
purchased the downtown system, pulled cars out of service, disrupted the
trolley scheduling, tore down the power transmission lines, tore up the tracks,
and put GM buses into service.
No
story of the Los Angeles trolley system would be complete without mentioning
Harry Chandler. Mr. Chandler was the
owner of the Los Angeles Times; he was also in the board of the Goodyear Tire
and Rubber Company and had additional interests in road construction companies,
rock and gravel companies, and several oil companies. Mr. Chandler was also a director of the California Automobile
Club, a post he held for some 30 years.
The editorial policy of the Los Angeles Times reflected Mr. Chandler's
many interests with its support for the motorization of Los Angeles. Those who opposed "progress" were
labeled as communists. It is ironic
that when American City Lines pulled the last of the Red Cars out of service in
1963, the Los Angeles Times had begun to editorialize against air pollution.
The
San Francisco experience differed only in degree. San Francisco was a city without much surplus land to use for
roads and depended on its cablecars and its Key system, a system operating 230
electric trolleys and trains. Immediately
after acquiring controlling interest in the parent company of the Key system,
National City Lines announced its plans to replace the entire system with a
fleet of---you guessed it---General Motor’s buses. The Key system owned rights of way across the Golden Gate Bridge;
these rights of way were paved over to make way for cars and buses. San Francisco's recently developed light
rail system, (the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, generally known as BART,) had
no right of way across the Bay Bridge and was forced to tunnel under the bay at
a cost of $180 million.
In
1916, some 3.6 million cars were on the road at a time when most of the country’s
roads were unpaved. The fact that cars
were all the rage did not escape lawmakers, so in that same year the first
federal highway program was funded.
Between 1904 and 1940, the percentage of paved streets rose from around
9% to 47% of total mileage. This gave
drivers somewhere to go and the automotive population ballooned to 16 million
by 1924. In 1923 the National Highway
User's Conference, (now the Highway User's Federation for Safety and Mobility,
or HUFSAM, was formed by the president of General Motors to lobby for increased
highway construction and the exclusive use of highway tax revenues for highway
uses. For whatever reason the State of
California was especially vulnerable to this sort of manipulation. In 1938, the California amended its state
constitution to create the Highway Trust Fund, a fund designed to set aside tax
revenues for the exclusive use of the highway system. The results of this lobbying are clear. Between 1921 and 1971, (two years before the first energy
crisis,) the annual per capita highway expenditure increased from $13 to
$109. Accounting for the rise in the
population during those fifty years yields an even more pronounced spending
increase. Another telling phenomenon is
that between the years of 1945 and 1970 only 16 miles of subway was constructed
in the entire United States.
Contrary
to popular opinion, building more highways does nothing to relieve traffic
congestion. New highways initially ease
traffic congestion, but the rapid increase in highway use creates worse
congestion than before. When the
Interstate Highway system was proposed, one of the reasons it was routed
through the urban centers was as a means of relieving urban congestion. This failed to anticipate---by either
ignorance or design---this automotive subsidy would actually increase
traffic. Once the highways were built
the wealthy and the merely well off abandoned the urban centers for the
suburbs, leaving behind a blighted urban core.
The interstate highway system provided the initial impetus for the
growth of the suburbs, the death of the inner cities, and the development of
urban sprawl. This change in mobility
allowed the development of collections of suburbs like Los Angeles. The development of the highway system served
to increase the profits of the industrial giants at the expense of the cities.
Today
HUFSAM has over 2800 different lobbying organizations around the country whose
function is to prevent the use of highway uses for any use other than highway
maintenance and construction. They
outspend proponents of mass transit by 1000%.
The effect of this has been to force mass transit to compete with
general revenue for priority. Local and
state politicians have to balance the need for mass transit against the other
social programs that have proponents that are more vocal. As an example, California's Highway Trust
Fund did not pay a penny of the $792 million cost of the BART system. The taxpayers paid for BART through bonds
and property taxes. The Southern
California Rapid Transit District provides another example; Los Angeles County
was to have paid the $5 billion dollar cost with a hike in the sales tax.
As
the nation's highways are clogged with cars, as the nation's airways are choked
by pollution, as the country's lakes and forests are poisoned by acid rain, and
as the inner cities are decaying, it behooves us to look into possible
solutions. Solutions will not come
quickly. This problem has been in the
making for nearly seventy years and it would be naive to think it will
disappear overnight.
Once
we had a mass transit system, a system that was the envy of the world. This system was almost entirely a private
enterprise. What began the demise of
mass transit was the loss of rights of way.
When trolleys are forced to compete with the more mobile cars and trucks
for space, the trolley loses time. This
reduces the number of passengers per mile a trolley can carry. It plays havoc with the transit schedule. It also means that it can be quicker to get
somewhere using your own car than taking a trolley.
We
need to provide some incentives for private initiative. Cities should declare their intent to sell
rights of way for the purpose of constructing some form of mass transit. These enterprises should be described in terms
of function rather than design. In
other words, they should describe what the cities want them to do and not
prescribe how to do it. These
enterprises should be regulated as little as possible. Some federal involvement will be necessary
as some of the best routes will likely be over federal roads. Federal funds should also be diverted away
from the construction of new highways and into the maintenance of the existing
roadways. This will initially increase
rather than decrease traffic congestion, causing no little political
turmoil. However, some discomfort will
be required if we are to ever wean the cities away from cars. When the systems are constructed, it will be
quicker to get to where you are going via mass transit and the use of autos in
urban areas will decline.
One
of the keys to making mass transit work is reducing the hidden subsidies of
automobiles. Road construction, road
maintenance, traffic signals, traffic signs, traffic patrol, radar guns, speed
traps and entire highway bureaucracies: all these are in place to fund and
regulate your right to drive your car.
The problem with reducing these subsidies is the vocal nature and deep
pockets of mass transit's opponents. We
must force mass transit and the automobile to compete for funding with each
other. We must replace the highway
trust fund with a general transportation fund.
If anything, we must tilt the balance toward mass transit, because the
cost of replacing the missing transit architecture will be significant. We should not force mass transit to compete
with hospitals, welfare programs and public housing for funds. Instead, place mass transit in direct
competition for highway revenues. This
removes other social pressures militating against mass transit. This eliminates the false choice of building
light rail systems or housing the homeless.
I have no doubt that HUFSAM and its 2800 state and local level lobbying organizations will oppose any attempts at rebuilding the mass transit infrastructure. I have no doubt that local politicians will feel the heat from constituents who are put out by all this. But the effort will be worth it, even if many of us never see the results, for the results will be a cleaner environment, a revitalized inner city, more opportunity for those who have no transportation, and reduced traffic congestion.