Here’s a sentence that makes you think: Los Angeles used to have one of the best mass transit systems in the world. But today, the city of Angels is known for its terrible traffic and poor public transit. In the early 20th century, LA relied on streetcars: trolleys with stops throughout Southern California. But in 1961 the last passenger streetcar took its final ride. Why? Well a popular conspiracy theory blames GM. But is that true? Cheddar explains.
Further Reading:
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/25/story-cities-los-angeles-great-american-streetcar-scandal
Los Angeles Times
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-02/explaining-la-with-patt-morrison-who-killed-la-streetcars
Curbed (LA)
https://la.curbed.com/2017/9/20/16340038/los-angeles-streetcar-conspiracy-theory-general-motors
https://la.curbed.com/2018/9/6/17825186/los-angeles-streetcar-map-red-pacific-electric
Southern California Railway Museum
https://socalrailway.org/collections/pacific-electric/#:~:text=Pacific%20Electric%20(PE)%20was%20America’s,connecting%20Los%20Angeles%20with%20Pasadena.
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The oil companies help destroy it.
God, Los Angeles MUST bring these back. Those railcard were so beautiful too!!
There were still a lot of streetcar tracks around in LA during the sixties and seventies when I was growing up in Orange County.
This was a very frustrating watch. "It's more nuanced than GM deliberately undermining rail transit! There was also a strike going on in the rail industry!" I just…have, have you considered that those things are still related? That maybe, just maybe, the company GM was a shareholder in was only able to strike a deal for the railway bc the owners would rather undermine the strike and make a quick buck than to concede to whatever their workers were asking of them (which was probably quite reasonable, as most strikes are against some truly heinous conditions)? Have you thought about not blaming workers for what was ultimately a series of decisions by wealthy executives? It's very harmful to misassign blame this way. where's the solidarity? did you do any research on the working conditions in the rail transit industry at all before deciding a labor strike shared equal blame to underhanded business tactics by massive companies? I suspect you did not and it's disappointing to see
I despise cars always have always will. Money pits who keep the masses economically suppressed.
The people need to bike or be transported as much as possible.
It's insane how good it was, not only it could have made money from tourism, but also made less traffic and less polution and noise polution and so on…
High Speed Rail with electric taxies to the station would fix lots of this.
Last tram was scrapped in the late 1960s. Oil crisis hit in 1973… Talk about an irony.
This video is basically a defense of the car and oil industries. "The LA world-class transit system didn't fail because of car industry pressure, not at all, it just didn't work! Even though it worked fine until it was dismantled but you see public transit just does work somehow." So there, I saved you eight and a half minutes.
All "Real Muricans" who believe that public transit is communism will love this video.
This video is ridiculous 🤣 the freeway is heavily publicly funded, making the car much much more subsidized than the trolleys
Dang in my country it would take you an hour to travel 10 kms 🤣
Corporate greed of General Motors overruled everything else.
that liberal cesspool is destroying everything. good luck to those who have not left yet. they are too busy encouraging drug abuse and homelessness and crime. they are spending billions on the wrong things. more people are leaving california every year because of all the liberal nonsense there
I feel like [it changed because we truly believed it was the better more cool independent option of the era] BUT: Since we have learned just how out of control this car freedom idea can go… And are dealing with the current traffic jam system…. Plus many other issues. [Can we PLEASE reinvent, reintroduce, past ideas, methods, with our more modern abilities. To improve the way we live everyday.]
Welcome to every big city problem 101
LA's streetcars weren't "world class" when they were closed. Many of the lines hadn't been upgraded or improved on since the 1920s. Buses were more flexible and could use the growing road infrastructure. As early as the 1930s and 40s, many would use bus lines on top of the streetcar lines. LA isn't "rebuilding" it's old streetcar system, it's a brand new rapid transit system. Some lines utilize old rights of way ( A Line, Expo Line), but it's not the same since cars are much bigger and they usually have fewer stops. The current subway under construction on Wilshire Boulevard doesn't utilize any existing streetcar route, and it's ironic because Wilshire was originally built as a road solely for cars.
Lol an hour to go 14 miles. Try 4 miles in 1 hour just to go from downtown Boston to Brighton. Traffic in LA isn't that bad
That's why I always say most of us Americans are forced to pollute the air in order to keep our lives going because there is just no easier way to fulfill our travel needs without relying on our four-stroke engines unless you happen to live either in Manhattan or near downtown San Francisco.
Honestly, for someone who hates driving, especially in LA, I don't see the need in driving unless you plan on going on a trip, need to be somewhere in a hurry or are planning to carry a lot of stuff. The transition for more public transportation shouldn't that be bad, but ppl always go against change. But honestly, with the rising prices of gas and with Uber and Lyft prices going up as well due to their domination of the market, this seems like the best time to push for it. It will also reduce the amount of accidents that occur on the road if car culture is reduced, which would result in less potential DUI situations as well. Not to mention, less maintenance would be required to maintain rails than maintaining roads
I'm sorry, NO. Los Angeles NEVER HAD a world-class transit system. They DID have a very impressive number of total miles of track, but it was always underinvested in and poorly thought-out cheap track, without grade separations, a long-term investment plan or top-tier rolling stock. They spread outwards by keeping the cost of construction low, and in the end, they probably did this too much.
Great piece except for the myth that "habit" is the reason people drive in LA. I love public transit and live in Echo Park, a neighborhood with not one but three streets near me that used to have street cars running down them. Now these are replaced by busses but the routes are not always straightforward– for example, about a year ago Metro consolidated, cutting the only bus line that would take me to Union Station, as well as making me walk much further to the bus that I would take to Hollywood, UCLA, or my closest train station, MacArthur Park. My daughter takes the city bus to school but the bus she takes only runs every 30 minutes so if she misses it, I could drive there and back before the next bus even arrives!! Metro's solution to dropping ridership seems to always be to cut service. It takes me 15 minutes to get to work by car, but 75 minutes by public transit– despite living in a central neighborhood. My choice to drive has nothing to do with "habit" when public transit takes 5x longer.
Everytime a public service is privatized, it gets worse.
In Vienna (and many places in the U.S.) the water supply, via public drinking fountains is assured -> Nestlé
In Sweden a University Student get's ~800$ for beeing a student -> 40 years old Manager of a big company, still has to repay his student loans, for some years
etc.
Don't even get me started on the privatization of the german healthcare system…
before 2004: Oh u need some meds, a plaster cast, and a new lung..? no Problem, here u get this liver for free, on top.
After 2004: Sry…our only nurse on the station is already handling 5 other patients, but we could release you early, so a family member can handle ur healing process…
I'm a rural Midwesterner, who would never consider living in "town", let alone a city. However, old clips of big cities fascinate me. I'm especially intrigued by LA and San Francisco. They must have been wonderfully beautiful places to live in the early to mid 20th century. I can see why many "shivering" eastern WW2 service men decided to settle there.
L.A. is hands down one of the ugliest 'wealthy' cities in the western world, by leaps amount, sorry not sorry.
Chilean here. In Santiago, it happened something like that, but in a different way. There was a strong, omnipresent public transportation system of buses, which were entirely private owned; each entrepreneur owned one or two buses, made groups, set a route, and that was it. Very chaotic, and unsafe (drivers raced each other to get more passengers – their wages were proportional to that), but you had buses everywhere. Cars were seen as a status thing more than a transportation need.
The government tried many times to put order there. The last big effort was to assign the routes and frequencies and create a system for everything in combination with the subway, called the Transantiago. Big problem, the engineers (I presume there were some, I doubt that), miscalculated the actual amount of people, ignored the actual flux and reflux according to job and work schedules, and in their attempt to discongest the center of the city forced everyone to make combinations instead of taking just one long-route bus as it was before. Result: disaster. The city is still recovering from that and nowadays the system has improved a lot, but, the main consequence was… everyone who could buy a car, did it. So, now, instead of having traffic jams of half-empty buses, we have traffic jams of cars with just one person per car. Just like in Los Angeles.
I would dare to say that, besides the cultural love for individual cars Americans have, the absence of efficient public transportation, no matter who owns it or what finances it, forces people into buying and using cars.
In the last 3 decades or so, Europe has started redesigning their cities to go back to people centric models. This is accomplished by making public transit more viable and accessible.
But the mindset here seems to be, "If it wasn't thought of by us [the US], then it can't possibly work here.".
Like when Fox Noise said solar power can work in Germany and not here because of these 2 brain dead reasons.
1 The US is "too big". – Wrong
2 Germany gets more sun than the US. – WTF?
It takes 1 day living in LA to understand that public transportation is not safe – the problem expands in many directions. Not mentioned in this video
Getting so sick of LA
Rip
HUMANITY UNITE!!!!!!!! Cloud seeding technology since the 1940s. Covert party of corporate heads are DOING THIS. They control our media, bank roll candidates. They remove or blackmail rightfully elected with cooked up scandals. Social problems are a lie they use to cause conflict & hate while they pose as saviours. WAKE UP.
Time to bulldoze all of the freeways and the SFH
Replace with transit and mixed used development
Shows proof of the concerted effort to kill public transit. Disregards it in the same video 👎
Who framed Roger Rabbit was made in 1988 not 1986 which is what the video says at 4:01
Ngl a city focused on Cars is far better and way more convenient than one based on Public transport.
🙁
As an American we need to stop being so car centric & go back to public infrastructure to how it was in the 1900s-1960s. *for a first world country we are behind on electric, public transportation, etc. taking public here is looked down upon as “only for poor people” and “dirty” which, fair point but it just needs govt $ to help it out. It’s not looked like that in other first world countries like in the EU & UK.
its not a conspiracy theory. wall street has been pulling this crap for years, and continues to do so. eg, they want you to buy digital games, so they purposely tank Gamestop, etc
I once drove through LA, it was an absolute nightmare to a European like me, I was so shocked by it. It took us 5 hours to drive 4 miles, it awful ans everywhere was just grey and concrete with lane after lane or highway all over with ramps and supports all over us as we were stuck at the bottom layer of an interchange for ages.
Fun fact: Americans on average spend 6 months of their life in traffic. Tells you everything about how bad car culture is here
You mean the wealth of some corporations were preferred to the overall benefit of the population, that has never happened before. Well done. 👍
If los Angeles would have kept the public transit systems it had and THEN included freeways and roads LA would have the best system worldwide bar none