December 16, 2010: Taken For a Ride
Taken For a Ride is a short documentary (52 minutes) from 1996 which gives an overview of the well-documented but not well-known reality of how public transit systems in several US cities were systematically dismantled and made less efficient through the 20th century by the careful and deliberate action of American automotive companies, primarily General Motors.
Electric streetcar systems were common in American cities at the turn of the last century and for some decades afterwards, but even as personal automobiles became more and more popular and the fortunes of the car companies soared, they wanted to go further and make everyone consider driving. Public transit was effective in those days because cities were still fairly compact and their populations were not overwhelmingly large except in a couple of major centres such as New York, which already had subway infrastructure. Streetcars were quiet and pleasant to ride (as pleasant as being packed into a vehicle with a bunch of strangers can be, I’ll admit), and the lines had the capacity to handle large passenger volumes. So what did GM do? They provided seed money for new bus companies and set up their own wholly-owned bus companies in some cases, providing alternative transit in these cities and pushing to have the streetcar lines shut down. Of course, it goes without saying that these companies were buying GM buses. Slowly but steadily, streetcar networks were shut down and replaced with “more flexible” and “modern” bus lines, which incidentally were louder and less pleasant to ride and didn’t have the capacity of streetcars, so as fares went up and service was cut, public transit slowly became a less desirable way of moving around and people turned more to commuting by automobile. By the 1950s, President Eisenhower’s interstate highway system got rolling and nobody ever looked back. The federal funding structure for the interstate system was even structured so that it was not permissible for a state to spend the federal money on public transit – it was designated only for roads – a requirement so completely senseless that some big cities fought this stipulation in the 1970s which is why Washington DC, San Francisco, and Baltimore have decent subway infrastructure today.
Of course, this is all presented as being “the way it is” with little in the way of evidence backing up the claims. Mind you, GM’s push towards buses instead of streetcars is probably easy enough to verify and certainly the results speak for themselves, and the interstate highway system legislation and fights against ever-expanding roads were very real. However, the documentary loses some of its weight by not going in-depth enough on some of these points. Archival footage of people getting on streetcars is nice, but this kind of story might be better told in a book.
The film did get me wondering, though, about just how inevitable some of these changes really were. It’s hard now to imagine life without the interstate highway system (and similar-style highways here in Canada) in a world where everything that ends up in a store and ultimately in our homes came from somewhere on a truck, but it could just as easily have been some other way. We might have all still driven cars, but what if there was a well-maintained railway infrastructure so that if I wanted to “drive” to New York City, I could book a reasonably-priced ticket to drive my car onto a train (like the way cars are shipped on trains, all stacked up) and then drive it off at the other end, so for the price of the gas it would take me to drive there anyway, I get to sit in my car and NOT have to drive all day, but still have my car there when I get to New York? It sounds weird, but is it any more weird than the fact that the typical options these days are to get into a little metal tube with wings which expends massive amounts of energy flying to New York, or that I need to pay 100% attention to driving along a capital-intensive road for 10 hours, arriving tired because I had to make my brain work effectively on autopilot while I risked my life all day?
I also got to thinking about the big corporate player in this fiasco – General Motors. In the last few years, we’ve seen that former behemoth fall victim to the consequences of its size and its gross mismanagement over several decades, as it collapsed and became effectively a government entity, only recently returning in part to public hands. This isn’t an idea I can take credit for, but I’ve heard it suggested that with GM in government hands, it may be the perfect opportunity to have it shift focus entirely, perhaps first to electric cars and other “green” automotive solutions, but then to become a leader in a push towards smarter technologies in many sectors and to spur other corporations and industries into action on rethinking how we do things. I don’t intend to come off as a hardcore environmentalist here, but rethinking some of the things we don’t remember being any other way (one small example being how we drive long distances to the detriment of our psyches and our wallets) might reveal some new ways of doing things which someday we couldn’t imagine being without. Public transit is a particular passion of mine, and an area which often falls victim to a lack of imagination. Good ideas and good integration/transition are both important, and they can be done if people will think on a timescale longer than an election cycle.
Sorry about the angry political rant.
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