The Master, after a somewhat lengthy answer, winds up answering in the negative. As long as I’ve thought about this issue, it’s only recently that a startling realisation came to me which I think points the other way. It’s simply this: It’s obvious that electric streetcars run more quietly and accelerate better than buses, and certainly produce less pollution. So while one can understand why service on the longer runs was ended, after cars became popular, it’s hard to understand why there was such a rush to switch the urban streetcars to buses. I can even understand why newer areas of the city would not have streetcar lines. But why was there such a rush to tear up the existing lines? I’m thinking mainly of Los Angeles, but the same story took place in dozens of cities across the land.
Just a WAG but I’d say that once a city decided (for whatever reason) not to run electric trolleys anymore, the tracks would be torn up (or paved over) to eliminate what were street obstacles as far as cars were concerned. I mean, it’s not like GM would say “get rid of those tracks- or else!”.
I have recently come across a copy of British MP Sir Peter Halls’ Cities in Civilization, an exhaustive (and at times exhausting) survey of 25 cities (all Western Civ cities, except for Tokyo) during their “Golden Ages” (a very creative or influential phase in the cities history). This is a very thick tome, coming in 1,150 pages, one where the author is just at ease throwing out Marxist analysis to 15th century Florence to Schumpterian ebbs and flows to 1900s Detroit and San Francisco/Palo Alto from 1950-1990 (the book came out in 1994, meaning he missed the whole Internet thing. So add 15 years to that date). With an 83 page bibliography, and an average of 200 citations per chapter, this is a learned book, and it, and its citations, will form the basis of this post.
Chapter 26 starts a 39 page discussion of the development of the Los Angeles traffic network from 1900-1980, though the story really ends by 1925. In it, Sir Hall dismisses Branford Snells accusation by the simple expedient of showing that the LA street cars had peaked by 1911, and were irrevocably doomed by 1925.
Los Angeles was a city that was different from other American cities in that it promoted itself to second generation Americans, particularly the monied or salaried kind, and not to first generation immigrants. In 1890 LA and LA County’s respective population were 50k and 100k respectively - 40 years later in 1930, 1.2 million and 2.2 million respectively. And while New York was over 1/3 foreign born in 1920, LA was just 19% foreign born… and of those born in the US, a full 2/3rd of them were born outside California. The significance of this is that LA was the first great city in America to be populated by migrating Americans, people already at ease in the culture.
LA started out decentralized: settlements in Ventura, Riverside, Colton, Anaheim and others were in place by 1900, a decentralization reinforced not by the Model T, but by the interurbans, the electric trains. America took to electric transportation in a serious way, from 70% of street railways using horses in 1895, to 97% of those same railways using electric rail by 1902. By 1908, 9,000 miles of electrified track was laid, with a near unlimited future in the industry’s sights… but it was not to be.
Los Angeles was no exception to the short lived interurban dominance. Of the 18 SoCal cities of 1,000 or more people in 1910, only 2 were off an interurban line. The interurbans helped fix the idea of LA as a highly decentralized city, especially since they were used more as a means of land speculation than mass transit, a process that reached its apogee with the work of Henry E. Huntington. In 1901, Huntington first won the right to build an interurban from LA to Long Beach, a distance of 20 miles. Prior to building the line, Huntington made sure to snatch up cheap scrub land on the knowledge that his new line would increase the towns population - which it did, growing from 2,000 in 1900 to 55,000 in 1920. He also founded 3 companies, the Pacific Electric Railway (PE), Huntington Land & Improvement, and San Gabriel Valley Water. Using these corporate bulwarks, he repeated this process throughout the decade in Orange, Los Angeles, San Bernadino, and Riverside counties. By 1911 it was complete: Huntington merged and consolidated over 70 separate companies into the PE, did some reorganization, and completed his takeover of the entire Los Angeles basin, putting the mass transit needs of the city from San Bernadino to Long Beach into the hands of a land speculator.
But Huntington wasn’t stupid. For even as he was consolidating everybody out of the market, he was slowly leaving the business, slowly selling off his portion of PE in the name of diversification and focusing his efforts on his new baby, Pacific Gas and Light. He did this because he saw the writing on the wall, the rise of the automobile.
Los Angeles, being more affluent and more decentralized than almost any city in the country, took to the automobile like no other place in the world was capable. In 1915, LA already had 1 car for every 8 people, with the national rate being 1 car for every 43 people. In a mere five years, per capita car ownership had doubled in LA, with 1 car for every 3.6 people vs. 1 car for every 13 people for the country as a whole. By that time (1920), LA county had more registered cars than all but seven states. Traffic conditions in downtown LA were so bad in 1919 that the city banned automobiles in an edict that lasted a surprisingly-long 30 days before it was rescinded by a harangued and harried council.
With the dispersal of the population points largely brought about by Huntingtons forays into land speculation in the first two decades of the century, the car spread the populace even further now that they didn’t have to live near an interurban station. By 1930 LA population density was less than 1/2 NYC’s, Chicago’s, and Clevelands - LA’s 1,572 per sq. mile versus 4,336, 3,890, and 3,852 respectively. The relative affluence and decentralization of the city can also be seen in the number of single family homes: 93.9% of LA city homes were single-family homes, while in NYC the figure was 52.8%.
This decentralization hit downtown LA hard, with its share of the LA retail market declining from 75% to 25% during the 1920’s. But even harder hit were the interurbans. As the car increased population dispersal, downtown passenger traffic decreased from 315,000 people per day in 1923 to 250,000 in 1931, a 24% drop in service. The depression didn’t help either, with daily passengers declining to 200,000 a day in 1934. (Cecil mentions that the rail service was moving 80,000,000 people in the late '30s, a number that’s on the very high end of credible estimates. In comparison, in 1923 the interurbans were moving 115,000,000 people a year at a time when the population of the LA basin was 1/2 the size.) Since gas was deflationary cheap at 11 cents a gallon, it became increasingly cost-efficient to drive as the '30s progressed.
Almost since being born in 1911, PE was a money loser. They made a profit of $400,000 in 1912, but from 1914 to 1940 it reported annual deficits for all but 8 years, with the average annual deficit running at $1.5 million. By the late 1930’s, cutbacks had to be made. Between 1938 and 1941 PE abandoned service on the San Bernadino, Riverside and Pomona, Redondo and Newport Beach lines; in the late 1940’s it abanded passenger rail service altogether.
As it slowly collapsed, from 1925 onward proposal after proposal was put before Angelenos to subsidize or take over the train system. For a full 15 years prior to GM’s buying into PE, the voters turned down every single proposal to assist the Red Car by subsidy or takeover but voted overwhelmingly for proposals that boosted the local road networks. As the public of LA became aware of the cost needed to keep the Red Cars around, the more they rejected and abandoned its public transport system, finally letting it die mid-century.
In short, by the time GM bought into PE in 1939 the consolidation and dumping of lines had already begun, and Angelenos had rejected the trolleys as a viable transit system.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the problem with mass transit generally is that, even if you have a very good system, when you consider the time spent waiting at transit stops, and the time needed to travel between the passenger’s final destination or starting point, and the transit stops, it’s almost always faster to drive your car. Having to wait at transfer points demands still more time.
That all goes to explain why the long distance trolley lines were abandoned, but it doesn’t explain, in terms of utility, why the local streetcar lines were changed over to buses. In effect we replaced slow streetcars with slow buses that belch pollution and noise, and accelerate poorly. I don’t think profitability is the issue, since urban public transit of any kind is rarely run at a profit. With the implication that it’s a given that a transit system is going to lose money, the issue then revolves around the issue of what the best way to lose that money is; i.e., what kind of transit delivers the most utility. They had streetcar lines in place, so to change over to buses they had to scrap the rolling stock, take out the rails and traction lines, and buy the buses. That must have cost a lot of money.
Seeing as we’re stuck with the buses now, I’m not really advocating that local bus lines be replaced with streetcars, but find the mad rush to buses somewhat puzzling.
There is one indisputable advantage to a bus line: you can change the route at will.
After the automobile became dominant, cities stopped spreading in purely linear directions along rail routes of all sorts. The centers of population density therefore started to shift to different points. Los Angeles is perhaps the most extreme example of this. More importantly, the population densities and the high-traffic destinations continued to shift annually.
Bus routes can be continually extended, added, moved, rerouted, and jiggered in every possible way. Rail routes cannot.
Whether this was done most efficiently in Los Angeles or anywhere else is a matter of debate. The public always seems to hate the local bus service. But rail would be a thousand times more inefficient - and more costly - at serving the changing populations.
There are times and places and routes at which rail is the best choice for mass transit. But these are a tiny minority compared to the times and places and routes at which they aren’t.
I was expecting that someone would mention that you can easily change bus routes, but I think that much vaunted selling point is not so great as first appears. True, as new suburbs are developed you can extend or change existing bus routes, or create new ones. But in my OP I was referring mainly to the inner city. In L.A., the long established MTA bus routes like Wilshire, Santa Monica, and Olympic have probably never been rerouted and probably never will. That being the case the advantage of reroutability is negligible.
In addition to possible machinations of GM, I’m inclined to think of this as a slap against the underclass. As the more prosperous classes moved to personal autos, the tracks in the streets were a nuisance to drivers, and the underclass, not being worth more consideration, were consigned to the buses. For them, at least, it was a change for the worse.