T delays are just stunning: Now the Red Line's stopped running

You might want to try not treating Who Framed Roger Rabbit as an historical documentary. "GM bought up the streetcar lines and put them out of business so people would buy cars instead" is a myth. The demise of streetcars is much more a product of state intervention (partially a consequence of broad consensus among the progressives of the first half of the 20th century that public transit was contrary to social progress).

Van Wilkins has a good summary:

To understand what happened, one must look at the condition of the industry as it entered the 1930s. Total ridership had peaked in the mid-1920s and went sharply downhill from there--the result of a combination off factors. These included the proliferation of two-auto families, construction of better roads beyond city limits (encouraging urban sprawl), the Great Depression, lack of adequate funds to modernize, aging street railways, and actions by Federal, state and local governments. There was an increase to ridership during World War II, but with the end of the conflict the downward slide resumed.

The primary cause for the decline in transit usage was the automobile, which was proliferating wildly. While prone to breakdown, the car provided a more comfortable ride than did a streetcar built in many cases early in the century and running on worn-out track. Most streetcars were noisy; wooden or hard rattan seats were the norm. For many street railways there was little money to rebuild track or buy new cars.

The primary reason streetcar operators had no money to fix tracks or buy new cars was a combination of local governments' rules preventing fare increases (through conditions on the franchise agreements), increasing labor costs (not helped by requirements that streetcars be operated by two crewmembers), and requirements that the streetcar operators maintain the streets on which they ran.

The Great Depression led to money from Washington for road building as a method of providing employment, but federal policy discouraged funding for the paving of streets or roads which contained streetcar tracks. Local governments pressured companies to substitute buses for streetcars, even in cases where the firm wished to continue to operate streetcars.

In 1935 Congress passed the Public Utilities Holding Company Act. One effect of what came to be called the "Death Sentence Act" was to cause power companies to sell off street-railway subsidiaries. Streetcars thus lost a major source of monetary support. Even before the legislation was enacted, the utilities were seeking buyers for failing operations in smaller cities.

Prior to the PUHCA, electric companies often ran the street railways, which thus got cheap electricity (often the electric company would run streetcars in order to get permission to run wires). When the power companies had to divest the street railways, that raised the electricity costs of the streetcars for the new owners.

The motor vehicle manufacturers were not stupid; they saw opportunities to sell buses and aggressively pursued them. At smaller systems--some of which were already in bankruptcy or with revoked franchises--the sales pitches fell on receptive ears.

Such systems were acquired by General Motors and several independent groups. In some cases the buyer continued to operate the system. In others, the bus operation was sold and the money used to buy other systems on the verge of abandonment. GM at first directly financed such activities.

In 1936 the auto and truck giant and others began assisting one of these groups--National City Lines--in its efforts to expand operations. Agreement to purchase buses, tires, and fuel only from the participating companies was required. This is the conspiracy that has now passed into American folklore as the agency that destroyed the trolley. In fact it did not.

Over its corporate life National City Lines and related companies controlled a total of perhaps sixty systems. It has been asserted that NCL destroyed five rail systems in these cities, but in fact in a number of cases rail service had disappeared before the takeover. In others the decision to abandon had already been taken and the process was well advanced. NCL acquisitions in the 1930s were in cities of less than 100,000, ranging down to a low of 17,000. The single exception was Tulsa, where the local operator was already in very serious trouble.

The 1940s saw NCL acquisition of some larger systems. Related Pacific City Lines bought the Salt Lake City system in 1944. There, a handful of cars were still running on a remnant of a single route abandoned in 1941 but restored to service as the result of a wartime edict. The decision to abandon all rail operations in favor of buses had been made in the early 1930s.

Major NCL-influenced systems included Baltimore, St. Louis, the Los Angeles Railway, and the Key System at Oakland. Philadelphia was acquired in 1954, after the conspiracy trial. For these five a case could be made that major rail lines should have been preserved. There is of course no question that NCL planned to abandon all rail service eventually, but these five are worth a brief look. They illustrate how more than a conspiracy was involved.

In Baltimore the city brought in Henry Barnes, fresh from Denver where he oversaw the conversion of Denver Tramways to bus and trolley coach. Baltimore wanted the streetcars off its narrow downtown streets to improve traffic flow. In St. Louis a combination of freeway construction, paving projects and municipal pressure caused abandonment of much of the system. But, in both cities the last cars ran into the early sixties, long after they had been abandoned in most non-NCL cities.

In Oakland, state authorities wanted Key System trains off the Bay Bridge to provide more traffic lanes. Los Angeles Railway had decided before World War II that retention of just three lines could be justified; NCL continued to operate five. And in Philadelphia streetcars run today because of NCL ineptness in dealing with city authorities.

What is perhaps more significant, however, is a listing of major cities where no NCL role has been documented. Aggressive bus salesmen, yes; city officials wanting rail-free streets, yes; transit companies wanting out of rail operations, yes; financial shenanigans, yes: a conspiracy, no. Such locales include Boston, northern New Jersey, Washington, Atlanta, Birmingham, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Cleveland, Louisville, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Memphis, Kansas City, Denver, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. In a few cases some rail survived, usually because of a tunnel, a subway, or some political factor. In Canada, the pattern is the same, and there was no NCL influence there.

Too often, writers have confused the Los Angeles Railway with the Pacific Electric , where NCL had no role, although former NCL executives did become involved after the abandonment of almost all of the system. The California Railroad Commission had studied PE in the 1930s and recommended modernization of some lines and abandonment of the rest. There is some evidence that PE was interested in rail operations in the medians of freeways, but owner Southern Pacific could not or would not provide the money. As a result, the system disappeared, with the last lines done in by a public transit authority.

It has been said abandonment in non NCL cities was influenced by officials who had come from NCL operations. It has also been asserted that while there was a "smoking gun" in the NCL cities, other systems were abandoned because of a larger, undocumented conspiracy by auto manufacturers to substitute buses on the premise that they were inferior to streetcars and would drive more riders to the automobile. This would imply that universities turning out traffic engineers and urban planners preaching that rail was obsolete, along with politicians across the country, were also part of the conspiracy.

The idea of a conspiracy provides a simple and comfortable explanation for what was the result of a very complex set of circumstances. We have yet to grasp all the implications, and we repeat the errors of the past by continuing to pander to the automobile.

The National City Lines conspiracy boils down to GM seeing that (largely due to the New Deal), street railways were planning to replace streetcars with buses, and they started buying up the street railways to ensure that the buses the railways bought were GM buses. They were convicted of trying to monopolize the market for buses.