Streetcars

Cold case: Who killed streetcars?

The Dallas Morning News reports that the city of Dallas is seeking $80 million in federal funds to develop a downtown streetcar system. Anyone old enough to remember streetcars has fond memories. But one DMN reader, "1bellplaza," no fan of streetcars but perhaps too young to remember them, says in a comment, "Someone should ask why they did away with streetcars."

Seque to Trey Garrison, who inadvertently suggests an answer while lobbying for something else entirely. In a blog defending drinking and driving (that's not a typo; libertarian Garrison has some strange causes), Garrison notes:

"My favorite attorney, Robert Guest, talks about how bad zoning contributes to DWI. ... Robert equates bad zoning -- separating residential and retail use so that you can’t have a neighborhood bar or neighborhood market in an actual neighborhood -- with the word 'sprawl.'"

Related zoning laws required new businesses to set aside a minimum amount of parking space for cars, leading to businesses set back from streets and acres of parking lots in front of new retail. Streetcars, tethered to their tracks, were isolated and doomed. More mobile cars, now favored by zoning laws, thrived and drove the streetcars to extinction.

Would streetcars have survived without the favoritism of zoning laws? Maybe not. But it wasn't just zoning laws that streetcars had to contend with. The growing automobile industry left nothing to chance. In an essay titled "The StreetCar Conspiracy," former U.S. Senate Counsel Bradford Snell indicts General Motors:

"The streetcar did not die ... because of demographics or economics or disinvestments or evolution; it died because GM in 1922 made a conscious decision to kill it and, for the next several decades, pursued a strategy designed to accomplish this objective."

That strategy allegedly involved using freight leverage to force railroads to divest themselves of electric railways, pressuring banks to withhold funding for electric railways, purchasing and scrapping electric railways directly, and bribing mayors and city councils with Cadillacs and GM dealerships to convert streetcars to buses.

As with so many historicals trends that might have happened no matter what, this one was helped along by those who stood to benefit from the outcome at the expense of society as a whole. With unintended irony, that same DMN reader who advises others to ask why they did away with streetcars to begin with, thinks he knows why some government officials are now trying to bring back streetcars:

"Let me tell you why I think we need streetcars....... someone in city government will make millions off the deal."

If there's any truth to that, it would be a case of déjà vu.