According to popular convention, General Motors and the oil industry bought up all the wonderful streetcars that used to efficiently move people around our cities and scrapped them, thereby forcing people to buy cars and become petroleum-dependent. If true, spending billions of dollars on rail transit merely restores the natural balance that was disrupted by monopolistic auto and oil companies.
In fact, this myth is totally bogus, and I am gratified to note that Googling general motors conspiracy actually produces more web sites debunking the myth than supporting it (at least on Google’s first page). Yet I still hear it raised time and again, so it is worth debunking one more time.
