The Roger-Rabbit Myth and Why It Persists

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.

The myth was created by a Congressional researcher named Bradford Snell, who apparently still believes it. Yet numerous academic researchers have examined and dismissed it:

• UC Berkeley researcher Scott Bottles wrote an entire book to debunk the myth;
• Portland State University planning Professor Sy Adler says, “Everything Bradford Snell wrote . . . about transit in Los Angeles was wrong” (quoted in Driving Forces);
• Most recently, UC Irvine transportation research Lyn Long has refuted Snell’s arguments.

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Snell’s basic claim is that General Motors (along with Firestone Tire, Chevron, and Phillips Petroleum) bought National City Lines, which owned numerous streetcar companies, in order to dismantle the streetcars lines. The truth is that the National City conspiracy was solely aimed at selling General Motors buses, Firestone tires, and Chevron/Phillips oil. Just as the government ordered Boeing to divest itself of United Airlines (which it owned to monopolize the sale of Boeing aircraft) and the Pullman Manufacturing Company to divest itself of the Pullman operating company (which it used to monopolize sale of sleeping cars to the railroads), the government ordered General Motors and the other companies to shed their interest in National City in 1949.

The clearest evidence that disappearing streetcars were not an auto-oil industry conspiracy comes from the numbers and timing of conversions of streetcar lines to buses. General Motors and its co-conspirators purchased National City in 1933 and held onto it until 1949.

In 1910, about 750 American cities were served by streetcars (these numbers are from Wikipedia). Conversions of streetcar lines to buses began in earnest in 1918, and by 1933, when the National City conspiracy began, more than half of these streetcar systems had gone out of business or converted to buses.

Over the next sixteen years, when the conspiracy was active, more than 300 streetcar systems converted to buses. National City had an interest in fewer than thirty of these systems — along with at least thirty more that did not convert to buses during this time. Twelve of the National City lines that converted during this period completed the conversion in the same year that National City bought the line, suggesting that the decision to convert may have been made before National City took control.

In 1949, when GM was convicted of conspiring to monopolize the bus market, fifty U.S. cities still had streetcars. By 1966, only six still had streetcars (two more had subways and commuter trains). In short, the GM conspiracy was associated with less than 5 percent of the disappearing streetcar lines in the country. This shows that something more was at work, namely that transit companies realized that buses were both more economical and more flexible than rail transit.

When I was sixteen years old, my first “job” was as a volunteer for the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society. One of the streetcars owned by the society was a giant Key bridge car, similar to the one pictured below, that once criss-crossed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. These cars were, in essence, some of the first light-rail cars (so, to be accurate, rail skeptics should call light rail a 1930s technology, not a nineteenth-century technology).

Made a part of the National City lines in 1946, the Key car had once been painted a bright yellow and green and had operated over the Bay Bridge for nearly a decade after GM gave up its interest in National City. Like most streetcar systems, the Key System had originally been built as a part of a real-estate scheme. The cost of construction was covered not by anticipated transit fares but by the sales of East Bay homes to San Francisco workers.

After the homes sold, transit fares covered the cost of operating the streetcars, but could not pay for the periodic replacement of rail, electrical facilities, and other infrastructure. For example, the Key System paid virtually none of the cost of constructing the the Bay Bridge, even though it effectively occupied a quarter of the bridge’s capacity. As the infrastructure wore out, streetcar service quality naturally declined, and both transit companies and transit riders were relieved by the conversion to buses, which shared the costs of roads with autos and trucks. As Cliff Slater observes, when the New York Railway System converted the Second Avenue streetcars to buses, ridership increased by 50 percent.

(To depart even further from my topic, I recently visited the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. On display was the very bus in which Rosa Parks refused to yield a seat to a white man, painted in the same National City yellow and green. Montgomery, Alabama was one of the twenty-eight or twenty-nine streetcar systems that had converted streetcars to buses when National City was under GM influence.

(Though totally irrelevant to this debate, it is an interesting historical footnote that when the Supreme Court overturned the Jim Crow law that required Rosa Parks and other blacks to yield their seats to whites, Montgomery and other cities immediately tried to pass ordinances to get around the ruling. National City Lines, however, announced that they would ignore such ordinances and order their drivers in all Southern cities where they operated to follow the spirit and letter of the Supreme Court decision.)

The Roger-Rabbit myth persists because some people want to believe that the only reason Americans drive is because they are forced to do so. “When public policy allows a real choice between the auto and mass transit,” claims John Pucher, a professor in the Rutgers University planning school, “a far higher percentage of the population travels by mass transit” (JAPA, 54:509-520). In fact, all the evidence is to the contrary: even when cities spend tens of billions on transit, the vast majority of the population travels by auto. I’ll detail this evidence in future posts.