Back in 1987, I rode a bicycle from Echo Park to Santa Monica in Los Angeles, California. Drivers in that enormous city made this a high-risk ride, they really were not used to seeing a cyclist back then.
Not only that, I was aware I was breathing in a toxic mix of burned leaded gasoline with zero attempts and efficiency or low tailpipe emissions. No catalytic converters, no ‘add blue,’ just good old fashioned rumbling combustion motors. I was breathing a carcinogenic soup, as it has been described to me by an air quality scientist.
It was my first visit to the city and looking back, I clearly had no concept of quite how spread out and enormous Los Angeles is.
However, I survived and at one point I spotted something on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood that intrigued me.
I’d stopped for a coffee break and was pushing my bike across the street to carry on my journey. This section of the well-known boulevard had a wide central reservation with flower boxes along it, but in the gaps between, you could clearly see rail lines set in the street surface.
Contrary to many assumptions, cars and cities in the USA are not natural bedfellows, they didn’t emerged together in some benign organic way around the turn of the last century.
This is why history is kind of important, because, for all intents and purposes, they were forced upon us.
An important series of events happened in many US cities about 100 years ago.
I’ve been reminded of this as I have been re-reading an extraordinary book which was a large part of what inspired me to start the Fully Charged Show 14 years ago.
Titled ‘Internal Combustion’ with the strap line ‘How Corporations and Governments addicted the world to oil and derailed the alternatives,’ is a fascinating book written by Edwin Black.
The history of the US automotive, tyre manufacturers and oil industries does not glow with empathy. It’s fair to suggest that their avowed target was not the betterment of all humankind, but simply the endless drive for profit and power.
Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Tucson, Atlanta and New Orleans all had what North Americans call street cars and we call trams. A light rail system, originally pulled by horses but by 1900, most of them were electrified.
Many of you will have seen old black and white footage of these tram systems, each car could carry between 80 and 100 people, they were clean, relatively quiet, had zero tailpipe emissions and were cheap enough to use benefitting the vast majority of the population.
The city of Los Angeles built the largest electric tramway system in the world, over 1600 kilometres or 1,000 miles of track. The tramcars could run as a single tram or in multiple-unit operation thereby capable of moving a few 100 people at a time.
The tracks ran down the centre of the boulevards and it was remnants of this system that I saw that day in 1987.
That was just in the USA, in more or less every city in Europe, trams were would have been a central part of every city dwellers day to day experience. The were ubiquitous.
So why do we not see these trams or streetcars running in our cities today? Why are the original ones that have survived now mostly a tourist attraction rather than a sensible way to move around?
Los Angeles is a really good example of what happened.
A quick bit of background. A steel wheel running along a steel track has just about the lowest resistance of any load carrying mechanism. The contact area is tiny, a horse could pull a tram with maybe 40 or 50 people on board, if the tram had tyres, you’d need multiple horses.
Why? Because a tyre, although a brilliant invention, has far greater rolling resistance than a steel wheel. This is a good thing as a tyre doesn’t have guides like a tram wheel does, it needs that friction, or grippiness to not only push the vehicle along, but to facilitate safe steering.
So streetcars or trams are incredibly energy efficient, and when they are powered by electricity as they all were, the amount of energy needed to travel 1 mile was a fraction of the energy used to push along a large passenger bus with tyres.
And yet, a large passenger bus is exactly what replaced the tram.
But did this happen because the people in all these cities in the early 1900’s refused to ride on the trams and welcomed the combustion engine busses with cheers and flag waving.
The answer is a very emphatic no.
The tram companies, popular, profitable and reliable, were bought up by rapidly formed shell companies that were fronts for the likes or Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, GM, and Mack Trucks among others.
As soon as they had a controlling influence over the tramway companies, they closed them down. Literally on the day they took over, they drove all the trams to the depot on one side of the city and set fire to them.
The trams were rapidly replaced by combustion engine powered busses, vehicles that carried far less people, burned petroleum and wore out their tyres thus needed endless replacements. One of the big names behind this push was a chap called John D. Hertz, who at the time was a very successful bus manufacturer. The Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company bought the streetcar lines in New York City among many other places, and eventually replaced them with his busses.
That’s capitalism, and that’s fine, but I think it’s important to remind ourselves that the streetcars were well established and popular. The general public did not want to get rid of them. And remember, busses in the 1920’s and 30’s were filthy, inefficient beats belching our thick clouds of choking smoke and toxic gas.
In the years after World War 1, more and more people started buying cars. As the streets and indeed the newly built suburbs had been created for trams, horse drawn transport, bicycles and pedestrians, the car created huge problems.
Gridlock was a common experience for both drivers and tram riders in American cities, and local government were just as much to blame for the demise of the streetcar as were the company’s pushing combustion and oil burning.
The 5 cent fare had become, as some stated at the time, ‘an American’s birthright’ and through the raging inflation and economic downturn of the 1920’s, the fares did not rise, causing the transit companies running the streetcars to start to fail.
So the oil, truck, bus and car companies had easy pickings, buying up transit companies one by one in cities all over America.
These companies were all convicted of a conspiratorial scheme to create a monopoly on transit in the late 1940’s. They were fined, General Motors had to pay . . . . $5,000.
The demise of mass transit in the USA is very well documented, I know far less about the history of trams in Europe. A few cities like Lisbon and Amsterdam, Budapest, Prague, Milan and a few others are still running trams on their original networks, but mostly they were ripped up and replaced with petrol or diesel busses long ago.
The point I really want to make though is cities were not always dominated by cars, obviously European cities predate cars by many centuries, but I had assumed American cities, particularly Los Angeles, were built around cars.
I thought the streets and endless sprawling suburbs were facilitated by private cars. But up until the 1950’s, this really wasn’t the case.
They were built around the trams, the cars just arrived later and chocked the whole city up, millions of tailpipes pumping out billions of cubic meters of toxic gas.
I know we are not going to get trams back in our cities, in places they have been re-introduced on a small level, Edinburgh and Manchester in the UK for example, the costs and disruption to the city has been enormous.
But we can certainly reclaim our streets from cars to a large extent, and that seems to be happening all around the globe.
10,000 people trying to move in 10,000 cars on crowded streets, with cars that need parking somewhere, when you could move the same number of people in a few hundred trams that don’t need parking space in the city, does make more sense.
But maybe if we make it safer to ride a bike, walk, and use cheap and reliable public transport, then less people might use combustion cars to move about our cities.
Just an idea.
Absolutely, it's madness. I've only been driving since I turned 40, but have never enjoyed it. Here's the thing, I actually did more traveling without a car. Originally cars were marketed as "freedom", but that is now laughable, they're a hindrance – unless you need a vehicle for disability reasons. As an able-bodied person I feel "freer" using my own feet or using public transport.
It's a travesty. As per the article, capitalism is the cause and despite living in the UK and benefiting from it, I'm under no illusions that the current system has a finite lifespan. What replaces it that doesn't create other though, I don't think the human race has the answer on that one.