The Roger Rabbit Theory
"General Motors Killed America's Streetcars"—Right? Not so Fast...
Once upon a time, according to a persistent urban legend, Los Angeles was a tranquil constellation of residential villages on the Pacific shore, unafflicted by freeways, congestion, or smog. In the 1988 feature Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, an urchin asks gumshoe Eddie Valiant, played by Bob Hoskins, why he isn’t driving a car.
“Who needs a car in L.A.?” replies Valiant, as he insouciantly hops on the rear bumper of a passing streetcar. “We’ve got the best public transportation system in the world!”
The plot hinges on the dastardly plans of Judge Doom, who wants to pave over the animated denizens of Toon Town (which bears a marked resemblance to Watts) so he can build an empire of tire salons, fast-food restaurants, and billboards along a new kind of high-speed roadway: “Eight lanes of shimmering cement—they’re calling it a freeway!” Valiant reacts with disbelief. “Nobody’s going to drive this lousy freeway when they can take the Red Car for a nickel!”
This much is true: the Red Cars really existed, they really went everywhere, and the fare really was five cents. If you credit the Judge Doom version of history, a cabal of automobile interests tore up tracks in Los Angeles and across the country, and replaced efficient electric streetcars with polluting diesel buses in an effort to make the internal combustion engine the king of the road. This conspiracy theory, while it makes for compelling pop history, is at least a couple of notches too simplistic. The real story behind what happened to the Red Cars, and why Los Angeles has become a byword for sprawl and congestion, is a little more complex, but a lot more interesting.
Los Angeles owes its sprawled, horizontal form to railways, rather than freeways. Founded in 1781 as a New Spanish ranch town by mestizo and mulatto settlers, the city remained an obscure dot on the map until railroads brought a tidal wave of settlement from the Midwest; by the mid-1880s, fare wars between the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe brought the cost of a one-way ticket from Kansas City down to a single silver dollar. A railroad right-of-way to San Pedro, which became the city’s deep-water port in the 1890s, extended the city limits 20 miles southwest from downtown. The building of the Owens Valley aqueduct—a story of civic corruption loosely told in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown—permitted the annexation of the San Fernando Valley, and the discovery of oil dispersed centers of industry, and population, throughout the Basin. By 1930, Los Angeles was the fifth-largest city by population in the United States—and the largest in area in the entire world.
The budding metropolis really began to grow thanks to the adoption of a marvel of nineteenth-century technology, the electric streetcar. In 1887, inventor Frank Sprague outfitted Richmond, Virginia, with a system of 40 sparking trolleys that drew power from a cat’s cradle of overhead wires. Streetcars quickly became the dominant mode of urban transportation in North America, carrying eleven billion passengers a year by the end of the First World War. (I write more about the network of interurban systems, which in some places allowed a journey of a thousand miles, exclusively by electric trolley, in this Straphanger dispatch from earlier this year.) In Los Angeles, Southern Pacific heir Henry Huntington bought up dozens of shoestring streetcar companies to create the Pacific Electric empire. The Red Cars, as the big interurban trolleys were known, could be seen swaying through orange groves between Santa Monica and Arrowhead Hot Springs, and clattering over the sandy margins of Newport Beach all the way up to the tavern at snow-topped Mt. Lowe; on a straightaway, they could hit 60 miles an hour. At their peak in 1926, they laced together four counties and 50 communities, mostly along private rights-of-way; together with the Yellow Cars of the Los Angeles Electric Railway, Huntington’s network of smaller streetcars which ensured local service in central Los Angeles, they constituted the most highly ramified public-transport system in the world, with over 1,500 miles (2,400 kms) of track.
The Red Car system wasn’t the product of high-minded philanthropy—the tracks had a suspicious tendency to go straight to land owned by Huntington and his cronies—but it did produce an appealing urban landscape with pockets of factories, bungalows, Safeway Supermarkets, and Owl Drugstores within walking distance of the streetcar lines. “The efficiency and convenience of the Big Red Car interurban system,” wrote rail historian Spencer Crump in Ride the Big Red Cars, “whisking people to the contrasts of the orange groves, seashore, mountains, villages and cities, and showing them the opportunities, encouraged people to vacation permanently in Southern California…Of the thirteen cities incorporated in Los Angeles County during the decade which ended in 1919, all but one was located on a Pacific Electric line.” The city’s horizontal spread was also encouraged by the dispersed location of oil fields and refineries, as well as a preference for detached houses, brought by migrants with roots in small towns and family farms. The result was a new kind of city, where walkable residential centers could be physically distant from downtown, but still within easy commuting distance. As long as the Red and Yellow Cars were running smoothly, Los Angeles delivered its residents both spacious living and a modicum of urbanity.
The golden age of urban rapid transit ended with the coming of the motor age. The car’s arrival in cities across America was hotly contested, and with good reason: it turned public streets into killing fields. In one year alone, 1925, seven thousand children were killed by cars and trucks. Reckless drivers were attacked by mobs in Philadelphia and “death drivers” were denounced in major city newspapers. In a Milwaukee parade, a streetcar pulled a flatbed trailer displaying a wrecked car driven by a likeness of Satan; in St. Louis, flowers were scattered from an airship over a monument that bore the names of 32 child victims of automobiles…
Jazz Age Los Angeles was a key battlefront in the contest. Automobiles were not a hard sell for Southern Californians, many of whom had made the long trek across the desert from the rural Midwest in farm trucks and jalopies. By the mid-’twenties, Los Angeles counted one driver for every three people—essentially a car in every garage, making it by far the most motorized city in the world. As dispersed as the city’s industrial and residential areas were, its downtown was one of the largest in the nation, concentrating banks, offices, and retail into 300 square blocks of Beaux-Arts skyscrapers and palatial department stores. As car commuters and shoppers joined the half million workers who converged on the downtown every day, traffic ground to a halt, and Huntington’s Red and Yellow Cars routinely ran sixty minutes late during rush hour. To unclog the streets, the newly formed City Planning Commission took a radical step: on a hazy spring day in 1920, they decided to ban on-street parking during business hours.
The plan worked—at least at first. For the first time in years, the streetcars ran on schedule, and workers got to their offices on time. But the following day, tens of thousands of enraged motorists descended on the downtown, led by silent movie star Clara Kimball Young, and parked their cars in protest. The doe-eyed actress told newspaper reporters that brutish bureaucrats were restricting the freedom of middle-class women to shop and attend downtown matinees. (It was no coincidence that Young’s latest picture had its debut at the Rialto that very weekend, and the parking ban threatened to play hell with the box office.) After the protestors exhausted the police department’s supply of tickets, the pro-automobile Los Angeles Times declared the planners’ parking ban a fiasco, running a picture of boys playing marbles on empty streets, with the headline: “No-Parking Law Proves Motor Cars Absolutely Essential.” (Which was nonsense: eight years later, Chicago would successfully implement a daytime ban on curb parking in the Loop.) A publicity-seeking actress had won the day, the ban was lifted, and streetcars were once again stuck in a morass of barely moving traffic
The question still remains: Did streetcars die a natural death? The Roger Rabbit theory, it turns out, has a surprising amount of truth in it. After a sales slump hit the auto industry in 1924, motordom explicitly identified the lack of “floor space” in crowded downtowns as its chief impediment to expansion, and targeted streetcars as the vehicles standing in its way. In the ’thirties, General Motors, Firestone Tires, Standard Oil, and Mack Truck really did buy up an obscure Midwestern intercity bus company to form National City Lines. This front company, which eventually scrapped streetcar systems in 45 cities, secretly and illegally agreed to buy an equal number of buses from GM and Mack Truck. In 1944, a subsidiary of City Lines bought up Huntington’s Yellow Cars and replaced them with “motor coaches” running on Standard Oil diesel and Firestone rubber tires. (“From our standpoint,” a Standard Oil executive would testify, “it was going to create a market for our product—gasoline, lubricating oils, and greases.”) Two years later, a federal grand jury found the corporations that owned City Lines guilty of antitrust violations and fined their directors one dollar each. They were convicted, however, not of conspiring to rid America of streetcars, but of colluding to agree to buy only GM and Mack buses. After the war, GM and the other conspirators sold their stock in City Lines and got out of the transit business altogether.
Some transportation scholars argue that streetcars would not have survived on their own, pointing out that ridership was in decline by the ’thirties, and that, after years of neglect, the rolling stock of many private companies was in terrible shape.[1] The streetcar, from this perspective, was so much road kill, a victim of the irresistible American love affair with the automobile. Trolleys, it was true, were having trouble operating as automobiles brought them to a near standstill in downtowns across the United States. Pacific Electric, forced to keep its fares at a nickel and maintain service on low-demand lines, saw its business stolen on profitable routes by unregulated “jitneys” and bus companies; its efficiency was further reduced by accidents as reckless drivers criss-crossed the tracks. General Motors and its co-conspirators were not solely responsible for the death of the trolley—but they did manage to deliver a pretty convincing coup de grâce.
Streetcars, in other words, didn’t simply fall off the cliff. Like the bison of the great plains, they were stampeded, recklessly and prematurely, to near-extinction. (The fact that extensive systems continue to run in Toronto, Melbourne, and dozens of European cities shows street railways can function effectively in modern urban settings.) Public ownership and expansion of the Pacific Electric system—of the kind that guaranteed the future of the subway in Fiorello LaGuardia’s New York—could well have saved the Red and Yellow Cars. But Huntington and other real-estate barons were complicit in their demise. As author Peter Hall put it in Cities of Tomorrow, “Los Angeles allowed its light rail systems to be built by buccaneer capitalists chiefly interested not in supplying transportation but in massive land speculation; then, it abandoned the system to its fate.” In 1925, a comprehensive transportation plan was devised to separate trains from traffic on elevated lines emanating from downtown, but planners, politicians, and the public imagination were already fixated on a sure-fire cure-all for the city’s congestion problems: a kind of express highway completely separated from slow-moving surface streets—a freeway!
The last interurban made its final run to Long Beach in 1961. The Red Cars of the world’s greatest streetcar system would end up in a scrapyard at the end of the Long Beach freeway, stacked like cordwood…
In real-life Los Angeles, it was Judge Doom and his freeway, not Roger Rabbit and the Red Cars, that ultimately triumphed.
(The above is an adaptation of a passage from the Los Angeles chaper of Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile.)
[1] These are half truths—at best. The Depression did send transit ridership into freefall, but the Second World War made many systems profitable again, including Pacific Electric, which also earned significant revenues from transporting freight in the Greater Los Angeles area.