Did you know that up until the 1920's, that, except for two 20-mile gaps in New York state, you could ride from New England to Wisconsin entirely by trolley car? Here is a map of trolley lines in the Midwest from 1912:
Practically every town in the USA with a population of 2,000 people or more had access to the once-ubiquitous trolley car.
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For a background to this post, please read Harvey Wasserman's GM Must Re-Make the Mass Transit System it Murdered.
In a 1922 memo that will live in infamy, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit aimed at dumping electrified mass transit in favor of gas-burning cars, trucks and buses.
Just one American family in 10 then owned an automobile. Instead, we loved our 44,000 miles of passenger rail routes managed by 1,200 companies employing 300,000 Americans who ran 15 billion annual trips generating an income of $1 billion. According to Snell, "virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system."
But GM lost $65 million in 1921. So Sloan enlisted Standard Oil (now Exxon), Philips Petroleum, glass and rubber companies and an army of financiers and politicians to kill mass transit.
The campaigns varied, as did the economic and technical health of many of the systems themselves. Some now argue that buses would have transcended many of the rail lines anyway. More likely, they would have hybridized and complemented each other.
But with a varied arsenal of political and financial subterfuges, GM helped gut the core of America's train and trolley systems. It was the murder of our rail systems that made our "love affair" with the car a tragedy of necessity.
Wasserman's article in Common Dreams is essential knowledge as to why public transit in the USA is so poor and also, why America, which has less than five percent of the world's people, consumes 25% of the world's petroleum. It is no accident. We once had a public transit system that was the envy of the world, and, no coincidence, used practically no petroleum. By destroying the US (and Canadian) electric public transit systems, GM, the oil companies and the tire and rubber companies sent the USA on the road to perdition, isolating people, destroying American cities, wasting vast amounts of energy and scrapping what was once the finest rail public transit system in the world.
The time for rebuilding America's electric traction public transit systems is long overdue.
We need a crash program for rebuilding urban, suburban and intercity electric rail systems. This program will put millions of people back to work doing the important task of greatly improving our transportation infrastructure and vastly cutting our profligate energy use at the same time.
Electric light rail is far more energy-efficient than motor buses. Because light rail runs on electricity, alternative energy sources like wind power generation become a transportation option.
Electric traction motors accelerate far more quickly than internal combustion engines, so light rail vehicles can deliver better on-time performance than buses.
Electric traction motors are far more energy-efficient than internal combustion engines. Electric traction has far less moving parts than internal combustion, so maintenance costs are lower. The bottom line is that, although the up-front capital costs of light rail are higher than the capital costs of buses, the operating costs of light rail are far lower due to energy savings, lower maintenance and far longer depreciable lives of electric rail versus rubber-tired buses.
Light rail has higher passenger throughput than buses. It has lower labor cost per passenger mile, not simply because it has lower maintenance costs than buses, but also because you can couple cars together allowing one operator to carry 400 people or more.
Tom Delay tried to stop Houston's Harris County Metropolitan Transit Authority ("Metro") from building light rail by blocking federal funding. Metro built their light rail line entirely from local funds, without Federal Transit Administration assistance. Delay was (and is) entirely in the pocket of the oil companies and the auto and road building interests. Delay failed. Metro built their line anyway, and now it carries a million riders a month.
Rebuilding the USA's electric transit systems, besides creating jobs and saving a huge amount of petroleum, will revitalize America's decaying cities.
Light rail is versatile. It can operate as a streetcar, a subway, and elevated train or a high-speed commuter train.
MetroRail won a referendum put to the voters in 2003, authorizing them to build five new light rail lines, this time with FTA funding. Here's the plan. Construction on the new lines began in July 2008:
Let's put America back to work building something useful and save much of the energy we are wasting now. Light rail is a major component of a twenty-first century transportation network. Other countries have figured this out. Now it's our turn.