This evening I attended a presentation at Waterloo’s famed Princess Cinema hosted by fellow Hespelerite and history enthusiast Paul Langan. Called “How the Streetcar Died and Came Back to Life”, it discussed the death of light rail transit (or streetcars as they used to be known) across North America, and about how various cities are now trying to fix the problem of too many cars on the roads.
The core of the presentation was a film called Taken For a Ride (see below for link). A 1996 documentary, it explores how General Motors, under the steerage of Alfred P. Sloan Jr. colluded with other companies, such as Standard Oil, Mack Truck and Firestone Tires to eliminate streetcars in order to open up the streets for automobiles, and also to force people to buy cars.
Simply put, in 1921, only one in ten Los Angelinos owned a car. Three decades later almost 70 percent did. Ironically, a study done in the 1990s concluded that the only way to get rid of L.A.’s infamous gridlock traffic is to reduce the number of cars on the road by 60 percent, which is roughly the same percentage as when Sloan started treating cities as his personal social engineering experiments.
The toll over the past fifty years on some American cities has been horrendous. Los Angeles’ famed Red Cars were loved by residents. They loved zipping from the suburbs to downtown quickly, cleanly and quietly. Under the aegis of progress, L.A. was turned into the smog-ridden, traffic-clogged nightmare we all know and despise soon after the tracks were torn up.
And it wasn’t democratic, either. The people didn’t want to lose their streetcars, and the public waged a huge battle for over two years, until the chief planner, who was actually employed by the company that ran the bus line (which itself was secretly owned by GM), quashed all dissent and decreed that Los Angeles would henceforth be a bus and freeway city.
In one segment, he went so far as to say that the buses (the old 1950s buses), did not pollute in any way, and did not affect the quality of Los Angeles’ air at all. How a person could self-delude themselves so completely in the pursuit of dough is beyond me. Actually, that goes for a lot of what people do: if you actually thought about the consequences of your stupid action, you probably wouldn’t do it. At least, I hope you wouldn’t do it.
To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “And so it goes”.
But Waterloo is looking towards a brighter tomorrow with the implementation of a new Light Rail Line connecting Kitchener-Waterloo to Cambridge. Many people say it’s too expensive, and that not enough people ride transit for it to make sense. You know, the usual "the chicken or the egg" scenario. When gas hits three bucks a litre, as it inevitably will, an improved transit plan will make sense.
You bet it will.
Here's the link to the film:
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