How Tire Companies Supposedly Sabotaged LA's Early Transit System
By May 23, 2023
To efficiently get around Los Angeles, you have to drive a car, but it wasn't always like that. At the turn of the 20th century, the city was speckled with the "Red Cars" of the Pacific Electric Railway Company, but by the '60s, they had disappeared. Where did all the Red Cars go? Some people think General Motors singlehandedly took them out, but it's a little more complicated than that.
Streetcars In Los Angeles
In 1926, Los Angeles had one of the largest mass transit systems in the world. With hundreds of stops between Santa Monica and San Bernardino, it was possible to get around the entire growing sprawl for the price of a nickel without ever setting foot in a car. When the Great Depression hit, however, Pacific Electric Railway began to suffer along with everyone else. The value of a nickel fell, and the city refused to allow a fare increase. Innovations in the automobile industry as well as new, more flexible bus lines operated by the Los Angeles Railway (which also owned the Yellow Cars that roamed the tracks alongside their red counterparts) meant Pacific Electric was hemorrhaging customers.
The opposite should have happened, as the population of Los Angeles County swelled from fewer than 200,000 to more than 2 million between 1900 and 1930, but as the city expanded to accommodate all these new people, trolley lines did not. There was a brief uptick in Red Car riders during World War II, when rationing was in full effect and Angelenos were conserving gas, but once the fighting was over, more cars crowded the road than ever before. "Crowded" is an apt descriptor: Cars drove the same lanes as trolleys, so as more cars entered the fray, trolley serviced slowed immensely.
National City Lines
By 1945, Pacific Electric was inextricably in trouble, but the nail in their coffin actually had nothing to do with them. A company called National City Lines bought up the Los Angeles Railway only to rip up the tracks that sent their Yellow Cars—and by extension, Pacific Electric's Red Cars—through the city streets to make way for a new fleet of buses, putting an end to the whole streetcar system in Los Angeles. It just so happens that the principle investors in National City Lines were General Motors, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Standard Oil of California, and Phillips Petroleum. You know, a lot of folks who had a vested interest in the success of the automobile.
It didn't help that just four years later, those corporations were found guilty of "conspiring to acquire control of a number of transit companies, forming a transportation monopoly" and "conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies to companies owned by National City Lines" in violation of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. Sure, General Motors also made buses, so it's not like they wanted to kill off public transportation completely, but they wanted it powered by diesel. About 30 years later, antitrust lawyer Bradford Snell testified before the U.S. Senate that "General Motors and allied highway interests acquired the local transit companies, scrapped the pollution-free electric trains, tore down the power transmission lines, ripped up the tracks, and placed G.M. motor buses on already congested L.A. streets."
