[tsudounym]

This is a chicken and egg problem, stop making excuses for Western governments. Nearly all US cities had streetcars and dense walkable downtowns. There are pictures of this. They were destroyed in the 1950s due to pressure from car/oil lobbies, as well as eager house buyers who wanted cheap FHA loans. (Only available to whites)

Europe is not immune either, they would've followed the US's footsteps entirely if it weren't for the 1973 oil shock, which hit them harder than the US.

[jeffchien]

I know you didn't name a city, but since everyone says this about Los Angeles due to Roger Rabbit, I'll zoom in on LA. The LA street cars, Pacific Electric and LA Railways, were operated by Henry Huntington to sell real estate and were increasingly unprofitable over time. This definitely wasn't helped by increasing competition from private automobiles, the 1910-20s version of rideshare called "jitneys", and local buses, but the streetcars weren't there as a charitable public service and rarely reinvested in itself. In 1925-1926, they proposed having LA city fund expansion and rapid transit, but the public and press at the time were very against elevated lines and increased taxes. There was no shortage of racism (as evidenced by voters destroying half of Chinatown to build Union Station), and LA Times infamously called elevated lines "four miles of hideous, clattering, dusty, dirty, dangerous, street-darkening overhead trestles." That basically sealed the streetcars' fate, and what the car industry did decades later was picking apart their corpses.

I'm sure that Roger Rabbit might be more true for some cities, but I dislike that LA and other cities cling on to this. It excessively absolves everyone else -- politicians, press, homeowners, and PE/LARy themselves -- of their own fault. They could've saved their transit system like London did in the 1920-30s. Even today every SFR owner seems to prefer pointing at the Roger Rabbit story rather than looking in the mirror. Thank god for AB2097 and other new laws that address low density.

Sources -- basically any source that's not Roger Rabbit will tell you the same thing:

* http://scsra.org/library/rapid-transit-history/

* https://laist.com/news/entertainment/union-station-history

* https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demis...

* This entire book; the preview pages have a lot of pertinent parts: https://books.google.com/books?id=OfTlph3cXoQC

[rootusrootus]

> They were destroyed in the 1950s due to pressure from car/oil lobbies

Popular explanation but largely false. They were destroyed because people quit using them.

[anon25783]

Why and how did people quit using them? Suppose you're in a world where the interstate highway system hasn't been built and subway trains are the dominant mode of transportation, and you would like to stop taking trains to get to places, what do you do? Walk? Bike? Ride a horse? Drive offroad in a car with a manual transmission and no seatbelts or airbags, with no gas stations in between?

Seems like you'd be S.O.L. unless the government kindly free-markets a continent-wide network of paved roads, with conveniently placed roadside stops along the way where they sell gasoline. Can't imagine why they would undertake such an exorbitant public works project when the transcontinental railroad already exists; it's not like the government is disproportionately influenced by any industries that would very obviously materially benefit from such a thing.

[throwaway22032]

People use e-mail more than snail mail nowadays too. Funny, that.

[theironhammer]

A decent article on their demise. https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demis...

[ghaff]

But it's far more satisfying to blame some change you don't like on $EVILCORP than a more complicated narrative that revolves around people as a whole preferred something different so it didn't really make sense for government/a company to keep pouring money into a pit to keep a small minority happy.

The story often goes that someone destroyed a fully operational system for profits when in fact the system was badly deteriorated and not really used a lot.

[tsudounym]

Do you REALLY think gasoline subsidies and government backed 97% LTV mortgages is a free market? People were coaxed out of cities with very generous subsidies as well as race baiting (redlining)

[ghaff]

People moved out to the suburbs for a lot of reasons--not least of which was the post-war baby boom. The US government certainly didn't discourage it (though they were arguably pursuing policies the majority of the population wanted) and the exodus added fire to a self-reinforcing cycle of urban problems (including race-related ones)which lasted at least through the 1980s. And arguably we could see movement out of at least some cities again.

I'm not especially pro-suburbia--I live in an exurban/almost rural location. But I think it's perfectly understandable why many people wouldn't live in a city given a choice which they increasing had post-WWII in the US.