[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