[sustran] Conspiracy or fate?

[Lee Schipper]

I support Jonathan's point -- even in social democratic sweden and
left-centrist france, governments of the 1950s and 1960s dissasembled
many local and intercity rail systems and rationalized bus systems --
instead of making private motorization face its real costs -- so that
these systems, on their way into disuse anyway, were spared the
suffering and suffocation from auto use. No one dared keep residential
expansion into single family dwellings in the US structured close to
rail corridors etc.  

The real point is that many people love the store of the
GM/FIrestone/Standard oil "conspiracy", but it happens everywhere if
cars and roads are cheap and more or less already there. The nice
streetcars of the 1920s in the US went bankrupt because cities would not
let them raise fares. ANgry consumers bought cars as the next
alternative for commuting, and the car was out of the bag, so to speak. 
 A geographer at UC Berkeley, Skip Vance, wrote a book about this in the
late 1980s that was to be published by a major publisher that was bought
out and the book project dropped.

In short, take away the "conspiracy" and you still have the same
develoments, just perhaps retarded by the "retarded" response by p olicy
makers.

And, oh yes, the Parisians are trying to replace the circumferential
rail system they destroyed in the 1950s, Sweden has now reintroduced
private and public buses (and some rail service) to replace the
intercity systems that decayed through the 1970s, and the US, well..
that's another story. 

>>> richmond at alum.mit.edu 4/6/2006 10:32:32 AM >>>



While your other points are well-made, there are questions about
the so-called GM conspiracy to buy up electric railways. The reason
for
this activity was that railways were losing money. True, GM wanted to
sell
buses, but the natural conversion from an efficiency point of view was
from rail to buses. Even without GM's activities, the railways would
have
gone out of existence without government intervention, which was
certainly not available at the time.

                                          --Jonathan

-----
Jonathan Richmond
Visiting Scholar
Department of Urban Planning and Design
Graduate School of Design
Harvard University
312 George Gund Hall
48 Quincy St.
Cambridge MA 02138-3000

Mailing address:
182 Palfrey St.
Watertown MA 02472-1835

(617) 395-4360

e-mail: richmond at alum.mit.edu 
http://the-tech.mit.edu/~richmond/ 



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