“The great American streetcar scandal”
A contributor makes the valid observation “You may wish to do a little research on why trolleys don’t exist anywhere in the states, save for a few cities. Your investigation could start by looking into who (or what special interest) might have benefited from getting rid of the trolleys.”
We will conduct research into this matter as it concerns Lancaster and report further.
According to Wikipedia under the heading “The Great American Streetcar scandal”:
“On April 9, 1947, nine corporations and seven individuals (constituting officers and directors of certain of the corporate defendants) were indicted in the Federal District Court of Southern California on two counts under the U.S. Sherman Antitrust Act. The charges, in summary, were conspiracy to acquire control of a number of transit companies to form a transportation monopoly, and conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies to companies owned by the City Lines.
“The proceedings were against Firestone, Standard Oil of California, Phillips, General Motors, Federal Engineering, and Mack (the suppliers), and their subsidiary companies: National City Lines, Pacific City Lines, and American City Lines (the City Lines).”
However, the article concludes:
“Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that streetcars faded away at the invention of internal combustion private automobile and then the bus. At one time, nearly every city in the U.S. with population over 10,000 had at least one streetcar company. 95% of all streetcar systems were at one time privately owned.
“Robert C. Post wrote that ‘nationwide, the ultimate reach of the alleged conspirators extended to only about 10 percent of all transit systems—sixty-odd out of some six hundred—and yet virtually all the other 90 percent also got rid of trolleys (as happened with all the tramcar systems in the British Isles and France).’”
Ahh, but the 10% of remaining transit systems were the ones in the largest cities, where if not for the “Conspiracy” they may still be operating today. Luckily, the “conspiracy” spared a few cities, such as Boston, Mass. Several of Boston’s streetcar lines from the early part of the 1900s survive to this day in the form of the MBTA Green Line and the Ashmont-Mattapan Branch of the MBTA Red Line. The Ashmont-Mattapan trolleys in particular still use 1940s vintage, restored PCC cars, while the Green Line uses modern Light Rail vehicles.
So yes, market forces (competition due to automobile) are what killed streetcars in most smaller cities, but the “conspiracy” was what drove the nail into the coffin for the lines which had the best chance of long term survival (and hence, competition to their automobile-based interests).