“Ring out the old, ring in the new,” peal the bells at this time of the year. Indeed, there is a perennial appeal for discarding the old and welcoming the new.
Anyone who opposes change is by definition an old fogy, a Neanderthal, and an obstacle to progress. However, change sometimes turns out to be a costly mistake.
But it’s downright funny when we are told that it is “progress” to change back to the custom we were induced to discard 40 years earlier, especially after we were ridiculed for opposing the abandonment of the earlier fashion.
In the 1930s and 1940s, streetcars, trams, and trolleys were the primary form of transportation in many U.S. cities. As a city dweller growing up in a family without an automobile, I relied on the streetcar as my principal means of getting about town.
Streetcars were fast, efficient, relatively clean inside, and pollution-free and odor-free outside. I could set my watch by the regularity of the schedule.
From my apartment window, I could hear the clang of the coming streetcar from a block away. I would run out to the car stop, board at 15 minutes before the hour, disembark 15 minutes later in front of Washington University in St. Louis, and have time to walk to my college classes, all of which started at 7 minutes after the hour.
It was a tight schedule, and the streetcar never let me down. Later on, when I was employed in downtown St. Louis, the streetcar gave me a similar reliable 25-minute ride each way.
From portal to portal, the streetcar provided faster service than I can drive the same route today and park my car. A streetcar token offered cheaper transportation than automobile mileage plus parking charges.
An extra bonus was that streetcar transit was smooth enough to read or nap on board. We saved the wear and tear on our nerves of thrashing through traffic; we didn’t have to tune into the morning traffic-copter to hear where we might be bogged down by bumper-to-bumper traffic.
When streetcars were phased out in favor of buses in the late 1940s, the city planners said that buses would be cheaper, faster, more flexible, and make traffic flow more smoothly. All those predictions proved to be false. Buses are far more expensive because they have to be replaced so often, and their obnoxious odors and gases are a major environmental irritant.
Now, CBS’s “60 Minutes” calls the changeover a “criminal conspiracy.” In a recent segment, Harry Reasoner said the phasing out of trolleys “wasn’t progress, wasn’t suicide; it was murder by conspiracy.”
As a city in point, Reasoner took us to Los Angeles for a look at the famous freeways. Los Angeles used to have one of the best streetcar systems in the country. In 1920, trolleys rode over 1,000 miles of track and hauled 100 million people a year.
Then, as Reasoner described it, the streetcar company was mysteriously bought up, a month later hundreds of buses arrived in Los Angeles and, overnight, workmen dug up the tracks. The government later brought conspiracy charges against General Motors, which made millions of dollars selling the buses for this changeover, and the company and its officers were ordered to pay small fines. General Motors declined to be interviewed on the program.
Mayor Thomas Bradley of Los Angeles is now trying to install a new rail system along the route of the old tracks that were abandoned 40 years ago. Naturally, the cost will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
San Diego opened a new light rail line in 1981 and about 19 other cities are building or planning similar systems. The mayor of San Diego thinks streetcars are very progressive and modern.
New Orleans and Philadelphia never gave up their streetcars. They must be crowing “I told you so” now.
When shown a sundial one day, Sam Goldwyn is reported to have said, “What’ll they think of next!” I guess he would have said the same thing if he saw streetcars rolling back into Los Angeles.
