This link has been bookmarked by 11 people . It was first bookmarked on 04 Jun 2008, by Adam Skinner.
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05 Jun 08
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04 Jun 08
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Wikipedia says that the station was built before there was much concern about competition from the automobile. It wasn't built in the center of the city, but on the outskirts - so most people arrived at the station not by foot, not by car, not by bus, but by street car or by the interurban. Interurban? What the heck is that? Even the vocabulary of the pre-automobile world is being lost to us. The reason that you likely don't know that word is because you've never seen one, and for that you can thank - guess who - General Motors.
In 1921, GM lost $65 million, leading [GM President Alfred P.] Sloan to conclude that the auto market was saturated, that those who desired cars already owned them, and that the only way to increase GM's sales and restore its profitability was by eliminating its principal rival: electric railways. At the time, 90 percent of all trips were by rail, chiefly electric rail; only one in 10 Americans owned an automobile. There were 1,200 separate electric street and interurban railways, a thriving and profitable industry with 44,000 miles of track, 300,000 employees, 15 billion annual passengers, and $1 billion in income. Virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system. Source
Subsequently, according to Wikipedia:
General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum formed the National City Lines (NCL) holding company, which acquired most streetcar systems throughout the United States, dismantled them, and replaced them with buses in the mid 20th century. After all was said and done, and all the streetcar systems gone, GM was convicted of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, fined a whopping $5,000. Each executive was ordered to pay a fine of $1 for a conspiracy to force the streetcar systems to buy GM buses instead of other buses (but not for dismantling the streetcar systems, which were also being dismantled by non-NCL owned systems). Source
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