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
