Forwarded mail received from: PERMIT1:NAL1 I forwarded some of the discussion on California/transit to a colleague here at the City of Berkeley, one of our transportation planners, and this is his comment, with his permission.
The GM conspiracy theory has little or no credibility in transportation circles. It's true that a GM-owned company bought up trolley- based transit systems and converted them to bus operation. But if it hadn't been GM, it most likely would have been someone else. Trolley systems were suffering from disinvestment, and politically it was very hard to raise trolley fares. Trolleys were increasingly being blamed for blocking traffic. Large cities could have created off-street rapid transit systems, but the voters of Los Angeles voted down the Rapid Transit Plan in, I think, 1927 (even so, about a mile of subway tunnel was built to bring trolleys into a Downtown Los Angeles terminal). The changing dynamics of passenger transportation under American capitalism did in the trolleys. That's a harder target to blame than a nice juicy conspiracy, but that's the way it is.
