[PRCo] Re: General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars

[Schneider Fred]

The piece in Transportation Quarterly is rather scholarly but it too  
has its flaws and predictably comes off not qualifying all the data  
the end of the report.   I find that it's principal problem is that  
the writer tries to prove that the passengers went to the buses when  
then there were always multiple modal splits.   In 1910 we traveled  
by streetcar or horse and buggy (if we had a lot of money and had a  
footman to take the beast back home) or we walked, and some some used  
commuter trains.   By 1930 the split involved walking, buses,  
streetcars, trains and automobiles.   The author leads us to believe  
that the trolley riders switched to jitneys and buses.   He totally  
ignores the modal shift to the automobile.   The jitney driver that  
he mentions had already switched to driving his own vehicle and was  
only asking someone else to subsidize it.

A second flaw in the analysis:  as a railway reduces the number of  
routes, its costs per car mile for railway service are going to  
increase because the power generation, substation and shop  
facilities, i.e. the overhead costs, which remain fixed, now have to  
cover fewer car miles so the cost per car mile will naturally  
increase.   If we want to bring it home to Pittsburgh, the  
engineering people in the track department on Sandusky Street  had  
fewer miles of responsibility.   Charlie Shauck's people in overhead  
lines had fewer miles of wire to maintain.   Charlie also pointed out  
to me during one visit to his home in the early 1960s that Duquesne  
Light was enforcing a demand charge because they weren't using enough  
power.  The taxes on Homewood Shops had to be spread over fewer car  
overhauls.   If you have a situation where the line poles are  
taxed ... say 50 cents a pole ... and you are running half as many  
cars compared to 1915, the cost per car mile doubled.   So sure, the  
cost of running a rail system probably went up in later years.   That  
should not come as a surprise to anyone.

The other strange thing is that one might expect the cost per car  
mile to drop as the railway reduces maintenance.   In 1920 the  
railway would spend money renewing track and wire.   In 1945 only a  
fool spends money on track they are going to remove in a year or  
so.   This suggests to me that perhaps some of them might have added  
deferred maintenance as an item to make the railway more costly to  
prove that the bus cheaper.   I wonder?????

Let me hammer more on the point that the critique totally ignores the  
increase in automobile usage.   The jitneys that were mentioned  
evolved simply as a way for Joe or Harry or Mark who were unemployed  
to make money with their automobiles.   Notice the year when this  
started ... 1914.   The Model T Ford began production in 1908 and  
allegedly by 1918 half of all the cars in the USA were Fords because  
Henry had shown us how to make them cheaply on an assembly line ...  
so cheaply that the working man could afford to buy the car he  
built.   By 1920 somewhere around one family in four in Pennsylvania  
(and that might be true on average for the nation) had automobiles.

By 1930 perhaps three families in four in this state had cars.   That  
ratio probably did not extend to places like Philadelphia,  
Pittsburgh, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis and any major  
city with good public transportation but it any shortage of cars in  
the cities would have been offset by more cars in rural areas.

The story suggests that the patronage disappears because it went to  
buses but it makes no honest attempt to show how many person trips  
there might have been in 1910 versus 1940 and what the modal split  
was between walking, streetcars, buses, and automobiles.    I don't  
object to now telling us how many because no one really knows but I  
wish he would have said that.    I would have to believe that we  
experience a logarithmic increase in the number of trips made because  
we no longer saw the true cost of making those trips.   Instead of  
being charged 5 cents for the trolley fare (4.5 cents to railway and  
0.5 cents in taxes) we were now paying a much smaller out of the  
pocket cost for gasoline and not realizing how much of the cost of  
driving the car was hidden in annual or quarterly bills for  
insurance, repairs, car payments, local, federal and state taxes.    
For example, in 1910 we walked to the corner store to get a sausage  
or maybe we stopped there between the carstop and home.   Today we  
drive to the supermarket ... guaranteed it is a second or third or  
fourth trip of the day too.

If I had to make a stab at it, I would suggest that in 1910, if we  
had a population of 1 million people, that might generate a half  
million streetcar trips per day.   How many other person trips did we  
make?   No way of knowing because most of them were walking trips to  
the corner store or the neighbor down the block.   Most of us lived  
our entire lives within 10 miles of home and much of that time was  
spent within a few blocks of home.   Going to church required that we  
walk.   The drug store was a walk.   Getting a new pair of britches  
was a walk.   Maybe the trolley only represented 10 percent of the  
trips even then and the rest were walking trips but we will never know.

Today we know with surprising accuracy how we travel to work but we  
still do not know how many other trips we make.   I once looked at  
the 1970 census commuting to work patterns for southern New Jersey  
and found that close to 20,000 individuals used subways, streetcars  
or trains to get to work.   If you multiplied that by 2, you got 90  
percent of PATCO's daily ridership ... amazing.   The other 4,000 was  
the off peak riding.   The point I am making is we know with  
surprising accuracy how we get to work but we still know zip about  
total person trips.   I would suggest, however, that since our  
society has become a motor vehicle dominated society, many of the  
trips that we probably made by foot in 1910 are today made by car.    
Our friends don't live within walking distance any longer.   "Hey  
Mom, will you please take me over to George's home?"   "Dad, I need  
to meet Susie at the mall.   Will you take me?"

(It is very easy for me to obtain motor vehicle production data by  
year ... it is right in this house by manufacturer.   What I do not  
have is longevity or titled motor vehicles by state by year.   Even  
in Pennsylvania it is easy to get statewide registration data by year  
but don't ask for it by county or city.  But by talking to older  
people, we have a pretty good idea that farmers bought the first cars  
and small trucks and we find that very often only the rich in the  
cities had them because the others had no place to put them.   The  
implication is that people in my grandparent's neighborhood off  
Perrysville Avenue had them ... they had yards big enough for  
garages.   Squirrel Hill had cars.   Dormont and Mt. Lebanon and  
Brookline developed in the automobile age.  The fancy homes in Shady  
Side and Highland and Point Breeze probably had footmen to drive  
their cars.  But I would not have expected an abundance of  
automobiles in Wilkinsburg, Homewood, Brushton, Braddock, Herron  
Hill, Manchester, Homestead or Lawrenceville.  Since Rich Allman is  
on this list, we know that PRT put the first PCC cars up in Chestnut  
Hill because the automobile competition was strongest up there.   But  
they didn't have to worry about automobiles taking business away from  
1911 Nearside cars on Girard Avenue or Lehigh Avenue or 15th and 16th  
Streets.   Our good friend Jim Henwood, a former history professor at  
East Stroudsburg, grew up in the Philadelphia area and he is one who  
points out that most city people neither had nor needed nor wanted  
cars.  I think the wanted was simply Jim's perspective but even today  
many in Philly manage to shy away from personal cars. )

But it does make one important point and that is that GM sold a good  
product.   They were the first on the scene with a reliable automatic  
transmission.   The first with a reliable diesel.  When Minneapolis  
needed a lighter bus for weight reduction ... sure, we can give you  
air springs.  And they made it a marketing standard.   And when  
California had a similar weight problem, they came up with a TDH  
4801 ... just slightly different in length from the 5105 or 5106  
coaches.   They were willing to make money.   They did it well.   And  
having driven GMs, a Ford, an ACF-Brill, from the perspective of the  
guy behind the wheel, I'll take that diesel.   And from the  
standpoint of the accountant who pays a couple thousand dollars more  
for his bus and get something that runs a million miles instead of  
200,000.   No contest.

It just doesn't point out that those of us who got there to take our  
trolley pictures often arrived in our own automobiles and we needed a  
scapegoat to make us feel good.   So we needed the conspiracy  
theory.   Since E. Jay Quinby, the founder of the Electric  
Railroaders Association, was the one who started the whole battle, I  
wonder what kind of car he drove ... he did live in the New Jersey  
suburbs.




On Feb 12, 2010, at 8:00 AM, Dennis Fred Cramer wrote:

Transportation Quarterly, Vol. 51. No. 3 Summer 1997 (45-66)
General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars

http://www.lava.net/cslater/TQOrigin.pdf
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> Too bad the video does not finish Jupiter from The Planets.
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> http://www.carlustblog.com/2010/02/the-pcc.html
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>           Dennis F. Cramer
> http://home.windstream.net/dfc1
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