[PRCo] Who Killed the Streetcar?

[Fred Schneider]

Anyone who looks at the numbers understands.   Those, Dennis, who want to believe a conspiracy, will always select the numbers to prove their point.   The conspiracy deflects the blame from themselves, as car users, to the guy who sold them the car (and who also sold the bus).   

The three numbers I always liked were that Pennsylvania had 500,000 automobiles in 1900 for a population of 8.720 million people or about 2 million families.   Works out to about a machine for every 4 families.  (My constant is about 4 people per family.)

Ten years later in 1930 we had about 1,500,000 automobiles and 9.631 million people.  Using the same ratios, that is probably somewhere around 2.4 million families or about 60% of the families now have a car.  (We've gone from 25% of the families owning cars to 60% owning them.)

In the decade of the 1920s we paved 50% of all the rural highway miles in the state of Pennsylvania and 90% of all the state and federally subsidized highway miles in Pennsylvania.   You give them paved roads and they will buy a car.   

Doesn't that give us a clue why the peak year for transit in this state was 1923?   It was pretty much the same across the county.   If you look at Spencer Crump's Ride the Big Red Cars, you will see that Pacific Electric also peaked in 1923.   

As long as gasoline was cheap and traffic didn't kill us, we loved our cars.   

On May 5, 2014, at 6:56 AM, DF Cramer wrote:

> http://news.boldride.com/2014/05/who-killed-public-transportation-in-los-angeles/48243/
> Another positive report debunking the myths of City Lines. The BBC videos interspersed through the article are a great spoof of rail invention.
> 
> Dennis F. Cramer 
> http://home.windstream.net/dfc1/ 		 	   		  
> 
> 
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