Well you can blame General Motors.
They established a holding company that bought up all of the street car companies countrywide and dismantled them leaving people with no choice but to use cars. The holding company was called National City Lines. The articals about this I found while researching for my MYOP paper in English 102.
Here are the links. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Streetcar_Scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines
Yeah, they played a huge part in dumping the street car in Tampa. However, it was bigger than them. The auto became the number 1 transit choice in the USA for many reasons, including the advent of suburbs. When the burbs came there was no real transit option to them and at the same time personal automobiles made it possible for people to live outside the main part of the city, Tampa, L.A, and other more modern cities can attest to that. With people owning their own auto there was no need for municipalities or counties to invest in transit.....until the cities became even more crowded and traffic became bad. Many successful transit systems in the USA are actually commuter systems with transit in the core, which is different from the past. In the past the transit system was for general mobility, commuting into the city was a part of the system too in larger cities, but more often it was for general mobility around the city......eventually we will get rail transit here, but it will likely be aimed more at commuters and circulatory systems in the core areas.
Jb -- Gm might have killed Tampa's streetcar, but it was Cloverleaf that did it in LA!
Those bastards tried to destroy toon town too! Smile, darn ya, smile...
(ok, who gets the movie reference??)
Seriously though, though steve has a poitn that there are a lot of things that added to the demise of trolleys and street cars in America, GM does have a very large hand in things. They cornered the market of transit with their busses and cars... They didn't act alone but they had a large part in it.
Funny how GM is tanking now, though, because they got far too big for their own good
Seriously though, though steve has a poitn that there are a lot of things that added to the demise of trolleys and street cars in America, GM does have a very large hand in things. They cornered the market of transit with their busses and cars... They didn't act alone but they had a large part in it.
Funny how GM is tanking now, though, because they got far too big for their own good
It is quite pitiful to think of what happened back then. And far worse, seeing how poorly GM and the other American auto companies are doing these days. hno:
I get the feeling that the pendulum will swing back in favor of transit. Not immediately, but gradually. Driving is already a pain in the ass, and the city's going to be twice this size in a couple of decades. Add to that the large increase in the cost of gas and I think we're going to see a trend for denser residential construction in older parts of the city.
We've already got house prices that have outpaced the ability of Tampa residents to pay for those houses. As demand goes up, you'll see more townhouses and condos and fewer single family homes in SoHo/Hyde Park/Palma Ceia/New Suburb "Beautiful".
If you get the population dense enough (and local traffic onerous enough), I think transit becomes viable. But it's useless for Tampa outside the core neighborhoods.
Yeah, like we could not learn the lesson the FIRST time around... good greif, lets expand our trolley and get some real transit while we are at it.
Steve
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