Made In America - Bill Bryson [107]
Thus the advent of the cable-car and trolley-car was not just a boon but a kind of miracle. The cable-car was perfected by a Scottish immigrant named Andrew Smith Hallidie, who had something of a vested interested in its success: he ran a company that made cables. Cable-cars moved by gripping underground cables that were in constant motion. When a driver wished to stop he pulled a lever that disengaged the grippers. If for some reason the grippers would not disengage – and this appears to have happened quite a lot – the result was a runaway car, which would trundle along inexorably, mowing down anything too slow or insensible to get out of the way, until the power station could be alerted to shut down the entire system.22 It was not, as you can imagine, altogether ideal. Even so, cable-cars were briefly very popular, though today San Francisco is the only American city where they still exist, and even there the system is a shadow of its former self. In 1900 the city had 110 miles of line and 600 cars; by 1980 it had a little over 10 miles of line and just 40 cars.
What rendered the cable-car obsolete was the trolley-car, or trawley car as it was sometimes spelled in the early days. The trolley-car was so called because the mechanism that connected the cars to the overhead wires was a troller, which in turn was ultimately from a British dialect word troll, meaning to move about. Trolley systems were easier to install and cheaper to run than any competing systems and in consequence they thrived. It is generally overlooked that the United States once had the finest system of public transportation in the world. At the turn of the century, Berlin had the most extensive streetcar network in Europe; but in America it would have come only twenty-second.23 By 1922, the peak year, America had over 14,000 miles of streetcar track. The biggest system in the country was, you may be surprised to hear, that of Los Angeles.
Streetcars changed the way people lived. They opened up suburban life. The population of the Bronx went from under 90,000 to 200,000 in the years immediately after the introduction of the streetcar.24 By 1902 New York streetcars alone were carrying almost one billion passengers annually. Cities became bigger, busier, more confusing and in consequence in the 1890s two new words entered the language: rush hour and traffic jam.
But streetcars also offered opportunities for pleasure. People were for the first time able to explore districts of their cities that they had only heard about. Realizing the possibilities, streetcar companies began building amusement parks at the end of the lines as a way of boosting revenue – places like Willow Grove Park, twelve miles from downtown Philadelphia and now, inevitably, the site of a shopping mall. Despite their popularity, streetcars were seldom profitable. In 1921 America’s 300 largest streetcar systems made a collective profit of $2.5 million – roughly $8,000 each – on an investment of $1.5 billion. With the rise of private car ownership and other forms of transport such as buses – or ‘trackless trolleys’, as they were sometimes called at first – their fate was sealed. Between 1922 and 1932 the number of streetcar miles in America almost halved. In that same decade, a company called National City Lines – a cartel made up of General Motors and a collection of oil and rubber interests – began buying up trolley lines and converting them to bus routes. By 1950 it had closed down the streetcar systems of more than a hundred cities, including those of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore and St Louis. Its actions were unquestionably illegal and the company was eventually taken to court and convicted of engaging in a criminal conspiracy. The fine: just $5,000, less than the cost of a new bus.
II
Tempting as it is to blame a monolithic corporation for the downfall of public transportation in America, the real culprit was the car, or more specifically the nation’s abiding addiction to it. No innovation in history has more swiftly captured