A Streetcars Story: Oil Firms' Successful Campaign to Thwart Electric Cars in California in The 1990s

Back in the 1920s, most American city-dwellers took public transportation to work every day. There were 17,000 miles of streetcar lines across the country, running through virtually every major American city. That included cities we don't think of as hubs for mass transit today: Atlanta, Raleigh, and Los Angeles.

Nowadays, by contrast, just 5 percent or so of workers commute via public transit, and they're disproportionately clustered in a handful of dense cities like New...
More Description

Back in the 1920s, most American city-dwellers took public transportation to work every day. There were 17,000 miles of streetcar lines across the country, running through virtually every major American city. That included cities we don't think of as hubs for mass transit today: Atlanta, Raleigh, and Los Angeles.

Nowadays, by contrast, just 5 percent or so of workers commute via public transit, and they're disproportionately clustered in a handful of dense cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Just a handful of cities still have extensive streetcar systems -- and several others are now spending millions trying to build new, smaller ones.
So whatever happened to all those streetcars?

A Streetcar Named Conspire Story tells a story about the demise of America's once-mighty streetcars. The auto and oil industries hated competing with popular electric trains, so in 1922 General Motors president Alfred Sloan began a secretive campaign to get rid of them. It went into high gear in 1935.

It's all here: the backroom deals that transformed nearly every city in North America. In Minnesota, the conspirators recruited gangsters; some went to jail.

The saga is full of heroes as well as villains: people who stood up to the auto industry and Big Oil. This book covers places never before exposed, including Canada, Kansas City, Kentucky, New Jersey, Oklahoma City, Portland, Savannah, and Seattle. A bonus chapter deals with car and oil firms' successful campaign to thwart electric cars in California in the 1990s