Comments by "Bushrod Rust Johnson" (@MilwaukeeF40C) on "Did GM really kill the streetcar in Los Angeles?" video.

  1. Would people choose cars as much if road paving couldn't be subsidized, and highways were private toll roads?
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  2. National City Lines DID keep some profitable streetcar lines in service in L.A., even bought new equipment, and they weren't shut down until the public transit agency took over. Also, Pacific Electric interurban lines were separate from Los Angeles Railway which was the city system. National City Lines was not involved in Pacific Electric.
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  3. Some of those Belgian cars were made with recycled PCC guts from the U.S.
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  4. The Liberty lines were essentially heavy rail commuter. Those can be time competitive with cars because of distance traveled.
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  5. The population of L.A. is actually quite high now for being a suburb.
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  6. To this day the rapid transit industry still has not developed traction motors and electrical shit that can tolerate fine powered snow.
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  7.  @villevirtanen00  I guarantee that sleet buildup on wires and ice in flangeways fucks with them all.
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  8. "A fair system would have paid for these roadways through a hefty excise tax on all car sales and a high Gasoline Tax." Nah fuck that. A fair system would have been the state staying out of the transportation and land use markets, and highways being built by private companies as toll roads, or not being built at all. I could live either way.
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  9. National City Lines bought systems mostly in small cities, and most of those were decrepit. Their goal was to make money by moving people. If they hadn't invested in buses, those cities would have ended up with no transit at all. Some of L.A.'s streetcar lines actually outlasted NCL ownership. Then there were things like Montgomery that turned a lot of people away from transit in some places. NCL actually lobbied against segregation a while before that issue boiled over because it was a pain in the ass for them to enforce.
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  10. For all intents and purposes buses are just as good as streetcars/trams, but much cheaper. Rail does not make sense unless there is enough demand for heavy rapid transit or mainline commuter rail.
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  11. The stock purchases and financing were really what the "convictions" were all about. I really don't see what is wrong with that kind of setup, and neither did the judge. It is like having to buy supplies only from McDonald's when you own a McDonald's franchise.
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  12. Streetcars and private transit companies thrived when there was very little government involvement in transportation and land use.
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  13. Track wears out. Electric railway equipment is actually also quite fragile and needy.
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  14. "the lines being more or less a bait and switch scam to sell houses that were only valuable because of a system the owners of both the land and the system had no intention of maintaining" The railroad is not the only reason the houses were valuable. Every lot has a street adjoining it as well. Lots have no value at all without that. By the time the communities had matured, they had value aside from the existence of the railroads. The passenger trains were breaking even financially before automotive technology was viable and government started subsidizing highways. Pacific Electric had a huge freight business paying the bills and some of these lines still exist.
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  15. "Lobbying" is what happens when everything is allowed to be up for a vote. People and organizations SHOULD be lobbying when the government can interfere in economics and individual liberty. Nobody had to lobby to buy transit companies. They were private entities that could be bought out by others.
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  16.  @phildouglas9086  Pills are not made from petrochemicals.
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  17. They were never charged for monopolizing anything. The "conviction" was a settlement with the government over trading special financing deals for being exclusive suppliers to National City Lines. The government couldn't prove anything illegal was done but didn't want to cede the case completely. The whole thing had pretty much nothing to do with the overall outcome of transportation.
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  18. Actually the Wikipedia article provides enough sources to show that the "conspiracy" thing was pretty inconsequential.
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  19. "You focus your attention on the bus itself, and you miss the fact that how what's beneath its wheels is paid for is the single most important factor in this equation!" But that road would be there no matter what. Every subdivided lot gets street frontage. This has been so long before there were cars, buses, or streetcars. If the street gets paved, and almost all traffic can make perfectly fine use of that pavement, why bother also putting tracks in it that only one thing will use?
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  20. "The permanency of Streetcar lines, for all of their faults, do raise property values and encourages small businesses to move in to a Much Greater degree than bus stops do." This reasoning gets a little too close to social engineering and economic outcome tinkering for me.
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  21. Same reasons that active streetcar tracks and the pavement around them are hell to maintain.
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  22. job require grammar and punctuation
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  23. In Jeffersonian fashion we should just make a constitutional clarification that public revenue is NOT to be used for internal improvements. Roads would revert to dirt and people would have to figure something else out.
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  24.  @davenicholson7645  What makes you think that?
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  25. Plane-arium.
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  26. These are important details. NCL actually bought new streetcars for LA.
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  27. It is just irrational baggage.
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  28. Why don't you read that. It cites sources that the issue was taken way out of context.
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  29. Actually embedded streetcar rails also contribute a lot of depreciation to pavements due to more places for water infiltration and mechanical hammering. It is extremely expensive infrastructure to maintain. The advantage of buses is that the pavement will be there and has to be maintained anyway. Bus traffic does not wear out pavement that much faster. The efficiency of railed vehicles also matters very little at streetcar loads and speeds. Low voltege (~600 volt) traction distribution also has high losses. Pavement damage is a matter of weight rather than friction. Car forces are not enough to stress pavement past its elasticity limits and cause permanent deformation. Almost all pavement damage is caused by weather and trucks.
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  30. Taking care of tracks buried in pavement is one of the worst things ever. The pavement doesn't last as long around tracks either.
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  31. Because it sucks to live near scrubs. Dog shit everywhere.
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  32. Oh shut up.
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  33. Houston sounds awesome.
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  34. Any steel that's been buried for a while gets brittle and rots rapidly as soon as air gets to it.
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  35. Some idiots somewhere probably would do something like that. But burning was also the preferred way of scrapping mostly wood cars.
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  36. The Los Angeles Railway had exclusive franchise rights to use streets for commercial transportation. It didn't matter if those rights were exercised with streetcars or buses.
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  37. GM never bought transit lines anywhere, National City Lines did. National City Lines did not shut down LA streetcars, in fact they purchased a group of new ones. The streetcar lines did not shut down until after the city government took them over.
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  38. Pacific Electric wasn't even bought by General Motors. This is the system that reached the vast majority of the L.A. suburbs and it declined without GM being involved. National City Lines bought the L.A. Railway (local streetcars) and kept some of the streetcar lines running. GM wasn't really in charge of NCL either. Streetcars were no real obstacle to people buying cars, ever.
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  39. People overstate the involvement of GM. They made buses. They had hardly anything to do with National City Lines.
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