How Standard Oil and GM Stymied Los Angeles Public Transportation

[robertpaulsen]

How Standard Oil and GM Stymied Los Angeles Public Transportation

Monday, April 10, 2017

This is the Seattle Center Monorail, built for the Seattle World's Fair in 1962 and still operating today. I've always wondered why this form of mass transit never caught on in Los Angeles where I'm from. The truth is the Alweg Monorail Company, responsible for the Seattle and Disneyland's Monorail offered to build this sort of thing for Los Angeles in 1963. What happened?

In the aftermath of gaining international recognition for their monorail at the 1962 Seattle Century 21 Exposition, the Alweg Monorail Company wanted to establish a major presence in the world of urban rail transit. On June 4, 1963, the President of the Alweg Rapid Transit Systems, Sixten Holmquist wrote a letter to the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) of Los Angeles with an official proposal. It stated, "We are pleased to submit this day a proposal to finance and construct an Alweg Monorail rapid transit system 43 miles in length, serving the San Fernando Valley, the Wilshire corridor, the San Bernardino corridor and downtown Los Angeles." In specifying the financial details, in which the complete system amounted to $105,275,000, the proposal, which was also presented to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, stated, "this is a turn-key proposal in which a group will share risk, finance the construction, and turn over to MTA a completed and operating system to be repaid from MTA revenues."

So why didn't the L.A. County Board of Supervisors approve this proposal? It was opposed by Standard Oil. According to Kim Pedersen, a former Alweg engineer explained that there was initially a lot of excitement for the proposal. But then political pressure from Standard Oil dampened their enthusiasm. According to page 170 of American Society of Civil Engineers - Los Angeles Section, political pressure may also have come from General Motors against the project. Famed author Ray Bradbury rallied against this pressure by stating, "A single transit line will not answer our problems; we must lay plans for a series of transportation systems that would allow us to move freely, once more, within our city. The answer to all this is the monorail." For all his objections, Bradbury was thrown out of the Board of Supervisors meeting. Walt Disney also supported the monorail, but unfortunately their influence was unable to match Standard Oil and GM.

But this wasn't the first time that Standard Oil and GM stymied public transportation in Los Angeles. Their most infamous collusion is known as the Great American Streetcar Scandal. Between 1938 and 1950, the transit systems in more than 25 cities were bought out by National City Lines (NCL) and replaced by GM buses. Who controlled National City Lines? Well, their list of investors included Firestone Tires, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Truck Company, Standard Oil and, at least since 1946 when American City Lines merged with NCL, General Motors. Despite public opinion polls that, in Los Angeles for example, showed 88 percent of the public favoring expansion of the rail lines after World War II, NCL systematically shut down its streetcar systems until, by 1955, only a few remained. L.A. had two popular trolley systems; the Pacific Electric "Red Cars" and the Los Angeles Railway "Yellow Cars." While National City Lines owned only the Yellow Cars, because both systems were often used in conjunction by travelers and cutting service on one line made the other less convenient than automobiles, both systems failed and were dismantled. While General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone Tires may not have bought the Red Car just to destroy it, like the Judge Doom character played by Christopher Lloyd did in the final act of the 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the result was identical.

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http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2017/04/how-standard-oil-and-gm-stymied-los.html

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