Taken for a Ride

Narrator:
Weren't the streetcars making money?

Barney Larrick:
Not after I got done chopping heads off, they weren't making money. Reduce service, make it less attractive to the customer, sell off property and holdings, take the money out, raise fares, suck the company dry, pull the company down. That's what we did.

Narrator:
This is a story about how things got the way they are. Why sitting in traffic seems natural. Why our public transportation is the worst in the industrialized world. And why superhighways cut right through the hearts of our cities.

Jim Holzer:
The Fitzgeralds came in here just like they did in every city they ever went to. They destroyed an established public-transit system that had been built to meet the needs of the people.

Narrator:
In the mid-1930s, GM worked hard to create the impression of a nationwide trend away from rail. But there was no trend. Buses were a tough sell. They jolted. They smelled. They inched through traffic. City by city, it took the hidden hand of General Motors to replace streetcars with Yellow Coach buses. In 1936, a company was founded that would grow to dominate American city transportation. National City Lines had no visible connection to General Motors. In fact, the director of operations came from a GM subsidiary, Yellow Coach, and members of the Board of Directors came from Greyhound, which was founded and controlled by General Motors. The money to start this new company also came from Greyhound and Yellow Coach. To hide these connections the company needed a front man. Roy Fitzgerald got his start in Northern Minnesota where he hauled miners and school children in a couple of buses. General Motors would groom him to become president of National City Lines. Over the next few years, Standard Oil of California, Mack Truck, Phillips Petroleum and Firestone Tire would join GM in backing this venture.

Edwin 'Jay' Quinby:
The plan is to destroy public utilities, which you'll find impractical to replace after you discover your mistake. Who are the corporations behind this? Why are they permitted to destroy valuable electric railways?

Bradford Snell:
At that time Alfred P. Sloan said "Wait a minute. This is a great opportunity. We've got ninety percent of the market out there that we can somehow turn into automobile usage. If we can somehow eliminate the rail alternative, then we will create a new market for our cars. If we don't, then General Motors' sales are gonna be level." They had to get rid of the streetcars. They wanted the space that the streetcars used for automobiles. They had to find something that they could put in place of the streetcars. Sloan at the time thought that he wanted to somehow motorize all the major cities of the country and then replacing all the street railways with buses, and ultimately thinking that no one would want to ride the buses and therefore they'd buy General Motors automobiles.

Bradford Snell:
The key lawyers involved in the case told me there was not a scintilla of doubt that these defendants, General Motors and the others, had set out to destroy the streetcar system. But since there was no antitrust law on the books at that point saying, 'Thou shalt not destroy streetcar systems,' the best way, the only way they could get them on a violation was to proceed along the criminal antitrust, conspiracy route. And that's what they did.