The Myth Behind the Streetcar's Revival (May/June 1998 | Volume: 49, Issue: 3)

The Myth Behind the Streetcar's Revival

AH article image

Authors: Robert C. Post

Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)

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May/June 1998 | Volume 49, Issue 3

In a crucial scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the murderous Judge Doom reveals a “plan of epic proportions” for transforming metropolitan Los Angeles. He boasts to private detective Eddie Valiant that his Cloverleaf Industries has bought the Red Car electric railway network so that he can dismantle it. In a movie that blends splendid illusion with shrewd social commentary (humans confine cartoon characters to a ghetto while exploiting them for amusement), this dialogue resonates with a familiar belief: A magnificent transportation system was destroyed in a carefully orchestrated plot mounted by powerful automotive interests.

The widely believed-in conspiracy that the movie’s story line is based on never happened. Yet the idea remains so compelling that efforts to expose it as a myth have gained little headway. What’s more, it has had significant consequences, helping animate an electric-railway renaissance across the country—and most vigorously in Los Angeles. In 1990, electric trains began running between Los Angeles and Long Beach, where the technology had vanished almost thirty years earlier. Today they connect with other cities where they’d been gone even longer, and they are ultimately slated to reach both the San Gabriel and the San Fernando Valleys, whence they disappeared close to a half-century ago.

Their supporters say that environmental concerns and plain common sense demand that any great metropolis must have such railways; critics contend that the projects have made scarcely a dent in L.A.’s increasingly dire transportation problem while consuming billions of taxpayer dollars. And, they add, such projects have been sold to the public by the manipulating of idealized images of the old Red Car system.

Idealized images of the past are always with us, of course. We know how often they influence choices in people’s personal lives; it’s far rarer that we are given an opportunity to see clearly how powerfully they can influence public policy and technological choices. As the historian of technology John Staudenmaier observes, “People plan and try to execute rational strategies for promoting or resisting a given technology, but those same people also respond to technology affectively, with awe or fear or anger or enthusiasm. We need to learn to understand our technological behavior as a constant blend of these very different modes of consciousness.”

Snell blamed a bus-and-car conspiracy, but transit managers had known that electric railways were far too inflexible.
 

Technology does not march ahead led solely by reason and logic; it is created and changed by human choices that are hardly always rational. The new California rail lines are in part a tribute to the power of the remembrance of things past.

The inception of the old system is linked with Henry E. Huntington, whose name is locally ubiquitous: Huntington Park, Huntington Beach, Huntington Drive, the Huntington Library. Like his uncle Collis, Henry Huntington was involved with steam railroads, but his special interest lay in the electric railways, urban