I was rewatching a Climate Town video, the thesis of which is that GM et al. killed mass transit in a deliberate and successful attempt at creating car centric development and selling more cars. However, I've heard elsewhere, without detail, that the fuller story is more nuanced and doesn't quite implicate the automotive industry as much as Rollie suggests. So what is that fuller story? Was America really duped by GM, or was there more going that ultimately killed the streetcar?
TLDR: No industry conspiracy. After all, streetcars disappeared from most other countries as well.
I laid out the basics nine years ago, and then discussed the policy choice five years ago, but I'm always happy to give more detail about any aspect of the subject. If you prefer, here's a video of a conference presentation I recently gave.
Three recent sources not mentioned in the earlier posts:
Mass Motorization + Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis, by David W. Jones, 2008, gives a very good summary beginning on p. 67.
LA Times: [Who killed L.A.’s streetcars? We all did] (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-02/explaining-la-with-patt-morrison-who-killed-la-streetcars)
Martha Bianco’s paper “Kennedy, 60 Minutes, and Roger Rabbit: Understanding Conspiracy-Theory Explanations of The Decline of Urban Mass Transit” https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cus_pubs/17/