>the car industry, that was minuscule compared to the rail and streetcar industries, killed interstate and local railIs this the most retarded historical thesis that people actually believe? Or are there retardeder ones?
>>18764075It’s mostly redditors seething that they were too socially inept to get their license before turning 25.
>>18764075passenger rail died because it was ruined from FDR nationalizing it during WWII
There’s just something really funny about the idea that people would be riding around in fucking streetcars in 2026 if it weren’t for the automobile industry
>>18764075>amerindians were genocided by blankets>polk stole mexican land>lincoln fought the south to free niggers>america fought germany to free the jewsIt's hard to say because american historiography, at least, is captured by victim narratives, we-wuzzery, and general disney-ification of otherwise complicated topics. Streetcars are just the perfect example since the non-reading masses only understand the topic's history from a movie about a cartoon rabbit. So no, I'd say it doesn't get more retarded.
>>18764075The funniest part is that most of the streetcar routes are still around, they just became part of the LA Metro instead
>>18764076I notice a lot of them are mentally ill, being incapable of driving is certainly evidence of this, but most of them don't even seem to be capable of riding a bike or walking. They literally invent strawman versions of American cities in their heads where they think they have to constantly be paranoid of motorists and that things like grocery stores are for some reason always 20 miles from where they live. I say this as someone who doesn't drive and bikes everywhere, urbanists on the internet are easily some of the most mentally inept people out there. They're Cluster B, agoraphobic retards who are just looking for a scapegoat.
>>18764075That's a straw-man. No one says Henry Ford eradicated street-cars. They said that after the car gained preponderance the industries invested in its continued dominance systematically lobbied to neglect already struggling alternatives like passenger rail and public transport and hinder developing ones like cycling.
>>18764076>If you want your cities to look nice like Copenhagen or Edinburgh as opposed to some shopping mall full of waddling fatties then you must be stoopid!!yeah naah
>>18764075>>18765630It comes from people who never tried using public transport on a daily basis but heard a narrative and now they're going to repeat the narrative because that's what they've been taught, how can it be any different.I've lived without a car in Warsaw for 6 years. It's global 12th best public transport and Europe's 6th so chances are if your city city is worse and even with significant amount of investment it would've been worse. Then I've started to look for a place to live in the suburbs because fuck paying rent there and bought a car since that made searching easier. The only time I used public transport since was because a) I knew there weren't enough parking spots where I wanted to go b) I wanted to go drinking. It's nice to have but the convenience of a car is just so huge it kills the appeal. In the end car travel is just hop into car, get to your destination directly, park and go. To get to my job I needed 13 minutes in a car and 35 minutes in public transport, around 10 of them spent waiting because my route required me to switch between different routes bus1-tram-bus2 kind of situation. When cars became predominant in the US and public transport was dying the US had cheap cars, cheap fuel, lax enforcement or no enforcement of DUI, easy access to drivers licenses and cheap and relatively high quality housing in the suburbs and it had and still has a more decentralised cities in general so parking space was always less of a problem. The only thing lobbyists did was that they encouraged the interstate highway system to be built(which mostly affected long distance travel), but considering how post-new deal US worked that probably didn't need lobbying.You can see the convenience in the fact that Euro cities stopped even pretending they can one-up cars with public transport, they're just doing things like introducing LEZ, restrictions on parking etc. to make using a car in cities annoying.
>>18765718>The only thing lobbyists did was that they encouraged the interstate highway system to be built(which mostly affected long distance travel), but considering how post-new deal US worked that probably didn't need lobbying.The Interstate Highway System wasn't even America's first major highway network, that would be the Roosevelt Highway, which was built in the 1920s and ran for over 4,000 miles and ran from Portland to...well, Portland, but on the opposite coast. Clearly that wasn't the result of lobbying, unless you want to argue that there was a car lobby in the early 1920s
Europeans were exploring High-Speed Rail in the early 1900s, on the other side of the Atlantic, Americans were instead starting to build massive highway and road networks for the burgeoning automobile industry. To Americans, personal transport was simply the future, and America's geography was simply better suited to cars than high speed rail networks. You can't blame lobbyists for this. This shit was starting way before any of that. Americans were never interested in public transport the same way Europeans were. You can blame geography or culture, but the urbanist narrative online that suggests the mass adoption of cars in the United States in the mid-20th century was inorganic is plain and simply false
You really think an industry run by very rich men would do that? Send bribists to the government to bribe for what they want?
>>18765782But anyways, enough about Cornelius Vanderbilt
>>18765783And he died when? Before the rise of what?
>>18765784Way to miss the point, dipshit
>>18765785Way to dodge the question because it utterly destroys your argument retard.
In the United States, street railway companies planted the seeds of their own destruction. They were financially sketchy ,in league with corrupt local governments and brutally crushed strikes. Their charters locked them into a nickel fare which became ruinous with post WWI inflation. They encouraged sprawl with streetcar suburbs and much of their early profit came from land speculation. When shit started unraveling in the 1920s they had little public sympathy and auto, oil, tire and highway interests were just newer hungrier capitalists picking off the walking wounded. Post WWII highway and auto boom doomed them and whatever was left of public transit was dumped off on local governments as a bare bones service for poors. I love streetcars and hate what American car culture has become but it’s a lot more complicated than some Roger Rabbit conspiracy theory.
>>18764075I mean they're partly true, but it's not that the car industry did the killing on its own, but rather that Western governments from the '30s onwards heavily subsidized car centric infrastructure. Nazi Germany built the autobahn, FDRs America built the interstate system, verious European govts build their own car centric cities and highway systems in the 50s and 60s
>>18765953Good post. Americans will never trade their cars for public transport again unless car ownership becomes financially untenable, or drastic steps are taken to make public transport clean and safe.
>>18765731>the urbanist narrative online that suggests the mass adoption of cars in the United States in the mid-20th century was inorganic is plain and simply falseRight, but that's a separate issue. The meat of the claim - which is correct - is that the automobile industry spent a lot of time and money on discouraging, defunding and otherwise sabotaging mass transit to make personal automobiles the only viable option to get anywhere. >>18765953 makes good points and obviously places with a low population density weren't going to be ideal candidates for "just take a train bro" but for the coasts and great lakes in particular the amount of rail transit in the US is just pathetic and the cause isn't entirely organic by a long shot.
>>18766394Big cities have mass transit. You don't know what you're talking about.
>>18764075trainfags deserve death
