Remove Streetcars, Watch Decay?
We know GM got rid of the streetcars, and we know about white flight to the suburbs, but I wonder how much worse urban decay could have been made by the tearing out of all the streetcars. Reading phrases like this about streetcars and urban decay is pretty common:
The streetcar line was shut down in the 1950s, and Eckington suffered the sort of decline that afflicted many urban neighborhoods in the ensuing decades.
This is the first time I’ve actually thought, however, that removing the streetcars really hurt urban areas.
Meaning, we know that removing the streetcars helped make more room for cars, and forced more people into cars because nobody wanted to ride the bus (still true), so of course urban areas were hurt by this ‘motorization’ effect that destroyed the livability of cities and so obviously that hurt urban areas, but what if those urban areas still got to hold onto their streetcars? Could the presence of the streetcars — which seems to be somewhere in the ‘decent to good’ range to me — have ameliorated some of the ill effects of motorization in our cities?
Is there any evidence to suggest that the presence of streetcars - even in the face of anti-democratic, corporate hostility - helped prevent the worsening of urban decline in cities that held onto their streetcars? In theory, it should be possible to look into this, since some cities, like San Francisco, preserved some of their streetcar infrastructure — even if it was only token.
Up until now I had been buying into the notion that suburban sprawl was just something that just kind of happened - it was just kind of ‘inevitable’ because, we’re told, cars were so awesome and people loved to drive. We know that roads were so heavily subsidized that people might have been seen as almost crazy not to drive out to the suburbs to live — but now I’m starting to see a different picture. I think there might be more to the story.
The introduction of cars - a fundamentally anti-human, disconnective technology - into urban areas, would have had terrible effects on urban living by itself. But to make matters worse, one of the core connective technologies of urban areas - the streetcars - were ripped out. It was a double-whammy. And I think I remember reading that phrasing before, so it’s possible I’m just repeating what I’ve read somewhere else.
So, we are left with the possible corollary to the title of this post — Add Streetcars, Watch Revitalization?
Maybe Portland knew what they were doing?
…This was about as poorly written as anything I’ve posted on this blog - no small accomplishment! To sum up my point — Was the removal of the streetcars the cause of decaying downtowns and city neighborhoods? Or possibly even a cause?
Obviously, we might have a bit of trouble separating that out, but we have plenty of cities that did a range of different things - some had streetcars and kept them or some of them, some had no streetcars, and I’m curious if any city was able to add streetcars while GM was on its tear.
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