There’s an old joke that says there are only two seasons in Utah: winter and road construction. While the humor of this joke is debatable, it certainly conveys a sentiment felt by many residents of our pretty great state, especially with the recent reconstruction of I-15 and TRAX across the valley. So it is hardly surprising to find students and faculty grumbling about the latest TRAX line to the University Hospital and the ensuing congestion of Wasatch Boulevard.
But before you start mailing death threats to President Machen or Mayor Rocky “Let’s-revitalize-our-downtown” Anderson, let’s take a look at who is really to blame: General Motors. That’s right, good old American GM. Why blame GM?
In a 1996 PBS documentary, “Taken For a Ride,” producers Martha Olsen and Jim Klein showed how General Motors systematically dismantled the nation’s public transportation infrastructure.
In 1922, one in 10 American families owned a car. Mass transit was made up of a vast network of electric trolley lines criss-crossing major American cities. Everyone was riding trains, no one needed a car. At its peak Salt Lake City had 146 miles of trolley tracks, with Trolley Square as the system’s main hub.
This was not good business for the automotive industry. So GM President Alfred P. Sloan Jr. combined corporate forces with Firestone Rubber, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum and Mack Trucks to create National City Lines, a bus-operating company. Hiding his ploy from the public, Sloan placed corporate unknown E. Roy Fitzgerald in charge of the company.
NCL’s tactics were simple. Using political know-how and the monetary influence of its private financiers, the organization bought up the public rail systems one by one of more than 80 major cities across America, including Salt Lake City.
After purchasing a public rail system from the local government, NCL replaced the management with its own staff. Then NCL’s devilish work began. The organization increased fares, canceled routes, took trolleys out of service, reduced schedules and cut the salaries of employees.
If NCL’s poor business practices were not enough to tank the electric trolleys, public complaints about transportation services were. Luckily, NCL had a solution to the transportation woes it created: take out the trolley tracks, widen the roads and switch to buses?built by GM, riding on Firestone tires and burning Standard Oil gasoline!
“Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” set in 1940’s L.A., spoofs this very scheme. Judge Doom murders a studio mogul to take control of Toontown so he can build a freeway through it. In the final scene he describes his diabolical plan to Inspector Valiant.
Doom: I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off. Off and on. All day, all night. Soon where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.
Valiant: Come on. Nobody’s gonna drive this lousy freeway when they can take the Red Car [nickname for L.A.’s trolley cars] for a nickel.
Doom: Oh, they’ll drive. They’ll have to. You see, I bought the Red Car so I could dismantle it.
In 1936 the Justice Department finally cracked down on NCL and dismantled the company. GM and NCL were each fined $5,000. Their management staffers were also fined a whopping sum of $1 each.
But GM didn’t stop there. In 1932 it formed the National Highway Users Conference, a powerful lobby financially backed by GM, set up to promote the building of more highways and to quell any discussion on the subject of gasoline pollution. In 1972 the lobby convinced the House of Representatives to cancel all federal funding for public transportation and instead fund the construction of more roads.
It wasn’t until 1992 that the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act was passed to allow for local input into public transportation. And, thankfully, we now have TRAX as a result. The great irony of TRAX is that during construction crews pulled up the road and had to remove the old trolley tracks to lay new ones!
Two weeks ago I towed my 1987 VW Golf to an auto wrecker and bid farewell to my beloved means of transportation. Since then I’ve grown to appreciate public transportation. The UTA bus system isn’t half bad. And as a student I ride for free, so I can’t complain.
Everyday I hop on the bus, catch up on a little reading on the ride into school, get off at campus and walk five minutes to class. I can’t help but snicker at the poor suckers stuck in traffic or desperately searching for a parking spot before they’re late for class. Sure the bus takes about 10 minutes longer than if I drove. But if I did have a car, I’d have to drop $120 on a parking pass so I could park a mile away from campus anyway, and the ten minutes I’d save driving myself through congested traffic would be spent hiking to class from the stadium parking lot.
Still, I can’t help but long for a thriving trolley system with clean, noiseless trains running down every major thoroughfare so regularly that I don’t even need a schedule. I long for freedom from burdensome insurance premiums, rising gasoline prices and the ever-increasing cost of auto-maintenance. I long for winter nights when I can look up through a cloudless sky and see the moon rather than the thick, choking soup of the Salt Lake City inversion.
I’m glad Wasatch Boulevard is under construction. I applaud any new TRAX line. I hope someday we’ll have one out to the airport, through West Valley and maybe even past my house in Sugar House.
Next time you’re stuck in a never-ending row of cars on Wasatch Boulevard today, don’t curse Machen, Anderson or UTA. Curse GM. And try to figure out how you can get a trolley line past your front door.
Jeremy welcomes feedback at [email protected]. Send letters to the editor to [email protected].