Chris Belland's - "Hindsights & Insights"
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Taken for a ride -- Alfred Sloan's other legacy and gift to the U.S.

By CHRIS BELLAND Citizen Columnist

Ever wonder where writers or columnists get inspiration? Whether it's a blessing or a curse, I've never been at a loss for things to write about in this column. There always seems to be something happening that reminds me of my life growing up, or makes me think about what the future holds because of what is going on in today's world.

Anyway, I was at Trivia Night at Finnegan's Wake the other night and I casually asked my son, Wesley, what I should write about this Sunday. My son's suggestion was, "Why don't you write the story you told me before about why we have so many cars?" The story he was referring to was one that has intrigued me for years. It's a story of deceit, misplaced genius and outright greed that literally changed our world. More or less, here it is.

Back in the early part of this century, about 1920, General Motors was run by Alfred P. Sloan. In the years just after World War II, Sloan was convinced that the auto market was saturated, even though only one in 10 of the American population drove automobiles. The rest took mass transit. His theory was that the people who could afford cars already had them, but a huge market awaited whoever could kill the competition.

His plan was nothing less than the debasement and deconstruction of a rail and urban trolley system that efficiently, effectively and economically brought people from the outlying suburban areas to the inner cities for work, and also provided recreational transportation for urbanites seeking a respite in the country from city life. You can still see how efficiently this works in countries like Germany where, due to the high cost of fuel (and the absence of Alfred Sloan), you either have a very small car or no car and use the very efficient means of getting around on an electric trolley system.

We keep longing for mass transit systems that work because deep in our psyches we know that they should be effective and economical if people were persuaded to use them -- but, thanks to Mr. Sloan, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, we are an ultra-mobile society based on personal automobile use, the inefficiency of which you only have to observe casually during rush hour. Typical of similar systems, the multibillion-dollar Metrorail in Miami speeds around with no one on it and every automobile that is gridlocked on the highways has but one person. How did this travesty occur?

The brilliant Mr. Sloan observed in the year 1920 that there were few automobiles and a whole lot of trolley cars operating on city streets, using about 44,000 miles of tracks and annually transporting some 15 billion people! His theory was that he had to change the way people thought about getting to and from their destinations. He set about doing this by forming a transportation company called National City Lines. There was no obvious connection between General Motors and this company but, in fact, it was funded by General Motors, which was later joined by Standard Oil and Firestone Tire.

Virtually every town in America with a population over 2,500 had a rail transit system for its people. It was cheap, convenient and efficient. Simply, with their vast resources, National City Lines bought out the lines from New York to Seattle, or used tactics, later challenged as predatorily antitrust, to take the trolley cars off their routes and pile them up in city dumps to rot or be put to the torch.

They tore up the rail tracks in the cities and took down the overhead electrical wires. Over a period of three decades, National City Lines essentially dismantled the entire transportation system of the United States. What replaced it? You guessed it! National City Lines put in buses manufactured by General Motors running on Firestone tires and burning Standard Oil fuel.

With the psyche of the American public changing to vehicular transportation as the "modern way" of the future, it was a simple matter for Sloan to project this image of the individual automobile as a means for people to get to and from urban centers and the suburbs. Of course, the construction of a vast superhighway system extended this same image of getting people out to explore America.

The net result? A very workable urban transportation system was thoroughly debased and dismantled in favor of individual automobiles that now choke inner cities and run like an endless centipede along the expressways of our country. While it promoted jobs for a short period of our history, it has now put us in the unenviable position of vast road systems we cannot support or maintain and has catapulted our country into needing 25 percent of global fossil fuel production. In short, we are taking our air-conditioned, individual cars on a lemminglike run at the cliff because, "What was good for General Motors wasn't so good for the country."

Chris Belland's Hindsights & Insights column appears here on Sundays. Belland also writes a biweekly column on environmental issues, which runs in our Sunday magazine, Solares Hill. All of his previous columns are available on his blog: hindsightsandinsights.blogspot.com. Contact Chris at cbelland@keysnews.com.