Reparations

Posted by on . 7 comments.

Over at TAPPED, Kate Sheppard writes about Bob (global warming is a crock of shit) Lutz and General Motors, specifically, the Wall Street Journal’s claim that GM’s actions are more important than Lutz’s words:

The Wall Street Journal weighed in on the issue earlier this week and concluded that the company’s actions are more important than Lutz’s opinions. Which is, of course, the real crock, considering how much GM has done to thwart action on climate change and greenwash their own image. They’ve been one of the big forces in ensuring that the country invests heavily in corn-based ethanol, and they’ve been a leading opponent of any increases to fuel efficiency standards. They’ve worked against states like California and now Minnesota and Arizona who are trying to set tougher emissions standards for automobiles. They might be working on a neat plug-in hybrid electric car, but they’ve been using it to lobby against higher CAFE standards. So yes, actions do speak louder than words – especially when those actions defy all that greenwashing GM has been trying to do.

Personally, I think GM owes us a lot more than an unproven plug-in. In particular, it would be nice if they’d return to us our streetcars.

The Great GM Streetcar Conspiracy is often oversold by transit advocates. Streetcar systems would not have been in such dire straits in the 20s and 30s without the negligent policy choices of local, state, and federal governments. And GM was not alone in buying up streetcar systems. Other car, tire, and oil companies participated in the dismantling, as well. But the bottom line is, GM was responsible for pulling much of the nation’s 1930s streetcar capacity off the road. And when they shut down a line, they ripped up or paved over the tracks.

If it hadn’t been GM, it would have been someone else. And in the end, it was the production of cars more than the removal of streetcars that permanently altered the landscape, making it transit-unfriendly. But those lines were an incredibly valuable, though underappreciated, piece of public infrastructure. So yeah, GM has a lot of bad environmental karma to pay off. The Volt is just a drop in the bucket.

Comments

  1. kent beuchert says:
    February 28, 2008 at 12:46 am

    The Chevy Volt is the future of the automobile and claiming that GM is somehow using this car to avoid CAFE standards (which have NEVER worked in the past thirty years) is pretty lamebrained and utterly lacking in any conceivablelogic. More GM bashing, as usual. Bob Lutz is NOT GM. He is a fairly recent addition, and is not the GM spokesman on anything, environmental or otherwise. He says what he thinks and
    from the data I saw today, which showed that the past year saw the greatest drop in global temperatures ever recorded,
    it looks like Lutz’s words are being proven correct. Of course, Lutz wants the Volt to avoid crude oil dependencies.
    Environmentalists want it to redcuce carbon emissions. What difference does it actually make, pray tell, exactly WHY you want to move away from gasoline? This is the point that the author of this blog has totally missed. He’s too
    busy slandering GM I suppose, to admit the reality.

  2. monkeyrotica says:
    February 28, 2008 at 10:37 am

    Well, technically it was a conspiracy. GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone were convicted of conspiracy and violating Sherman Antitrust in 1949, but they were fined something like $1,000.

    GM’s fairly irrelevant anyway, and I doubt it will be around in any substantive way 20 years from now. They invested in high-margin luxury SUVs, the market tanked, and now they can’t compete and not even Lee Iacocca can bring them back if he wanted to. Good riddance to bad garbage. Ask any auto enthusiast and I doubt any will recommend a GM product. It’s all about Japanese tech or German style. Until there’s a major leap in battery technology, clean diesel hybrids like the Smart and the new Golf will beat the pants off of the Volt, performance- and efficiency-wise.

    Streetcars can learn a thing from hybrid vehicles. They need to be smaller, cheaper, more flexible, and there needs to be more of them. To me, the so-called “light rail” still looks like a huge honking subway car that rides on the street. Putting more and smaller capacity streetcars on the grid would address the central problem with public surface transit: wait times. That, and giving streetcars the right of way. Streetcars sitting at stoplights doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, any more than sitting in gridlock in a lousy GM SUV.

  3. Dr. Leland Whitson says:
    February 29, 2008 at 12:59 am

    National City Lines was the entity fined. The court said, yest there was a cospiracty and the fine was $1.00.

  4. monkeyrotica says:
    February 29, 2008 at 10:03 am

    So there. Reparations have been made. Now, when do I get my dollar?

  5. ryan says:
    February 29, 2008 at 10:07 am

    Enjoy it, monkey. What are you going to get? A third of a gallon of gas, is my recommendation.

  6. monkeyrotica says:
    February 29, 2008 at 2:01 pm

    Pina colada blunt, please.

  7. Bob says:
    August 8, 2009 at 11:11 pm

    The fact is that neither GM, National city Lines nor anyone else were ever charged or convicted of a “conspiracy” to get rid of streetcars. Read the court decision (U.S v. National City Lines, available in any law library) rather than what people who have political agendas say about it. They were convicted of making exclusive dealing arrangements for sale of buses and bus related products, which has nothing to do with any consiracy about streetcars conversions. Again, don’t believe me – read the court decision.

    If the people advocating the conspiracy theory can’t even get this critical and easily checked fact right, you can bet the rest of what they are saying is as full of holes as swiss cheese. And, in fact, it is. Think about it a second. Once buses became available that could drive on the surface of a publically financed highway, what possible reason would a transit company or public transit agency have in continuing to run vehicles that required railroad tracks to be built into the pavement? This kind of trackage is a construction and maintenance nightmare. Ask any railroader how difficult it is to build maintain railroad track at a grade crossing and then multiply this by the miles upon miles of such track in a streetcar system. Further, as long as the tracks were being used, most streetcar companies were eesponsible for the paving of the street in the track area, which could be a quarter to half the surface area of the street. In other words, the streetcar company, even though it wsn’t using the pavement, was required to provide a portion of the paved street for its competitors. And to add insult to injury, the streetcar company was required to pay property taxes on the assessed value of the tracks in the street.

    Put aside your dislike for GM and automobiles and ask a simple question. Why would any transit company put up with this stuff if they could avoid it by converting to buses? And, once buses had become large enough to handle streetcar traffic, that’s precisely what they did.

    Oh, by the way, National City Lines controlled less than 10% of the U.S. transit industry during its heyday. So NCL’s activities don’t explain the disappearance of streetcars in 90% of the U.S transit industry. That includes cities like Chicago, where a public transit agency (CTA)having no affiliation whatsoever with NCL or GM converted one of the largest streetcar systems in the U.S. to buses over a 10 year period using buses from GM’s competitors.