The Seattle Times: Nicole Brodeur: The man who could move a city
Before he died in 1964, M.D. Mills left his daughter with a small part in the city’s transportation history.
She was on board when the city’s last cable car and streetcar were driven into the barn.
“We had a big party,” she said, “and my father autographed the tickets.”
The next morning, she was up early for the first run of the city’s first trackless trolley, and the first diesel bus — her father behind the wheel.
The dismantling of street rail was the biggest mistake the progress-minded big city officials of the 40s and 50s made, followed by the routing Interstate highways through their downtown cores instead of around them as Eisenhower envisioned.
It’s all very well to talk about how nothing has been done with the monorail, how expensive it will be, etc. but what of the cost to replace what we already had? This area was linked by streetcar lines from Everett to Tukwila. Neighborhoods were platted and built at the end of streetcar lines, linking them with downtown. And we tore all that up in the name of progress.
Beginning during the 1920s, a General Motors Corp. (GM) Bus Division subsidiary purchased streetcar lines in Springfield, Ohio, Kalamazoo and Saginaw, Michigan. gm set up a corporation staffed with dedicated functionaries, funneled dollars into it, bought private and municipal transit systems around the country, and then ensured through tightly worded contracts that the transit systems could buy only GM and Mack buses, Firestone tires, and fuels and lubricants from Standard Oil of California.
This is often alluded to by anti-transit activists as a myth: it’s anything but. It was a real court case, with [sur]real damages (a $5,000 fine for GM: what a burden that must have been), and now a festering mess for every city that sucumbed to the allure of NCL’s siren song to clean up.
It makes me mad as hell that cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Seattle were enticed to squander their infrastructure to inflate the profits of the auto cartel.
For more information on the story, see “United States vs. National City Lines,”Federal Reporter, 3rd. Series 186 F.2d 562.