Clarifying the Tangled Tale of the Pacific Red Cars

Most of what I write is myth; I know it, and I hope the reader knows it. But in a newspaper, what purports to be true should be true.

In writing recently about the demise of the Pacific Electric railway in Los Angeles and environs, I perpetuated the notion that it was trashed by General Motors and other automobile-related corporations in a conspiracy to sell their products, namely buses, tires and gasoline.

I did conclude with a revisionist view offered by Scott L. Bottles, a Wells Fargo banker and historian, who exonerated GM and its partners. “So we did it to ourselves,” I said, “with a little help from our corporate friends.”

That seems to have been fair enough. My indictment of GM et al. was based on a U.S. Senate committee report, a statement by Mayor Tom Bradley before that committee, the American Heritage History of Railroads in America, a Times editorial, a story in the Washington Post, and numerous letters from readers damning GM as the culprit.

The story is complicated, but it is clarified in fascinating detail in “Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City” (University of California Press) by the aforementioned Scott Bottles. I am also indebted to Gerald L. Squier, an RTD senior transportation planner, for some of this history.

Bottles emphasizes that the citizens had grown increasingly irate over streetcar service because of overcrowding, high fares, aging equipment, accidents, inadequate routes and what they regarded as the arrogant attitude of the railways and the power structure, including The Times.

Henry Huntington, to whom we are indebted for his library and gardens, started Pacific Electric (the Red Cars) in 1901, mainly to make his vast real estate holdings accessible to buyers. In 1910, he sold PE to Southern Pacific, which ultimately operated 1,164 miles of track in four counties. At the same time, Huntington acquired the Los Angeles Railway Co. (LARy), which served the city itself.

As Los Angeles decentralized and residents and businesses began moving to the suburbs, people depended more and more on the automobile for transportation. It could take them to their homes between the lines. Railway service deteriorated. Resentment of the railways grew. Huntington was accused of charging higher fares for lines that did not serve his land. PE abandoned passenger lines for freight. The reform movements of the Progressive Era brought further pressure on the railways to improve. During the Depression, the companies suffered heavily. World War II, with its shortages of gasoline and rubber, temporarily interrupted conversion to buses.

By the end of the war, the lines were exhausted and obsolete. In 1944 the Huntington estate sold LARy to American City Lines, a subsidiary of National City Lines whose minority investors included GM, Firestone Tire and Standard Oil of California. By 1947, NCL controlled 46 transit networks throughout the nation. These were soon scrapped and replaced by buses.

The U.S. Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against NCL for conspiracy to monopolize the industry. The trial resulted in some acquittals, some convictions. Bottles notes that GM and its sister corporations had divested themselves of NCL stock before the trial began, a fact that, to my mind, hardly mitigates their involvement.

“This is not to say,” Bottles concedes, “that General Motors was completely selfless in its actions.”

In 1953, PE sold its passenger service to Metropolitan Coach Lines, which in turn sold out to the state-owned Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, which scrapped the last Red Car in 1963. In 1958, LAMTA also acquired LARy (Los Angeles Transit Lines) and soon scrapped the last yellow car.

“The rail passenger operations of Pacific Electric,” an official observed, “became obsolete, and economically there was no justification for their perpetuation; as a result, like the horse and buggy, they dropped from the scene.”

Says Squier: “The suggestion that a national holding company and General Motors conspired to dismantle the PE system is patently ludicrous.”

And Bottles concludes: “It is important to realize that Angelenos freely adopted the automobile as their major means of transportation long before American City Lines purchased one of the city’s two major fixed-rail systems. Their decline began with the belief that the automobile could solve pressing urban problems and create a kind of utopia.”

All the same, I’d like to ride one of the big Red Cars from L.A. to Balboa Island for a buck.