When the American automobile arrived
on the transportation scene at the turn of the twentieth century, the electric
trolley still dominated the urban and interurban landscape. The electric
trolley's heyday lasted from 1890 to around 1930, but urban ridership in the U.S. peaked
in 1923 with 12,895,000 passengers using electric-powered trolleys.
The 1920 census revealed that, for
the first time in U.S.
history, most citizens were living in urban areas. Between 1900 and 1920, Detroit's population grew
from 300,000 to 1 million. Los Angeles
swelled from 100,000 to 600,000 residents during that same time period. The Pacific Railway Company, along with many
other trolley companies across the nation, expanded its trolley networks at an
incredible pace in parallel with this rapid urbanization.
Along with this intense urban
growth and increase of trolley lines, however, another technological
advancement in transportation was gathering significant interest.
The Horseless Carriage
When the automobile first arrived
on the urban scene at the end of the nineteenth century, it was seen as a
curiosity at best – or a toy for the rich. Most city dwellers and rural
residents could not afford to buy this "horseless carriage", as cars were
called.
For most Americans, automobiles
were simply unaffordable. Even as late as 1907, the average price of a car ranged
from $800 to over $1000 dollars, putting it well beyond the means of the average day-laborer working in a factory.
A five-cent trolley ride, however, was well within the means of a daily
commuter, and a 25-cent trolley ride to the park for the day was affordable for
the average day-tripper.
The traveling public also preferred
a smooth ride along steel rails rather than an uncomfortably, bumpy, jaw-rattling
ride in a car along unpaved, rut-plagued roads. During the first few decades of
the twentieth century, rough roads helped the trolley hold the automobile at
bay.
Henry Ford and the Affordable Automobile
Henry Ford helped changed all this.
At its peak, the automaker's assembly line pumped out a new Model T every 3
minutes. This dramatic improvement in productivity reduced the price of one of
Ford's touring cars from $850 in 1908 to just $300 dollars in 1916. Other automakers
soon followed suit, using assembly lines to put cars within reach of middle-class
workers.
With such a rapid decrease in
price, Henry Ford's easy-to-assemble Model T's were now snapped up at a record
pace. In 1908, there were only 8,000 privately-owned vehicles. By 1920, however there were almost 23 million.
But Ford's innovations in mass production did more than just increase
automobile ownership.
Routes and Reliability
Americans were enticed by the automobile
because it freed them of the limitations of trolley companies. Trolleys had
specific routes they could follow, and they didn't always stop where a
passenger wanted to go. By contrast, the automobile allowed workers,
businesspeople, and leisure seekers the freedom to travel wherever they wanted,
despite a lack of smooth roads.
Strikes were also common among trolley
drivers who demanded shorter working hours and higher wages. For example, there
were five trolley strikes in Albany,
New York between 1900 and 1921. Whenever
the drivers went on strike, the trolleys remained in their trolley barns while
the trolley companies lost thousands of dollars in daily fares.
The unreliability of trolley
service soured the public's view of a trolley system that it had come to rely
upon for transportation in and around the city. Residents wouldn't tolerate these
interruptions of service and, out of necessity, sought other means of
transportation. These included jitneys, converted cars that carried paying
passengers wherever people needed to go. Eventually, the trolley strikes that happened
all over the country put some trolley companies out of business.
The Rise of the Automobile
Automobiles came to compete with
the trolleys for space in the congested urban landscape. This proved to be a
nightmare as more cars were registered and filled the city streets. City
planners and traffic engineers worked in a crisis atmosphere to deal with the
intolerable congestion.
As the traveling public started to
side with the automobile, trolley lines across the country faced a troubled future.
Ridership decreased through the 1920s and continued to spiral downward during the
Great Depression. Trolley companies went out of business, or were bought by
emerging bus companies that replaced the old trolley lines with shiny new
buses.
Editor's Note: Part 13 of this multi-part series
will run in two weeks.
Resources:
Photo Credit: old-picture.com
Previous Blog Entries in This Series
The American Streetcar (Part 1)
From Stagecoach to Streetcar (Part 2)
From Horse-Drawn Streetcars to Cable Cars (Part 3)
The Birth of the Electric Streetcar (Part 4)
Electric Streetcars and Trolley Technology (Part 5)
Electric Streetcars: Private Lines and Public Roads (Part 6)
The Rise of the Electric
Streetcar (Part 7)
Electric Streetcars and the Industrial Revolution (Part 8)
General
Electric and the Schenectady Streetcar (Part 9)
Streetcar
Suburbs and Interurban Trolleys (Part 10)
Electric Amusement: The Trolley and Leisure (Part 11)
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