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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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Re: The Streetcar Turns a Corner
