>>990050>I'm most interested in how the automakers were able to dismantle the streetcar infrastructure and the politics involved therein.To understand this it's best to look at the few examples of streetcars that survived, notably Toronto, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and some specific lines like in Boston, Pittsburgh, etc.. Also you can look at Europe although the circumstances were quite different. It mostly comes down to two things:
Firstly, the streetcars that didn't shut down were taken over by the city at some point, as to revert the absurd contracts they had which meant stuff like having to pay for all the paving and maintenance of the streets. This made sense in 1900 when streets were just dirt roads, but in the 1930s this would mean paving and maintaining thoroughfares used by cars, your main competition. Streetcars as a rule had much worse conditions for operating than any bus system, so they had much more deficit even if operation was, IN THEORY, more economical per passenger, as long as lines saw enough demand.
And secondly, there was obviously the famous conspiracy. I think the role of the streetcar conspiracy is usually either overplayed or underplayed, I think the most accurate is seeing it as a middle ground: They actually did buy some major streetcar systems and shut them down against any economic and transportational logic, but far from most of them. However this was in turn used to create an apparent trend towards getting rid of streetcars. GM did PR campaigns against streetcars since the 1930's, they famously used New York as an example of the way to go, after managing to shut down some lines in Manhattan (which on the other hand wasn't too hard since the conduit lines were quite expensive to maintain, and as a consequence rolling stock was old).
