This may come as a surprise to many, but one did not need an automobile to get around the greater Los Angeles area during the Thirties and Forties and for some time after. I remember when I was a wee sprat living in Pasadena during the Thirties. Within five blocks of just about anyplace (easy walking distance for most people) was a "street car" line. Street cars were electric trolleys that ran on rails. Between Pasadena and Los Angeles and other suburbs in the area, the "interurban" ran. The interurban was also electrically powered and ran on rails. It was fast, it was clean, it was convenient, and it was inexpensive. My father worked in Los Angeles, and he took the interurban to and from work. Often one of my aunts, who lived in Los Angeles, hopped the interurban on Friday evening, stayed with us over the weekend, then returned on the interurban Sunday night. Getting around in the area easily and cheaply was taken for granted. Lots of people had automobiles, but nowhere near as many per capita as now. Many people regarded an automobile as expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and something of a luxury. Besides, you didn't really need one to get around.

When we returned to Seattle in 1940, we found the city had a public transportation system made up of what was then the very latest. "Trackless" trolleys. Rubber tired "trolley buses" that were powered by electricity from overhead wires, but could pull into bus stops at the curb, thus eliminating the waiting platforms out in the street that the rail trolleys required. I never had a problem getting around the city. Here, too, clean, convenient, and inexpensive.

But things began to change both here and in Los Angeles and just about everywhere else in the United States. It wasn't long before the overhead wires were removed and the whole fleet of trolley buses was replaced with gasoline and diesel powered buses. More flexible, they said. Not limited to wires. But I notice that not all that many bus routes have changed since then. It was not long after this that they dug a huge ditch right through the middle of downtown Seattle, paved Interstate 5 into the ditch, and grafted a series of snake's nests composed of on-ramps and off-ramps along its mighty length. And it wasn't long before the city had a distinct aroma of a blend of gasoline and diesel fumes, especially noticeable when you returned after spending a day in the mountains.

An excerpt from a web site I found:—

"A consortium of oil, rubber, and General Motors bought up rail lines worldwide then replaced interurbans and streetcars with GM buses which used oil and rubber tires. By 1961 the last remaining interurban rail line in Los Angeles went out of service and in 1963 the last streetcar line shut down."

Surprise, surprise!!!

Here's the web site. The pictures on the web site show a lot of eye-pollution with all the overhead wires, but back then, very few of those wires actually had anything to do with the trolley or interurban rail system. But it looks like they, like Seattle, have decided to go back to a light-rail system.

Seattle is way behind in light rail. They keep fighting over whether to spend billions of dollars tunneling under the Lake Washington ship canal and then under Capitol Hill or put the bloody thing someplace else. In the meantime, there are a bunch of people who are advocating a far less expensive and much more flexible monorail system. Fixed light-rail promoters who are into tunnels have been fighting the idea of a monorail, and it's bicker, bicker, bicker, bitch, bitch, bitch every inch of the way, and it's been going on for years now. In the meantime, Seattle, washed by soft rains and blow-dried by gentle breezes off the North Pacific, used to be one of the cleanest cities in the world. Now we have frequent "temperature inversions" where a layer of warm air gets trapped under a stratum of cold air, holding the air pollution produced by thousands of automobiles inching their way along the freeways, near the ground where our lungs can get the full benefit of it. There are frequent air pollution alerts, and after a temperature inversion has hung around for a couple of days, the whole city sounds like a tubercular ward and we all start to pray for a walloping good North Pacific storm to clear the crap out of the air (Wheeze! Gasp!).

In the meantime, on the tube, I watch Rick Steves' travel programs, "Europe Through the Back Door," and hear him talk about how easy it is to get around cities in Europe, and Europe in general, without an automobile because public transportation is so good. Lotsa people get around with a bicycle as their only mode of personal transportation.

Would've been a helluva lot better if Los Angeles, Seattle, et al had told the "consortium of oil, rubber, and General Motors" to go take a flying doo-dah and just left things as they were. If we had, maybe the Middle East wouldn't be in the news as much as it is. . . .

Just a few rambling thoughts on a quiet Sunday evening.

Don Firth