Did a Conspiracy Really Destroy LA's Huge Streetcar System?

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Interesting article as are some of the links.To this day for a lot of people, its still "that's my story and I'm sticking to it"!

"It's long been suggested the iconic Red Cars fell victim to a scheme by automakers"

http://la.curbed.com/2016/4/26/11505826/los-angeles-red-car-conspiracy

"Conspiracy theorists dreaming of a lost utopia by the sea, outfitted with the greatest public transportation system in the world, must come to terms with the fact that in the matter of the streetcar's disappearance, we Angelenos may have no one to blame but ourselves."
 
Ha ha, before I even clicked on the link, my mind immediately went to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." :p

One of my all-time favorite movies.
 
Coordinated conspiracies are notoriously difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. In the court of public opinion the best you can do is follow the money and base your decision on a preponderance of the evidence. I remember thinking if the streetcar lines were all going to die anyway why bother buying and tearing them and hoarding/destroying the assets until they had depreciated to scrap value? If the story has no basis in reality then why not simply allow it to drift into obscurity like any other myth? To me the most curious evidence of a potentially conspiratorial nature revolves around all the time and effort that has been spent by people of a certain ideology repeatedly digging this story up just to skewer and rebury it again. In some ways the streetcar conspiracy story seems to have devolved into a sort of ideological litmus test rather than a search for the truth. People who work this story forward from the beginning or backward from the end are likely to reach rather different conclusions. Reminds me of the infamous McDonald's Coffee Case in that regard.
 
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Yes, there was a coordinated conspiracy to rip out the US streetcar systems. GM, Firestone Tire, and Standard Oil were in fact *convicted* of it.

Unfortunately, it was an extremely popular conspiracy. It was so popular that the judge who handed out the conviction gave them a slap on the wrist, and apart from the lone individual who had fought the case -- he said "We're going to need these streetcar tracks some day, how are we going to rebuild them if they're all ripped out?" -- almost nobody cared -- people thought the conspiracy was Just Great!

That's the somewhat weird truth. It's a bit like Microsoft's conspiracy to develop a monopoly on computer operating systems by anticompetitive, abusive, illegal actions. They did it, they're guilty, they were convicted, but remarkably few people *cared*.
 
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