Real story behind the demise of America's once-mighty streetcar

Via NARP:

Back in the 1920s, most American city-dwellers took public transportation to work every day. There were 17,000 miles of streetcar lines across the country, running through virtually every major American city. Nowadays, by contrast, just 5 percent or so of workers commute via public transit, and they're disproportionately clustered in a handful of dense cities, and just a handful of cities still have extensive streetcar systems. So whatever happened to all those streetcars?

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The real story behind the demise of America's once-mighty streetcars

It was a national strategy to move to road based transport and later air transport that killed both urban and intercity rail transport. It is just as simple as that. Just as rail transport was promoted and developed with huge support from the government based on a then perceived strategic need, the passenger part of rail transport essentially died as it was no longer seen as a strategic need in comparison with what was perceived as a strategic direction or road and air. In the process even the freight part of rail transport came to the brink of the abyss, when it was suddenly realized that road alone could not replace rail as freight transport, and the direction was reversed through the varioys two R, three R and 4 R acts. In the process certain most needed rail passenger service was also rescued and subsidized. Now we are facing further consequences of those strategic decision made 70 to 100 years back. No other developed country executed the plan to kill rail transport as ruthlessly as the US did, and it will probably suffer more than other developed countries for that reasons as energy becomes more expensive and scarcer. Such is life. There never is a winner for all times in anything.

The film End of Suburbia addressed the deliberate destruction of streetcars as mass transit.

http://www.endofsuburbia.com/

This analysis jibes with what I know and with my personal knowledge of the streetcars. Once inexpensive (relatively) automobiles showed up, passenger traffic on the streetcars went down and pretty drastically. The fabled RED cars in Los Angeles and the other companies went bankrupt and at least one twice.

It's hard for a tax paying private company to shoulder strangling government regulation, build the infrastructure for their chief competitors and compete head to head with a government mandated, funded and constructed tax exempt opponent.
A lot of streetcars converted to bus just to get out from under the requirement to build and maintain the roads they ran along.

Vox's summary is good. If any idiot in a private auto can drive in front of and block a streetcar, it kind of damages the streetcar's ability to operate effectively. If the streetcar company is also subsidizing the roadway for the autos, it's even worse. This caused the wipeout of most of the streetcar systems in the 20s and 30s.

Many of the places with private right-of-way for streetcars managed to keep their streetcars much longer -- until the federal government started pouring even larger amounts of money into roads in the 1950s (which killed the "big" intercity railroads as well). A few of the private-ROW systems still exist under government management (San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Newark)