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Taken for a Ride
1996 · Film · documentary · 52 min
Directed by Jim Klein, Martha Olson
How the American auto industry engineered the demise of city public-transit systems.
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4 comments on Hacker News
Excellent documentary about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_for_a_Ride
The tram in LA didn't die, it was murdered.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Judge Doom's Plot to Destroy Public Transit [1]
My favorite thing about this movie is that the villain's evil plot is to bring about car culture in America. Watch and giggle/shiver. Read about Pacific City Lines, National City Lines, and the Great American Streetcar Scandal if you'd like to know more about its historical parallels.
General Motors streetcar conspiracy [2]
The 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, vectors the folktale about the decline of the Pacific Electric. Scriptwriters Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman explained: "the Red Car plot, suburb expansion, urban and political corruption really did happen. In Los Angeles, during the 1940s, car and tire companies teamed up against the Pacific Electric Railway system and bought them out of business. Where the freeway runs in Los Angeles is where the Red Car used to be." The story was told again in 1996 in Taken for a Ride and then in 2004 in the film The End of Suburbia.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OquSczOMkO4
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Reminds me of "Taken for a Ride", a somewhat famous documentary about the auto industry seeking to gut forms of public transportation in many cities.
Having traveled quite a bit I believe the US's public transportation systems, within cities and between regions, is a national embarrassment.
I think the documentary Taken for a ride(1996) [0][1] which showed up
on /r/Documentaries [2] is perhaps relevant to this discussion.
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0236785/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/3iflv6/taken_for_a_ride_1996_how_general_motors_bought/traffic