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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_consp...



According to this doco that's not true, or rather they died for other reasons. From 1929 until the last one closed they never made a profit. Partly because they had signed contracts to maintain the roads the tracks went down. As cars got more popular that became too expensive

https://www.amazon.com/This-Pacific-Electric-Stephanie-Edwar...




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