Mass Motorization and Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis

4. World War II and Its Immediate Aftermath: The End of the Streetcar Era and the Beginnings of the Freeway Era

FOUR World War II and Its Immediate Aftermath: The End of the Streetcar Era and the Beginnings of the Freeway Era The years during and immediately after World War II marked the end of the streetcar era and the beginning of the freeway era. For the transit industry, World War II was a period of extraordinary ambivalence. Transit carried its highest passenger volumes during the war (1941–45). Patronage reached these high levels because transit carried servicemen in large numbers and because auto and truck use was substantially diminished by gasoline rationing and the temporary unavailability of new tires and spare parts. Transit was clearly essential on the home front, but the war years also proved the streetcar industry’s final undoing, because the volume of patronage and the demands of the war effort literally wore out the industry’s track and rolling stock. With the streetcar companies ’ physical assets and credit both exhausted, wholesale abandonment of trackage and service followed from 1945 to 1955.∞ The war years also saw the designation of the first urban routes of the interregional highway system and the specification of highway design standards 96 ⴗ U.S. MOTORIZATION IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT that foreshadowed those of the interstate system. As a first step toward full freeway design, the Bureau of Public Roads articulated standards which required that projects on the interregional system be built as divided highways with the potential for upgrade to freeways with full access control. The first such projects served ports, military bases, and the armaments industry. Thus the war effort accelerated the development of divided highways within cities and engaged state highway departments in the design and construction of a next generation of highways that were forebears of the interstate system. The war effort also wore out street railways, accelerating both their abandonment and their replacement by buses. Transit during and after World War II Chart 4.1 shows the long-term trends of transit ridership from 1902 to 2004. Our immediate interest is in the huge surge in transit ridership that occurred during World War II and the devastating slump that followed. Clearly, this was both a tumultuous and defining period in transit’s history, and so it is important to understand why ridership increased so dramatically during the war and plunged so far and so fast after the war. Economic historians agree that the conversion of large parts of the economy to a wartime footing brought an end to the Depression and that wartime gasoline and tire rationing combined with the cessation of automobile and auto parts production to discourage automobile use during the war and the two-year reconversion period that followed it. In turn, economic expansion and gasoline and tire rationing combined with billeted travel by servicemen to produce a very high level of ridership that the transit industry acknowledges was a wartime anomaly. Thus the plunge that followed the war can be described as ‘‘postwar normalization,’’≤ and transit’s wartime service was the ‘‘last hurrah’’ for many streetcar companies. Streetcars performed yeoman’s service for the duration of World War II, but ridership collapsed immediately after the war. Operators providing subway and elevated service also experienced declining ridership, but at a much slower pace than the streetcar companies. Bus ridership actually increased during the first three years of the postwar period, but joined the general decline after 1949. Ridership stabilization was not achieved until federal funding made conversion to public ownership possible on a nationwide scale, and it took the OPEC oil embargo and a first generation of federal operating subsidies to produce sustained nationwide gains in transit ridership. The net result for 1946–72 was a 72 percent decline in transit’s nationwide WORLD WAR II AND ITS IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH ⴗ 97 Chart 4.1. The trends of U.S. transit ridership, 1902–2004. ‘‘Major Trends of Transit Ridership,’’ Transit Factbook, 2006. Used with the permission of the American Public Transit Association. ridership. During this 26-year period, streetcar operators lost 98 percent of their riders, bus operators lost 60 percent, and rapid transit systems collectively lost 39 percent. Most of this decline occurred before Congress fully funded the interstate highway program in 1956. Transit’s market share declined even more precipitously. Measured in terms of rides per capita, transit’s market share peaked at 167 rides per capita in 1945, then tumbled to 104 rides in 1950 and 65 in 1956—the...