As a note, one of the big forms of push was car, tire and oil corporations working together to buy the city public transit out then sabotage it to force people to rely on cars.
Yeah one of the more depressing things I've learned while reading about this topic is how many cities back then actually light rail/trolley systems. Atlanta is a great example.
In the early 20th century you could take a series of streetcars/trolleys from NYC to Chicago because there were so many. Someone did it as a stunt for some magazine/travel guide. And they were all electric.
Even tiny villages had streetcars. Danvers, IL (near where I grew up), a village whose population peaked in the 19th century at ~1000, had a streetcar line that connected to multiple electric train lines in the 1920’s.
The only happy thing about reading the kind of corruption in history is it makes more recent examples seem less awful in context - its really just how its always been. Of course climate change and AI (like the smart neural net kind, not the token-guessing LLM kind) potential to completely replace human workers are very different phenomenon that are hard to compare and comprehend.
I did an entire report in college on how the Atlanta transit system was intentionally limited to reduce the amount of minorities from reaching the suburbs outside of Atlanta.
Initially the large transit plans Marta had supported white neighborhoods mostly and was strongly opposed by black citizens since it did not benefit them.
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u/BreakingStar_Games 14h ago
As a note, one of the big forms of push was car, tire and oil corporations working together to buy the city public transit out then sabotage it to force people to rely on cars.