Today, hardly anyone can even imagine their life without an automobile. Entire cities are designed to make travel by automobile easier and more convenient.
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Public Transportation
Society has spread out far and wide because of its reliance on the individual transportation provided by the personal automobile. It was not always like this in the United States, however. Not so long ago public transportation was the most common way for people to get from one place to another. Light rail, trollies and electric buses carried folks from city to city; to shopping malls and doctor’s appointments. It was faster, more efficient and much cheaper to get somewhere on public transportation fifty years ago than it is today. If you want to take a public bus to work in 2011, you better give yourself an extra hour to get there. In 1950, that same trip would have happened in minutes.
How did America become so dependent on the automobile?
It was not by accident, that’s for sure. In fact, the automobile became the dominant form of transportation following a series of maneuvers by an assortment of companies interested in making money from things which previously did not make much profit at all.
Putting Useless Gas To Use
Henry Ford used a previously useless and hard to dispose of by-product to power his new automobiles. That product was gasoline. He had electric vehicles on his production line prior to that. His wife drove an electric car every day.
Once the gasoline powered automobile was being mass produced prices for cars plummeted. Gasoline was cheap, just pennies per gallon. That made owning an automobile and keeping it running a small investment, putting it in direct competition, price-wise, with public transportation.
Just as the automobile was becoming less and less expensive, and more and more popular, the companies that were operating the nation wide rail lines were becoming massive behemoth, less flexible and less able to easily turn a profit.
Cars Take Over – Rails Suffer
Rail lines began losing money almost as soon as the automobile came along. Companies eager to turn a higher profit on the rails turned away from transporting people and looked toward transporting cargo instead. Trolley companies found themselves bought up and shut down by people more interested in selling automobiles than in making good use of public transportation. Soon every light rail system and trolley in America was gone. Instead, Americans turned to the automobile to get them from one place to another.
It was a very fast progression from public transportation to private transportation for America. Once people saw the money that could be made from selling and servicing the millions of cars on the road, the change was accelerated.
Today, with more than 100 million cars on the roads of the United States, there seems little chance the country will turn back to public transportation.
