Theft at the Public Till
the oil and auto industries. For over a half-century the corporate response has been to undermine the nation’s rail and electric-bus systems. Consider the fate of Los Angeles. In 1935 a once beautiful Los Angeles was served by one of the largest interurban railway systems in the world, covering a 75-mile radius with 3,000 quiet, pollution-free electric trains that carried 80 million people a year. But General Motors and Standard Oil of California, using dummy corporations as fronts, purchased the system, scrapped its electric transit cars, tore down its power transmission lines, and placed GM diesel buses fueled by Standard Oil on Los Angeles’s streets. By 1955, 88 percent of the nation’s electric-streetcar network had been eliminated by collaborators like GM, Standard Oil, Greyhound, and Firestone. In short time, they cut back city and suburban bus services, forc- ing people to rely increasingly on private cars. In 1949, General Motors was found guilty of conspiracy in these activities and fined the devastating sum of $5,000. Given the absence of alternative modes of transportation, people become dependent on the automobile as a way of life so that their need for cars is often as real as their need for jobs. And Los Angeles was not alone. Almost all the places we have built – the environments we have created within which to live our lives – reflect the ubiquity of the automobile. Today, we have a total separation of uses in our man-made landscape. Our houses are all in their respective income pods, our shopping places are miles away from the houses, and our schools are separate from both the shopping and the dwellings. Work takes place in the office park, the word “park” being a semantic gimmick to persuade zoning boards that a bunch of concrete and glass boxes set among parking lots amounts to a rewarding environment, and manufacturing takes place in the industrial park. This compartmentalization has some interesting, and rather grave, ramifications. The amount of driving necessary to exist within this system is stupendous, and fantastically expensive. The time squandered by commuters is time that they cannot spend with their children, or going to the library, or play- ing the clarinet, or getting exercise, or doing anything else more spiritually nourishing than sifting alone in a steel compartment on Highway 101 with
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