Reddit reviews Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City
We found 3 Reddit comments about Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
The streetcar system in LA was basically part of a real estate pyramid scam that was only sustainable as the city expanded. Several factors led to the decline of the rail car system in LA and GM at worst put the last nail in the coffin.
If you want a more sophisticated, academic analysis all the info is in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Los-Angeles-Automobile-Making-Modern/dp/0520073959
There have been loads of threads on Reddit over the years that have debunked the conspiracy theory from several angles with many sources/citations.
Be careful not to romanticize LA's streetcar past too much. Yes, there were a lot of lines. However many were very slow and relatively expensive. All were private at this time and were often built and operated to serve the needs of stock holders (real estate developers) rather than the public who rode them. When the Pacific Electric Red Car raised prices to Santa Monica, the city responded by creating their own bus line to connect to the more urban Los Angeles Railway Yellow Cars.
Yes, it was great to have those lines. But no, they didn't operate faster or cover more area than our current system of buses. Yes, it's great to have right-of-ways from these old railcar lines, which many of LA's modern rail lines have used.
You can learn a bit more by reading the introduction of Los Angeles and the Automobile: the Making of the Modern City or checking the book out at your local library.
Anyone can ride a Red Car or a Yellow Car most weekends at the Orange Empire Railway Museum in Perris.
Just FYI, the "Streecar Conspiracy" is really a myth. GM might have helped to put the nail in the coffin of street cars in some places (namely LA), but there is virtually no academic analysis that supports the conspiracy. The streecars were pretty much doomed already by that point. Even on the wikipedia page you linked to it mentions alternate explanations and other factors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy#Other_factors
If you want a really good analysis of why so many cities switched to cars, this is an excellent (if academic) book: http://www.amazon.com/Los-Angeles-Automobile-Making-Modern/dp/0520073959
The core issue is about what gets subsidized by whom and what doesn't. If we want to learn from history it is important that we get a good understanding of what actually happened.