I remember learning from a teacher that the oil companies basically bought up transit lines and ripped up streetcar tracks as well as killing the electric car. It explains why my city struggles so hard to build subways and street car lines. There must still be lots of money lining pockets to keep the gasoline flowing
Standard oil was pouring gasoline into rivers as waste before Henry Ford and his Model T came along.
The auto industry gutted public transit across the country. GM diesel buses replaced electric urban rail systems.
GM made the EV1 and it was a huge hit, then they destroyed them all after collecting them from their users (they leased them all, no one got a chance to buy any)
And now, Ford just got a bunch of credit for putting a Billion $$ into the Detroit central train station, … so they can “design” EVs.
They are mocking us, that train station has no trains because the auto industry killed them. The building was unused because of cars. And now they are going to design something that was figured out 125 years ago that they destroyed. It is a monument to their domination of our economy.
Imagine, what kind of public transit we could have if we stopped building infrastructure for car companies and built actual mobility systems?
Yep, big oil, auto manufacturers (who wanted to line their pockets), and politicians (who wanted to suburbanize / facilitate white flight from the cities) all colluded to divide the American public with dangerous roads and freeways, and sell us the machinery we’d need to navigate them.