Waiting for a Streetcar

People are packed into streetcars like sardines in a box, with perspiration for oil. The seats being more than filled, the passengers are placed in rows down the middle, where they hang on by the straps, like smoked hams in a corner grocery.

So said the New York Herald, in October 1864. So, with more justice than at any time in the intervening 78 years, many a U.S. paper might have said last week.

Some 600 trolley and bus-line operators went to Chicago for an emergency conference of the American Transit Association last week. The emergency: too much business. How much too much, they heard from beetle-browed, mustachioed A.T.A. Managing Director Charles Gordon, who gave them some horrendous estimates for the next two years:

> Local transit facilities will have to carry a record 17 billion passengers this year, three billion more than they carried last year. In 1943 they will have to carry 20 billion. These estimates take no account of crucially needed new routes to deliberately decentralized defense plants.

>To make matters worse, this enormous increase will be very unevenly spread, will hit smaller cities—the least able to cope with it—hardest.

>All this comes at the worst possible time, and the industry is stuck with a colossal lack of equipment. Only last September OPM actually curtailed new bus and trolley production. Since Pearl Harbor the bars have been lifted, insofar as A-3 materials priorities can lift any bar. But the 7,000 city-type busses now on order represent more than a full year’s normal production.

At the heart of this heart-rending problem is the trolley, which has for years been dying a lingering death both from bus competition and from that of the automobile. The rubber shortage would bring back the trolley, but the entire trolley-building capacity of the U.S. is no more than 2,000 cars a year.* Result: a mad rush to recondition old and abandoned cars, whatever the cost. Detroit’s smart Fred Nolan, general manager of the Department of Street Railways (TiME, Aug. 14, 1939), despairing of the 500 new motor coaches he needs, is thinking of refurbishing 125 ancient trolleys, all of which have rusted in storage barns for at least five years. (Detroit is also the scene of an Alphonse & Gaston fight between bus lines and railroads over who is to service Henry Ford’s vast Willow Run bomber plant, scheduled to employ 100.000 men 20 miles from town.)

Unhappiest city of all is Seattle, which embarked upon a fancy modernization program two years ago. Some of its trolley tracks were ripped up and sold to Japan for scrap, others were buried in new asphalt. Mayor E. D. Millikin is now frantically looking for funds to unbury what tracks he has left.

No easy solutions to these problems came out of Chicago last week. Defense Transport Tsar Joseph Eastman warned the transitmen that the railroads, with “a herculean job in the movement of troops,” could not be expected to carry any more of the local passenger load. The conferees all agreed on one partial solution: staggered work hours for local businesses, schools, etc. Washington greatly eased its frightful traffic tie-ups by putting Government departments on staggered schedules.

Most ingenious suggestion came from Joe Eastman’s new chief of local transport, Guy Richardson, who got the idea from Detroit. The suggestion: to convert the U.S.’s 2,500 over-the-road automobile delivery trucks into busses. This would kill two birds with one stone: the over-the-road operators and their trained drivers, no longer having any new automobiles to deliver, are looking for work.

But transitmen knew that the biggest help of all would have to come from their customers’ abstinence. As. Joe Eastman told them, “shoe leather will have to take the place of rubber . . . leg power, afoot or on bicycles, [of] gas power.”

*St. Louis Car Co. and Pullman-Standard make “P.C.C.” (streamlined) cars, Clark Equipment Co. of Battle Creek makes the trucks; J. G. Brill makes ordinary streetcars.