It has been 40 years since the last clang-clang-clang of a trolley in Los Angeles. The Yellow Car -- the city's local electric-car line -- made its final run March 31, 1963, a farewell tour on the "V" Line from Los Angeles City College on Vermont Avenue to Pico Boulevard.
Two years earlier, the interurban Red Cars that once ran from Redlands to Santa Monica for a penny a mile had made their last runs. Once both were gone, so was the golden age of mass transit in Los Angeles.
In the decades since, Angelenos have repeatedly asked the question: Who was responsible for dismantling the electric trolley cars?
The automobile became Angelenos' preferred mode of transportation so quickly and completely that, for decades, conspiracy theorists have believed that the auto, oil and tire companies secretly did in the smokeless trolleys to promote the need for -- and sales of -- their products. The theory was part of a 1988 big-screen comedy about an animated actor named Roger who is charged with a murder he didn't commit. As he and a detective work to clear his name, they uncover a conspiracy to wreck Southern California's public transit system.
"Who Framed Roger Rabbit" became to traffic planning what "Chinatown" was to Los Angeles water politics -- but with more laughs.
The giant corporations with a stake in cars and buses were prosecuted half a century ago by the federal government for conspiring to deep-six the region's streetcars. The consortium of General Motors, Standard Oil, Firestone Tire & Rubber, Phillips Petroleum and Mack Truck Manufacturing Co., in turn, blamed the Red and Yellow cars' demise on Angelenos' love of their automobiles, arguing that residents had grown increasingly irate over the streetcars' overcrowding, high fares, aging equipment, accidents and inadequate routes into the new suburban reaches of Los Angeles.
Although it's tempting to believe that evil forces must have been to blame, most historians agree that GM and the other mega-companies only helped to speed the end of the railway, which already was deep into red ink. There were mixed court verdicts, with fines levied that were considered a drop in the bucket.
Nowadays, in the age of choked freeways, the nostalgic mystique of the old Red and Yellow trolleys remains and the old myths die hard, if at all.
