Did Auto, Oil Conspiracy Put the Brakes on Trolleys?

It's hard to believe in car-mad Southern California, but even before the beginning of the last century, and for a half-century thereafter, the streetcar was the model and the marvel of the nation's urban mass transit. For the price of a nickel, a dime or two bits, the trolley whizzed over more than 1,100 miles of tracks connecting the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach to the San Fernando Valley, and from San Bernardino to Redondo Beach. Tourists rode from downtown to the heights of Mt. Lowe in the San Gabriel Mountains.

The electric-car system was the combined brainchild of railway and real estate magnates Henry E. Huntington and Moses Hazeltine Sherman.

Sherman was 19 and a New York schoolteacher when he headed west in 1873, seeking a warmer climate. He stopped in Arizona, where he spent 17 years building a fortune in real estate, banking, ranching and railroads, a fortune he would both spend and increase in Los Angeles.

By 1896, he was established in Los Angeles, where he and his brother-in-law, Eli P. Clark, built the first electric-interurban railway that linked Los Angeles to Pasadena. Their first rail cars were green; the line was called the Pasadena & Los Angeles Railway.

That line eventually was bought up by Huntington's Pacific Electric Railway, which Huntington began building in 1901 -- primarily so people could reach his new suburbs and buy the homes he was building across the vast valley of Los Angeles and beyond.

In 1910, he sold his interest in the rail system to Southern Pacific Railroad. By then, the system linked more than 50 Southern California communities and four counties, making it the world's largest electric-transit system. Huntington kept ownership of the Los Angeles Railway's Yellow Cars, which operated locally.

In the 1920s, as Los Angeles grew and residents and businesses began moving to the suburbs, people began to rely more and more on the automobile for transportation rather than the aging trolley system.

With 160,000 cars cramming onto Los Angeles streets in the 1920s, mass transit riders complained of massive traffic jams and hourlong delays. The hard wooden seats and the open-window "air-conditioning system" in the summers were no picnic either.

The conflict between the trolley and the automobile was often played out at intersections, where they collided repeatedly, resulting in many injuries and deaths. Newspaper editorials raised the alarm about the accidents and crusaded against the streetcars.