A local young urbanist speculated that automobiles put the end to trolleys in the Lehigh Valley. He was half right, actually it was the Mad Men from Detroit. In the early 1950's, Americans were still a one car family, even in the prosperous Lehigh Valley. The mass transit system was still full of the other family members, still using the system for work, shopping and school. Between the late 1940's and 1953, Hamilton Street had both trolleys and buses. In the late 40's, General Motors and others wined and dined transit officials all over the country, exhorting the benefits of their buses. Shown above is a Lehigh Valley Transit work car, towing a trolley to Bethlehem Steel to be scrapped. The photograph was taken in 1952 on St. John Street, heading toward the Fountain Hill route. In June of 1953, the last trolley would run on Hamilton Street.
It was a combination of market forces and political forces that caused the demise of the trolley system in the Lehigh Valley. While GM did a good job selling their buses, Detroit also did a fine job of wining and dining community leaders, and publishers of the newspapers of record which had a tremendous influence on local politicians and area residents. The Morning Call took an early and direct support to the removal of the "old fashioned" trolleys so that the area could "modernize" like the rest of the country. David A. Miller, a car buff, was very negative towards the trolley system and that filtered directly into the editorial room. The newspaper celebrated when the last trolley rolled down the street on June 9, 1953. The paper also celebrated when the tracks were torn out or covered with macadem.
ReplyDeleteIt didn't hurt that Miller and other community leaders, like department store owner Jack Leh, invested heavily in parking lots in the city and heavily promoted a free parking shopping scheme. The parking system in Allentown remains a major source of revenue.
These forces worked against the Lehigh Valley Transit system which was losing ridership and revenue. The downward spiral after WWII is remarkable: in 1950, 50 million trips were taken annually on the local transit system that consisted of trolleys and buses across the Valley. By 1972, when LVT announced it was going to cease services, ridership on the remaining, near skeletal, bus system was only 2.6 million a year.
Once the trolleys were gone, keeping the buses operating was expensive. Fares were raised and services were reduced until the system could no longer turn a profit.
There's no question that many forces came together to diminish the ridership on transit systems in the Lehigh Valley as well as across the US. The historic Federal Highway initiative under President Eisenhower made huge amounts of funds available to communities if they built out highways. That favored the automobile to the extent that Detroit officials could sit in front of Congressional Committees and announce with conviction: “What was good for Detroit, was good for America.”
Until the late '60s, there was no such federal assistance for transit systems and, by then, it was too little, too late. As Lehigh and Northampton Countries struggled to create the Lehigh and Northampton Transportation Authority (LANTA), there was political and economic anxiety that they were adopting a money pit so their measures were hesitant and conservative. Funding formula required a “local match.” The more the local contributed, the more the Feds and later the State would kick in. The Counties traditionally, invest as little as fiscally possible.
By 1972, when LANTA took over, small urban areas across the country had "modernized" by taking the trolleys off the streets. That loss of infrastructure meant that transit operations under the private sector were doomed.
When we recall that the transit system in the Lehigh Valley had its origin with the power and light company – indeed Colonel Harry Trexler made a fortune off the transit company - it was a perfect synergy: The power and light company provided the energy, the transit system bought equipment and hired and managed drivers. The result was an efficient, environmentally positive, service that met the needs of the residents of the major cities. Once all those opposing forces came together to support auto ownership, that synergy was dismantled and, what resulted, was urban sprawl, inefficiency, pollution and rather than rely on a community service, individuals became burdened with the full cost of their own transportation.
Ironically, sprawl fostered the growth of commerce outside the urban commercial centers and caused business after business in the downtown to close. What The Morning Call desired - a modern and growing Allentown - became just the opposite.
Our nation’s cities lost a good deal when they lost the trolley and streetcar systems.