Here in the Twin Cities, our Metropolitan Council earlier this year made the entire parcel databases of the seven metro counties available for download if you pay for it or qualify for a special license (we are a nonprofit and had previous data arrangements with them, and so were able to get access without cost).
There was a great deal of work that went into making this dataset. First the Met Council had to coax some of the counties *cough*Anoka*cough* into sharing their data for the project, as some have historically been fiercely territorial and protective of their data. The number of bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through to get a small chunk of parcels and attributes out of Hennepin County is astounding. Then the Met Council had to get all the parties to agree on a set of 55 attributes that would be common to all the parcels in the merged set.
It's a great dataset to have, I only wish there had been more resources available to improve certain things about it--some of the counties use really bizarre coordinate systems and no effort was really made to get everything to line up from county to county, so there are overlaps in some places (between Anoka and Ramsey Counties, for instance). Also, all the counties update their assessor's data on different schedules and have varying degrees of completeness, so data quality is an issue.
But frankly since this was to my knowledge an entirely public sector endeavor, it's pretty amazing it even happened at all.
Free data is nice, but it's not very common. Usually the units of government (typically counties or metropolitan planning organizations) that create the data charge a rather hefty fee for the really good stuff. And I actually don't begrudge them that, because usually there is quite a bit of value added.
Later this month the seven counties that make up the Twin Cities metro area are FINALLY going to be making the region-wide parcel dataset available, which as been promised for about as long as Duke Nukem Forever. It will not be cheap, but that's because a lot of work went into reconciling the differences between each county's database fields and boiling things down into 55 attributes that will be common to parcels in all 7 counties. This is going to be a huge step forward, since until now the county data has varied wildly in quality, frequency of updates, etc.
That was a rather nonsensical decision by the court. So the city doesn't want to give out its parcel and assessor's data because then he could figure out where the rich people live. Oh noess!! You could drive around a city and get a pretty good idea of that anyway.
At work I have Ramsey County, Minnesota's full set of color orthophotos on my computer (I'm a GIS guy myself). They are of excellent resolution, to the point where a guy I know at the City of Roseville (who knew in advance what day the county was being flown) went out and put a 8.5x11 sheet of paper on the roof of his car in the City Hall parking lot. Sure enough, you can distinguish that piece of paper. Honestly though, there is very little you could learn from having this data that you couldn't piece together in other ways. I am racking my brain trying to come up with security risks and failing.
Raster data can be quite large, but don't underestimate the size of vector data tables. Thankfully DBFs compact extremely well, but uncompressed the tables for an entire county's parcel set or a multi-county street centerline file can be very big.
The UTEC is not a reflash, it is a piggyback that actually offers standalone control of boost and timing, but still relies on the ECU for fueling, so it operates by altering the MAF signal (standalone fueling is only a couple firmware updates in the future, however). You can switch maps while stopped or on the fly...it won't make the changes until your RPMs drop below about 1000.
Re:Is Will Smith going to rap in this movie too?
on
Will Smith as I, Robot
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Don't forget his other old standbys:
"Ya'll feel me, ya'll feel me?" -or- "Uh uh"
Truly one of the great lyrical artisans of this era.
Whoa. Of course I've heard of Codeweavers but I never bothered to figure out where they're located...as it turns out, I live about 400 yards from their office!
...depending on the crowd. Among plenty of academics (especially geographers) GIS = Geographic Information Science. Partly this is because there is quite a bit of ongoing research into the techniques and principles underpinning the technology.
The other reason is that there actually is (in an ideal world) a bit of expertise required--and familiarity with geography, and no I'm not talking about "What's the capital of so-and-so"--to fully understand what you are doing with the data.
I've found a great deal of folks in the public and non-profit sectors who are far too cavalier with their interpretations of data that they crunched on for a while...they think that because they used expensive software they must be getting some real value out of it.
Anyway, the point is that it's not some black box technological marvel. There is plenty of Science (geographic, statistical, etc etc) behind the Systems.
GRASS GIS is cool but sadly I work at a Winders shop, so it's ArcGIS for me (and plenty of contact with the abhorrent DBF file format).:(
$675 million. Half comes from the Federal Transit Administration, another $50 million from a federal CMAQ grant. Rest from various state/local sources. The biggest chunk pays for the extraordinary tunnel project under the airport.
It's not meant to benefit anyone in particular. It's meant to provide people with options. Yes, not a lot of people at the moment. The hope is for the line to become part of a regional transit system (including the Dan Patch corridor, Riverview, North Star, Hwy 61 corridor, etc.).
You're judging it with a time horizon of only a few years. It's an expensive project, but viewing it with a 30 or 40 year perspective and assuming the development of a network, it will be quite different. That's all rather optimistic at the moment, however.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of it. But that's the thinking, at any rate.
Yeah, I know lots of folks like that. The interesting bit is that none of them have ever tried using the bus.
Don't mistake me for one of those gung-ho transit people--I currently drive to work because it takes 1/5 of the time it would take on the bus (I reverse commute so existing routes do not adequately serve my needs). However, I used the bus nearly every day from summer 1999 to spring 2001. I enjoyed it very much, and even used it for purposes other than going to school--it was handy for trips downtown on the weekends or to the Target Center for a game, etc. No hassles with designated drivers, ya know. People of all kinds ride--from executives to students down to your token bag lady and/or drunk.
There are a substantial number of people around here who are desperate to use the bus. All you have to know is that when a new Park-and-Ride out in the suburbs opens (let's say there are 900 parking spaces) it's full to capacity within a couple of weeks.
It's too bad, really, that transit has a largely undeserved reputation for the kinds of things you mentioned. I always found the people on the bus very friendly, with probably less then 5 exceptions over the course of two years and hundreds of rides. All I'd say to the people who don't want to be 'contaminated' by the smell, appearance, and behavior of real people is: you better just stay in your homes, because (GASP) these same people are at your grocery store, walk the streets of the city, etc.
Somehow the idea got into people's heads that the smelly people, the drunks, et al. are only on the bus to accost other people. Nonsense. They just want to get from A to B like all the rest. OK maybe it happens sometimes but the drivers won't take crap from anybody...if someone is disruptive they'll get kicked off the bus, simple as that.
Roadrunner here in Minneapolis shut me down for a couple days two weeks ago because their portscan detected me running sendmail (gasp). It was automatically assumed that I was a professional spammer.
They shut everyone down who had ports 21, 25, and 80 (if not others) open, trying to force them to upgrade to Business Class.
A quick call to a friendly tech revealed that if you move your web server to any other port (8000, 8080, get creative if you like) they won't detect it and you'll be fine. They also had no problem with people using incoming telnet/SSH, thank God. FTP and sendmail are still right out, but there are workarounds so no big deal.
...who aren't quite as geeky as you are, consider buying them a Linux distribution and an O'Reilly book.
My brother is in his sophomore year in college and studying to be an aeronautical engineer. He has always liked to tinker with stuff, and he built his first computer last summer, but all he knows is Windows. He has asked me plenty of questions about my Linux boxen, so I know he's curious.
I think I'll start him on the path. I'm confident he'll be sufficiently intrigued to learn more on his own.
There might be isolated incidents of that, it's not difficult to believe. But employees who do that should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
If this behavior is widespread through the company, I imagine it would be discovered by someone and UPS would get raked over the coals publicly.
A company that tolerates willful destruction of people's personal property ought to be hammered on Wall Street at the least. Sorry, I just can't blame the guy for not knowing that writing "FRAGILE" would result in exactly the opposite intended treatment.
Time for UPS to reevaluate their hiring practices?
I wonder if there is anything to be concerned about with regard to national security. With the shuttle program in federal hands, I'm assuming there is close scrutiny of contractors involved in building and preparing military payloads that the shuttle delivers into space.
While the government has every right to keep sensitive information classified, they also have to keep the public informed (to a point) about what they're doing. If a private entity took over all the duties of deploying and maintaining the shuttles, would that entity be compelled to share as much information about what it's doing as the government currently does? How do intellectual property rights fit into this? Would a private entity at some point start claiming rights to knowledge derived from scientific activities that took place on one of its flights?
OTOH, a private entity that can't rely solely on federal dollars may have more incentive to find ways to drive down costs and streamline the whole process. But hopefully not at the expense of safety.
Agreed. I was very nervous after I got accepted to graduate school (not in computer science, though), because I wasn't sure how I was going to pay for it.
I ended up getting a very satisfying research assistantship with the chairman of the department (a well-known professor in an even better well-known department in my discipline). The assistantship gave me a tuition waiver of my out-of-state tuition and paid my full health insurance premiums for two years--and I got to do research, not grade papers. All I paid in graduate school was about $500 in student services fees. And I made enough money that I was actually able to save some along the way.
It can be done. If you go this route, find out up front what the likelihood of finding funding will be. Make sure you visit the department and meet people before you make your choice.
I agree with you that what Los Angeles is today is the result of large-scale planning. However, some of the details are a bit at odds with the account of Warner, one of the great American urban historians.
This quotes are from his chapter, "The Megalopolis: 1920-" in the book The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (Harper & Row, 1975).
"The special factor of the city's social geography is its low density of settlement, the ease and scope of movement of the overwhelming proportion of its citizens, and its comparative lack of domination by a single downtown area. It has thus escaped the rigid core, sector, and ring structure of business and residential occupation that tyrannized the industrial metropolis..."
(snip)
"The plan for a metropolis composed of single-family houses did not emerge from the drawing boards of freeway engineers; their constructions followed an already entrenched preference of the Angelenos."
(snip)
"The key decision in the determination of the spatial freedom of its residents came in 1939, when the Los Angeles Freeway plans were settled into a multicentered pattern."
(snip)
"The 1939 plan called for limited-access express highways to be laid out in the form of a giant grid, which would be capable of carrying automobile traffic both into and out of the overcrowded Los Angeles central business district and would guide it across the city without the necessity of its going throught the downtown area."
The Board which decided on this plan was made up of representatives from all over the metro area, and they rejected a designed hub-and-wheel pattern because of how dispersed people already were.
In the other points of your post, I'm in agreement.
I think ridership is quite central to decline of streetcars. What would you have had the companies do? Maintain their investments in an inflexible, aging technology that was clearly falling by the wayside? I'm curious.
I did incorrectly label them as "dedicated" rights-of-way, however, I would still contend that in the peak period of streetcars, service had to be so frequent and they stopped at such short intervals that the street space they occupied was essentially exclusive.
There was a period in the 1920s where buses were competing with streetcars, and gaining ridership while streetcars were losing. People liked them better--they got places faster, and routes could alter if people's habits and settlement patterns changed.
As for cost, strictly in terms of operating costs, streetcars were probably superior. But streetcars required high capital costs--rails, street improvements, overhead wires--that add to the total. Companies were responsible for carrying out street improvements. Don't forget about those costs, they are substantial and very much a part of the story.
Many bus routes do run on old streetcar lines, that's a fact, and it makes sense. But this ignores the fact that bus service is far more widespread than that. Extending service when it became necessary was far less expensive than it would have been if streetcars were still around.
I would add that roads, when they wear out every 20 or 30 years or so, are also replaced by taxpayers--at a MUCH higher cost. So I don't see the point of your assertion about the replacement cost of buses.
GM was not involved in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Even supporters of the conspiracy theory acknowledge this.
Two important questions Slater poses, and I'd be interested to hear your responses: How does one explain the cities that replaced streetcars with buses without the influence of GM (i.e., GM was not involved in the acquisition of the systems), such as San Fran and Honolulu? How does one explain the worldwide abandonment of streetcars? GM's influence back then was not nearly as global as it is now.
This was a technology that had had its day. They were nice, people liked them, and they contributed enormously to the development of the modern city. But then the world changed. Insistence on a fashionable conspiracy theory is to utterly miss the point of the big picture--people's preferences, activities, and the nature of the economy was not going to stay the same forever. The undeniable involvement of a major corporation in the drastic changes does not, by rule, imply the use of dirty tricks.
There's always (sigh) going to be a debate about this. Get the facts. Inspect contemporary sources. Read the hearings. Decide for yourself.
BTW, many of Minneapolis' streetcars are still in use in Mexico City.
Scott Bottles wrote a book called Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City which offers a good debunking of this sadly perpetuated urban legend. Coincidentally, it was published by the same university system to which you belong, judging from your email address.
This link also has a good article about this topic.
The upshot: we could genuinely discuss a conspiracy only if GM pursued its course of action and dismantled the nation's systems in spite of the fact that streetcars offered more benefits than buses. Ridership peaked in the late 1920s, and had been falling off consistently for over a decade by the time the systems were dismantled in the 1940s and 1950s. Streetcars are fixed route. Bus routes can be altered. Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way. Buses share the road with other vehicles. Streetcars do have the ability to move more people in the same amount of time with a high enough level of service, but the plain fact is that they were in decline.
The hearings to which you refer were about GM's monopolistic practices in creating the replacement bus systems. Who could blame them? They were taking advantage of the streetcars' demise--brought about by the economics of the time, I must stress--and getting in on the ground floor by supplying buses. And if I had time, I'd dig up those hearings and provide testimony from people who, DURING those hearings, debunked this conspiracy from the get-go, but were drowned out by the media's coverage of it all.
I'm not terribly surprised that your post got modded up to (Score: 4), but it does disappoint me that so many people believe this when just 10 minutes of the most casual research can unearth mountains of material that debunk this myth.
There have clearly been humans not living on earth for some time now. The most salient example is George W. Bush, who was captured by an alien civilization and replaced here on earth by a frighteningly informed, composed, capable Presidential candidate clone. How else to explain his broad-based appeal to independents and centrists?
If the real GWB was still here running for President, this race would be a cakewalk--Gore would have had it wrapped up months ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the Twin Cities, our Metropolitan Council earlier this year made the entire parcel databases of the seven metro counties available for download if you pay for it or qualify for a special license (we are a nonprofit and had previous data arrangements with them, and so were able to get access without cost).
There was a great deal of work that went into making this dataset. First the Met Council had to coax some of the counties *cough*Anoka*cough* into sharing their data for the project, as some have historically been fiercely territorial and protective of their data. The number of bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through to get a small chunk of parcels and attributes out of Hennepin County is astounding. Then the Met Council had to get all the parties to agree on a set of 55 attributes that would be common to all the parcels in the merged set.
It's a great dataset to have, I only wish there had been more resources available to improve certain things about it--some of the counties use really bizarre coordinate systems and no effort was really made to get everything to line up from county to county, so there are overlaps in some places (between Anoka and Ramsey Counties, for instance). Also, all the counties update their assessor's data on different schedules and have varying degrees of completeness, so data quality is an issue.
But frankly since this was to my knowledge an entirely public sector endeavor, it's pretty amazing it even happened at all.
London-Mumbai could probably use it too, judging by the number of Indians and Pakistanis I see every time I'm at Heathrow.
I assume this will accurately model the impact of CGI wolves on the world's population?
Free data is nice, but it's not very common. Usually the units of government (typically counties or metropolitan planning organizations) that create the data charge a rather hefty fee for the really good stuff. And I actually don't begrudge them that, because usually there is quite a bit of value added.
Later this month the seven counties that make up the Twin Cities metro area are FINALLY going to be making the region-wide parcel dataset available, which as been promised for about as long as Duke Nukem Forever. It will not be cheap, but that's because a lot of work went into reconciling the differences between each county's database fields and boiling things down into 55 attributes that will be common to parcels in all 7 counties. This is going to be a huge step forward, since until now the county data has varied wildly in quality, frequency of updates, etc.
That was a rather nonsensical decision by the court. So the city doesn't want to give out its parcel and assessor's data because then he could figure out where the rich people live. Oh noess!! You could drive around a city and get a pretty good idea of that anyway.
At work I have Ramsey County, Minnesota's full set of color orthophotos on my computer (I'm a GIS guy myself). They are of excellent resolution, to the point where a guy I know at the City of Roseville (who knew in advance what day the county was being flown) went out and put a 8.5x11 sheet of paper on the roof of his car in the City Hall parking lot. Sure enough, you can distinguish that piece of paper. Honestly though, there is very little you could learn from having this data that you couldn't piece together in other ways. I am racking my brain trying to come up with security risks and failing.
Raster data can be quite large, but don't underestimate the size of vector data tables. Thankfully DBFs compact extremely well, but uncompressed the tables for an entire county's parcel set or a multi-county street centerline file can be very big.
The UTEC is not a reflash, it is a piggyback that actually offers standalone control of boost and timing, but still relies on the ECU for fueling, so it operates by altering the MAF signal (standalone fueling is only a couple firmware updates in the future, however). You can switch maps while stopped or on the fly...it won't make the changes until your RPMs drop below about 1000.
Don't forget his other old standbys:
"Ya'll feel me, ya'll feel me?"
-or-
"Uh uh"
Truly one of the great lyrical artisans of this era.
Whoa. Of course I've heard of Codeweavers but I never bothered to figure out where they're located...as it turns out, I live about 400 yards from their office!
:)
I might have to get that tour too, hehehe.
...depending on the crowd. Among plenty of academics (especially geographers) GIS = Geographic Information Science. Partly this is because there is quite a bit of ongoing research into the techniques and principles underpinning the technology.
:(
The other reason is that there actually is (in an ideal world) a bit of expertise required--and familiarity with geography, and no I'm not talking about "What's the capital of so-and-so"--to fully understand what you are doing with the data.
I've found a great deal of folks in the public and non-profit sectors who are far too cavalier with their interpretations of data that they crunched on for a while...they think that because they used expensive software they must be getting some real value out of it.
Anyway, the point is that it's not some black box technological marvel. There is plenty of Science (geographic, statistical, etc etc) behind the Systems.
GRASS GIS is cool but sadly I work at a Winders shop, so it's ArcGIS for me (and plenty of contact with the abhorrent DBF file format).
11.6 miles.
$675 million. Half comes from the Federal Transit Administration, another $50 million from a federal CMAQ grant. Rest from various state/local sources. The biggest chunk pays for the extraordinary tunnel project under the airport.
It's not meant to benefit anyone in particular. It's meant to provide people with options. Yes, not a lot of people at the moment. The hope is for the line to become part of a regional transit system (including the Dan Patch corridor, Riverview, North Star, Hwy 61 corridor, etc.).
You're judging it with a time horizon of only a few years. It's an expensive project, but viewing it with a 30 or 40 year perspective and assuming the development of a network, it will be quite different. That's all rather optimistic at the moment, however.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of it. But that's the thinking, at any rate.
Yeah, I know lots of folks like that. The interesting bit is that none of them have ever tried using the bus.
Don't mistake me for one of those gung-ho transit people--I currently drive to work because it takes 1/5 of the time it would take on the bus (I reverse commute so existing routes do not adequately serve my needs). However, I used the bus nearly every day from summer 1999 to spring 2001. I enjoyed it very much, and even used it for purposes other than going to school--it was handy for trips downtown on the weekends or to the Target Center for a game, etc. No hassles with designated drivers, ya know. People of all kinds ride--from executives to students down to your token bag lady and/or drunk.
There are a substantial number of people around here who are desperate to use the bus. All you have to know is that when a new Park-and-Ride out in the suburbs opens (let's say there are 900 parking spaces) it's full to capacity within a couple of weeks.
It's too bad, really, that transit has a largely undeserved reputation for the kinds of things you mentioned. I always found the people on the bus very friendly, with probably less then 5 exceptions over the course of two years and hundreds of rides. All I'd say to the people who don't want to be 'contaminated' by the smell, appearance, and behavior of real people is: you better just stay in your homes, because (GASP) these same people are at your grocery store, walk the streets of the city, etc.
Somehow the idea got into people's heads that the smelly people, the drunks, et al. are only on the bus to accost other people. Nonsense. They just want to get from A to B like all the rest. OK maybe it happens sometimes but the drivers won't take crap from anybody...if someone is disruptive they'll get kicked off the bus, simple as that.
Roadrunner here in Minneapolis shut me down for a couple days two weeks ago because their portscan detected me running sendmail (gasp). It was automatically assumed that I was a professional spammer.
They shut everyone down who had ports 21, 25, and 80 (if not others) open, trying to force them to upgrade to Business Class.
A quick call to a friendly tech revealed that if you move your web server to any other port (8000, 8080, get creative if you like) they won't detect it and you'll be fine. They also had no problem with people using incoming telnet/SSH, thank God. FTP and sendmail are still right out, but there are workarounds so no big deal.
...compared to Bag-O-Glass.
;)
Isn't that what every parent is scrambling to put under the Xmas tree for their kids?
...who aren't quite as geeky as you are, consider buying them a Linux distribution and an O'Reilly book.
My brother is in his sophomore year in college and studying to be an aeronautical engineer. He has always liked to tinker with stuff, and he built his first computer last summer, but all he knows is Windows. He has asked me plenty of questions about my Linux boxen, so I know he's curious.
I think I'll start him on the path. I'm confident he'll be sufficiently intrigued to learn more on his own.
(Note: younger sisters are also acceptable, LOL)
There might be isolated incidents of that, it's not difficult to believe. But employees who do that should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
If this behavior is widespread through the company, I imagine it would be discovered by someone and UPS would get raked over the coals publicly.
A company that tolerates willful destruction of people's personal property ought to be hammered on Wall Street at the least. Sorry, I just can't blame the guy for not knowing that writing "FRAGILE" would result in exactly the opposite intended treatment.
Time for UPS to reevaluate their hiring practices?
Check out this nicely detailed account of a trip on the Vomit Comet, a modified KC-135A.
:)
Man that looks cool, as long as you don't succumb to the Technicolor yawn along the way.
I wonder if there is anything to be concerned about with regard to national security. With the shuttle program in federal hands, I'm assuming there is close scrutiny of contractors involved in building and preparing military payloads that the shuttle delivers into space.
While the government has every right to keep sensitive information classified, they also have to keep the public informed (to a point) about what they're doing. If a private entity took over all the duties of deploying and maintaining the shuttles, would that entity be compelled to share as much information about what it's doing as the government currently does? How do intellectual property rights fit into this? Would a private entity at some point start claiming rights to knowledge derived from scientific activities that took place on one of its flights?
OTOH, a private entity that can't rely solely on federal dollars may have more incentive to find ways to drive down costs and streamline the whole process. But hopefully not at the expense of safety.
Agreed. I was very nervous after I got accepted to graduate school (not in computer science, though), because I wasn't sure how I was going to pay for it.
I ended up getting a very satisfying research assistantship with the chairman of the department (a well-known professor in an even better well-known department in my discipline). The assistantship gave me a tuition waiver of my out-of-state tuition and paid my full health insurance premiums for two years--and I got to do research, not grade papers. All I paid in graduate school was about $500 in student services fees. And I made enough money that I was actually able to save some along the way.
It can be done. If you go this route, find out up front what the likelihood of finding funding will be. Make sure you visit the department and meet people before you make your choice.
I agree with you that what Los Angeles is today is the result of large-scale planning. However, some of the details are a bit at odds with the account of Warner, one of the great American urban historians.
This quotes are from his chapter, "The Megalopolis: 1920-" in the book The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (Harper & Row, 1975).
"The special factor of the city's social geography is its low density of settlement, the ease and scope of movement of the overwhelming proportion of its citizens, and its comparative lack of domination by a single downtown area. It has thus escaped the rigid core, sector, and ring structure of business and residential occupation that tyrannized the industrial metropolis..."
(snip)
"The plan for a metropolis composed of single-family houses did not emerge from the drawing boards of freeway engineers; their constructions followed an already entrenched preference of the Angelenos."
(snip)
"The key decision in the determination of the spatial freedom of its residents came in 1939, when the Los Angeles Freeway plans were settled into a multicentered pattern."
(snip)
"The 1939 plan called for limited-access express highways to be laid out in the form of a giant grid, which would be capable of carrying automobile traffic both into and out of the overcrowded Los Angeles central business district and would guide it across the city without the necessity of its going throught the downtown area."
The Board which decided on this plan was made up of representatives from all over the metro area, and they rejected a designed hub-and-wheel pattern because of how dispersed people already were.
In the other points of your post, I'm in agreement.
It seems you've never heard of Robert Moses and the New York Regional Plan Authority.
For the better part of three decades he was virtually in charge of the planning strategy of the New York metropolitan area.
You can find lots of things on the web about who he was and what he did, but check out this and this for starters.
That doesn't make him or the RPA socialist of course, but it was highly centralized.
I think ridership is quite central to decline of streetcars. What would you have had the companies do? Maintain their investments in an inflexible, aging technology that was clearly falling by the wayside? I'm curious.
I did incorrectly label them as "dedicated" rights-of-way, however, I would still contend that in the peak period of streetcars, service had to be so frequent and they stopped at such short intervals that the street space they occupied was essentially exclusive.
There was a period in the 1920s where buses were competing with streetcars, and gaining ridership while streetcars were losing. People liked them better--they got places faster, and routes could alter if people's habits and settlement patterns changed.
As for cost, strictly in terms of operating costs, streetcars were probably superior. But streetcars required high capital costs--rails, street improvements, overhead wires--that add to the total. Companies were responsible for carrying out street improvements. Don't forget about those costs, they are substantial and very much a part of the story.
Many bus routes do run on old streetcar lines, that's a fact, and it makes sense. But this ignores the fact that bus service is far more widespread than that. Extending service when it became necessary was far less expensive than it would have been if streetcars were still around.
I would add that roads, when they wear out every 20 or 30 years or so, are also replaced by taxpayers--at a MUCH higher cost. So I don't see the point of your assertion about the replacement cost of buses.
GM was not involved in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Even supporters of the conspiracy theory acknowledge this.
Two important questions Slater poses, and I'd be interested to hear your responses: How does one explain the cities that replaced streetcars with buses without the influence of GM (i.e., GM was not involved in the acquisition of the systems), such as San Fran and Honolulu? How does one explain the worldwide abandonment of streetcars? GM's influence back then was not nearly as global as it is now.
This was a technology that had had its day. They were nice, people liked them, and they contributed enormously to the development of the modern city. But then the world changed. Insistence on a fashionable conspiracy theory is to utterly miss the point of the big picture--people's preferences, activities, and the nature of the economy was not going to stay the same forever. The undeniable involvement of a major corporation in the drastic changes does not, by rule, imply the use of dirty tricks.
There's always (sigh) going to be a debate about this. Get the facts. Inspect contemporary sources. Read the hearings. Decide for yourself.
BTW, many of Minneapolis' streetcars are still in use in Mexico City.
Nonsense.
Scott Bottles wrote a book called Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City which offers a good debunking of this sadly perpetuated urban legend. Coincidentally, it was published by the same university system to which you belong, judging from your email address.
This link also has a good article about this topic.
The upshot: we could genuinely discuss a conspiracy only if GM pursued its course of action and dismantled the nation's systems in spite of the fact that streetcars offered more benefits than buses. Ridership peaked in the late 1920s, and had been falling off consistently for over a decade by the time the systems were dismantled in the 1940s and 1950s. Streetcars are fixed route. Bus routes can be altered. Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way. Buses share the road with other vehicles. Streetcars do have the ability to move more people in the same amount of time with a high enough level of service, but the plain fact is that they were in decline.
The hearings to which you refer were about GM's monopolistic practices in creating the replacement bus systems. Who could blame them? They were taking advantage of the streetcars' demise--brought about by the economics of the time, I must stress--and getting in on the ground floor by supplying buses. And if I had time, I'd dig up those hearings and provide testimony from people who, DURING those hearings, debunked this conspiracy from the get-go, but were drowned out by the media's coverage of it all.
I'm not terribly surprised that your post got modded up to (Score: 4), but it does disappoint me that so many people believe this when just 10 minutes of the most casual research can unearth mountains of material that debunk this myth.
There have clearly been humans not living on earth for some time now. The most salient example is George W. Bush, who was captured by an alien civilization and replaced here on earth by a frighteningly informed, composed, capable Presidential candidate clone. How else to explain his broad-based appeal to independents and centrists?
If the real GWB was still here running for President, this race would be a cakewalk--Gore would have had it wrapped up months ago.
When my eye passed over the title of this posting, I could have sworn that it said "Birth of a Testicle Baby".
Paging Mr. Freud...