(The Harper Line of the old Detroit Street Rail System.)

I got up early today, thinking the primary election in Virginia was today. I want desperately to vote against somebody, and they let independents throw themselves at the fray here, so what the hell. Of course, they did not let Governor Perry or Speaker Gingrich or Governor Huntsman on the ballot, but maybe they knew something. Mitt Romney is in a desperate shoot-out with that strange Santorum fellow up in Michigan, and it is funny hearing Mitt tell all the stories about his youth in my hometown of Detroit. We share a lot of stuff, though probably not Bob Seger or the Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent.

I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the bankruptcy of Detroit, and maybe they have averted the immediate crisis. There is talk about new infrastructure projects in the bedraggled and once-great city. A new People Mover light rail system has been proposed to take tourists up Woodward is one of them, which I suspect is desperately wrong-headed, but I have a stack of tokens for the Detroit trolley, and am generally in favor of good works that I do not have to personally pay for.

Anyway, my Left Coast Attorney sent me a cheerful note with a link to a video of the new retro San Diego Trolley. It appears to be something out of the 1950s- way cool styling, and it runs on the existing north-south track that connects the most lovely city in America.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMVyUaAG3f4

It sure brought back some memories for this Motor City kid, and tripped me off into a nostalgia binge that trumped the concern over the Israelis and the Iranians and the mess in Afghanistan.

The fleet of Detroit overhead-wire trolleys is a subject of great nostalgia in America’s first throw-away metropolis. The conspiracy theory made famous in “Who Killed Roger Rabbit” is blamed for the death of the Detroit Street Railway system, which wound up with non-tracked but over-head-line electric powered buses before final conversion to buses.

(Roger Rabbit’s long-suffering wife, Jessica. She was in favor of Trolleys. Photo Disney.)

There is much more to it, of course. Detroit’s system started with horse-drawn trolleys in the Civil War. At the beginning of the Gay Nineties, the horse-car riding public included just about everybody in town, but the electrification movement was all the rage, and technology was transforming the urban landscape. There was a time when manure was a big part of pedestrian life, and I am just as happy it is not now.

The Detroit Electrical Works inked a contract to electrify the Jefferson Avenue line of the Citizens Railway, though enthusiasm was not universal. Remember the fight between Edison’s Direct Current and Tesla’s Alternating Current? Some reasonable citizens considered the idea of stringing naked, lightning-bearing copper wires above the middle of the street to be outlandish and dangerous. in the case of Edison’s DC scheme, they were quite right.

(Thomas Alva Edison’s DC power was a dog, but he beat Nikola Tesla in the end.)

Ironic, really, that Detroit Edison was the company where Mom would take me to exchange lightbulbs which operated on Tesla’s AC, and Edison’s Menlo Park Lab was moved from New Jersey to Dearborn’s Greenfield Village in tribute. Tesla, except for an electric car, is largely forgotten.

Anyway, misgivings notwithstanding, poles and lines for the great experiment went in place without incident, and the transition was a success, cutting precious minutes off the commute from Downtown. Detroiters went wild with the clang-clang-clang of the new system.

By 1910, though, the bloom was off the rose. The two major independent street railway systems had been folded together with smaller concerns into a single-traction combine, the Detroit United Railways (DUR). The cartel was owned largely by Montreal stockholders and New York banking interest- neither known for their civic altruism. Complaints about inadequate service and monopoly exploitation swelled, and it was a common sight to see hardy winter-time passengers clinging to the outside of a trolley for the duration of their commute.

Detroiters eventually voted to buy out the DUR in a pair of elections in 1920 and 1921 and constructed more than city miles of new track. To do so, the City Council jailed the DUR superintendent while they laid tracks over his line. The DUR track and cars were purchased for $19,850,000, and the new city-owned utility was re-named the Detroit Street Railway (DSR). Labor disputes quickly arose.

Remember the term “feather bedding?” It has a certain nostalgia as well, when there used to be powerful Unions in America. In the railroad business of the time (Grandpa Socotra was an engineer) it was a common term for the position of Fireman on trains that were now powered by oil-fired steam, not shoveled coal. The unions insisted that the extra crewman was necessary for safety and management claimed it was wasteful and profit-killing. The “One Man Car” was a major issue from 1938 until the demise of the system.

When Detroit killed trolley service in favor of diesel buses on April 7, 1956, I was almost ready for kindergarten. The former fleet of Detroit were auctioned off and became the core of the system in Mexico City.

The last of the Detroit trolley cars ran there until 1984. On September 19, 1985, the remaining cars were undergoing restoration when an 8.1 earthquake on the Richter scale shook the city like terrier does a rat. The repair facility collapsed and crushed the  remaining cars. Salvageable parts from the destroyed cars were used to build 17 new trolleys, but they are no longer in service.

(The last Detroit Street Rail Trolley, April 7, 1956.)

There were some upsides in the system, which San Diegans are enjoying in the video. Old Detroiters remember that the streetcars were more pleasant to ride than buses.  They don’t lurch (electric engine torque is smooth) and they do not swerve to change lanes.  There were no fumes from gasoline or diesel engines.

The downside of the electric system (as the incredibly expensive and short-range Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf are demonstrating) is that streetcars generally are more expensive to run than diesel buses.  Track and overhead wire maintenance ate up both manpower and dollars. While the individual streetcars are less maintenance-intense than buses (electric motors are rather simple things), the cost of the infrastructure is what killed the trolleys.

There was romance, and there was tradition in the old system, though.

The DUR even had a dedicated funeral car, introduced in 1901. Detroit was one of a few cities to have such a car, and it was booked solid. It hauled anybody who had been anybody to the cemetery. The funeral car was black, with no name or number, and had an opening near the front to receive the casket. It stayed in service from 1901 to 1917. Each of the large cemeteries of the time maintained a loop of track to accommodate the car. Mourners rode right along with the corpse, coffin and family in front, guests in the rear.

Along with the required infrastructure, streetcars take up a lot of street. “Safety Islands” are required to permit riders to board and debark the trolley, and that increases the number of auto-pedestrian encounters.

Henry Barnes, the legendary traffic engineer, said in his autobiography that he “…often said I didn’t mind street cars except for the fact that they ran on the street.”

Electric light rail transit works most efficiently on dedicated right-of-way, like the one in San Diego.  Light rail in the street (either the center or the side) has conflicts with automobiles using the streets. the inherent conflict in the transformation of trolley and inter-urban systems is the genesis of the conspiracy, that the evil auto companies bought up the rights of way and deliberately destroyed the trolley system.

It was the force of the market, and the rise of disposable income that enable the suburban post-war sprawl. In the case of Detroit, there was a racial component to the flight of the middle class from the city. Henry Barnes was the man most singularly responsible for the system we have today. He lived the crucial transition period, 1907-1968, and started as the traffic engineer in Flint, Michigan, moving on through Denver and Baltimore, and finally arriving as Traffic Commissioner in the most snarled city in America- New York.

(Baltimore pedestrians doing “The Barnes Dance” in the 1950s. All vehicles had to yield and people could walk anywhere they wanted. Photo Maryland  Historical Society.)

Barnes represents the pivot point in the march of progress that enabled citizens to vote with their pocketbooks and escape the clogged post-war city that my folks moved to in 1948. Detroit was bursting at the seams. The flood of migration from the South to work at the plants of the Arsenal of Democracy made housing scarce and tensions between the ethnic enclaves sharp.

He retired after a public and ugly fight with Robert Moses, the titan of Manhattan development. Between the two, they transformed the Big Apple, and made their mark to one degree or another on the urban landscape of the post war era.

(The astonishing Robert Moses, the un-elected King of Manhattan.)

Their works remain extremely controversial. Supporters believe Moses applied Barne’s methodology to make the city viable for the 21st century by creating a popular and enduring infrastructure. Critics point out that (like Detroit and LA) that the march of freeways displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in the old cities and destroyed traditional neighborhoods in preference to the speeding autos.

Coming back from Joint Base Bolling-Anacostia yesterday, I saw that one of the last battles of the Barnes-Moses urban wars in being completed. Local activists here had staged a desperate and bitter fight to prevent the completion of the cross-town freeway, which ended at the Anacostia River, dumping thousands of Maryland-bound motorists into street lights at Pennsylvania and New York Avenues. It is a nightmare and always has been. The project, along with the massive new headquarters of DHS were shovel-ready projects and the linkage is now almost complete. The Neighborhoods destroyed were ghost towns, anyway, and the activists now prefer the jobs.

They say that Robert Moses is singlehandedly responsible for the ruin of the South Bronx, the death of Coney Island and the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, and the general decline of public transport through neglect in the years after his passing.
Maybe it is all true. But his one-time partner Henry Barnes knew how to make traffic move, as well as how to kill a downtown urban core. He looked at the trollies this way:

• “You can’t be a nice guy and solve traffic”
• “As things stood now, a downtown shopper needed a four-leaf clover, a  voodoo charm, and a St. Christopher’s medal to make it in one piece  from one curbstone to the other”
• “In this business there are very few problems that can’t be solved with some yellow paint and a little bit of common sense.”
  

This is great nostalgia for the trolley in San Diego, where the nature of the light rail system makes it possible with a single north-south axis. Detroit, broke as it is, contemplates something similar: a new dedicated light rail system on the Woodward Avenue corridor from the Hart Plaza downtown on the River to the city limit at Eight Mile. I have no idea who would be going to either place, unless it was in an armored Escalade, but it might be a great idea.

I don’t think it is going to happen, but you never know, you know? Clang clang clang.

(The Detroit People Mover in front of the RenCen. Photo City of Detroit.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com