How Standard Oil and GM Stymied L.A. Public Transportation

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Thanks, MacCruiskeen. That made me wonder just how much 'eminent domain' in the USA is strictly for carbon consumption interests. I know it's been the status quo since the late 1800s. It wouldn't surprise me if it was 90% or higher.

[Iamwhomiam]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
On The Road was published after the enactment of the Interstate Highway Act, but Kerouac wrote it years before. That legendary three week typing spree occurred inApril 1951.

Thank you for your correction, Robert. I know little about Kerouac and relied on references, though they did not indicate when the three weeks Kerouac spent writing the book occurred. I imagined it to be close to its date of publication.

[MacCruiskeen]

Thanks, MacCruiskeen. That made me wonder just how much 'eminent domain' in the USA is strictly for carbon consumption interests. I know it's been the status quo since the late 1800s. It wouldn't surprise me if it was 90% or higher.

Good question, Robert. I don't know. I just know that giant urban expressways also devastated huge swathes of several cities in the UK, including my home town.


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6Fjtk3WQAAnrBR.jpg

In the 60s cars were so rare in the sidestreets of Glasgow that hordes of kids could play football matches on the road and rarely be disturbed by a motorised vehicle. Now the sidestreets are jammed with parked cars, the hordes of kids have vanished, and the populace has moved (or been moved) out * to the new suburbs and council estates and satellite towns. And of course cars become "a necessity" once you are forced to commute long distances daily, especially when public transport is dilapidated, infrequent and unreliable, or else completely non-existent.

Standard Oil and GM surely had little or nothing to with that development in the UK, but equivalent corporations performed the same function and pocketed the same loot. This was at the time when Beeching was dismantling the British Rail network and Harold Wilson was promising to "forge a new Britain in the white heat of technology."

Marshal Berman is a good guy and a good writer, btw. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is well worth anyone's time. He also wrote a good angry essay about Robert Moses and the Bronx Expressway.

* The term actually used by the City Fathers (sic) was "decanted". Two of my best pals got decanted along with their families.

[82_28]

I-5 split Seattle in half starting around 1960ish. Maybe I brought that up already though.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-new ... d-seattle/

[PufPuf93]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
On The Road was published after the enactment of the Interstate Highway Act, but Kerouac wrote it years before. That legendary three week typing spree occurred inApril 1951.

Thank you for your correction, Robert. I know little about Kerouac and relied on references, though they did not indicate when the three weeks Kerouac spent writing the book occurred. I imagined it to be close to its date of publication.

Carolyn Cassady wrote a book "Off the Road" that tells of her time with Kerouac, Cassady, and Ginsberg.

In some ways Off the Road holds up better over time than On the Road, regardless they are good companion reads.

https://www.amazon.com/Off-Road-Carolyn ... f+the+Road

[stillrobertpaulsen]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
On The Road was published after the enactment of the Interstate Highway Act, but Kerouac wrote it years before. That legendary three week typing spree occurred inApril 1951.

Thank you for your correction, Robert. I know little about Kerouac and relied on references, though they did not indicate when the three weeks Kerouac spent writing the book occurred. I imagined it to be close to its date of publication.

Carolyn Cassady wrote a book "Off the Road" that tells of her time with Kerouac, Cassady, and Ginsberg.

In some ways Off the Road holds up better over time than On the Road, regardless they are good companion reads.

https://www.amazon.com/Off-Road-Carolyn ... f+the+Road

Thanks PufPuf93! That's Neal's ex-wife, correct? I know they were married for many years, despite his infidelities. I'll try to find a copy of that when I can.

[PufPuf93]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
On The Road was published after the enactment of the Interstate Highway Act, but Kerouac wrote it years before. That legendary three week typing spree occurred inApril 1951.

Thank you for your correction, Robert. I know little about Kerouac and relied on references, though they did not indicate when the three weeks Kerouac spent writing the book occurred. I imagined it to be close to its date of publication.

Carolyn Cassady wrote a book "Off the Road" that tells of her time with Kerouac, Cassady, and Ginsberg.

In some ways Off the Road holds up better over time than On the Road, regardless they are good companion reads.

https://www.amazon.com/Off-Road-Carolyn ... f+the+Road

Thanks PufPuf93! That's Neal's ex-wife, correct? I know they were married for many years, despite his infidelities. I'll try to find a copy of that when I can.

Carolyn Cassady had her own infidelity with Kerouac.

"Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg is an autobiographical book by Carolyn Cassady. Originally published in 1990 as Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg, it was republished by London's Black Spring Press, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac's seminal On the Road. Off the Road recounts the history of Carolyn Cassady, wife of Jack Kerouac's traveling companion and On the Road's hero Neal Cassady. As Neal's wife and Kerouac's intermittent lover, Carolyn Cassady was well situated to record the inception of the Beat Generation and its influence on American culture.[citation needed]
Off the Road begins in the initial stages of Kerouac and Neal Cassady's friendship, when Kerouac was a struggling author trying to publish his first novel (1950's The Town and the City), and documents important moments in the beat movement such as the success of On the Road and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl.""

from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_Road

I have never watched any of the On the Road or related movies but was/am a heavy reader of beat and 60s literature.

Kerouac's novels were all so biographical, mainly Kerouac as a voyeur and recorder of the lives of his illustrious friends.

The lifestyle and times of Kerouac and Cassady are related to the topi9c of your OP, specifically how Americans transport things. In the prime time of Kerouac and Cassady, the modes were streetcar, train, merchant marine, and large American automobiles; the modes are the metaphor and fetish.

I liked the old LA pictures in your blog. Yesterday, I spent some time doing internet searches of old photos of the various Beats. I like the looks of the time and place.

[Luther Blissett]

To hell with cultural influences... by the 50's city planners, suburbs, sprawl, parking lots, urban highway grids dictated the way North Americans everywhere would live and die by car. I read an interesting article on puma populations in LA and how the habitat-range-barrier-frontiers are all highways.

I post this video often, including just a few weeks ago on a thread in the data dump about shutting down highways as protest tactic. It's evocative of so much in cold war America.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk-c5jlk48s

I agree that there is strong correlation between guns and automobile motors. Combustion engines involve millions of tiny explosions, are violent machines, and represent a developmental mistake along with the rest of the Industrial Revolution, given the current state that the environment is in. Civilizations that were able to make it further past homo sapiens most assuredly did so through slower, smarter, more sustainable means, more connected to the natural universe.

Cars driven by humans are dangerous, and something must be done. I would be amenable to the complete ban of the combustion engine in favor of more bicycles, more travel by foot or sail, no animal abuse, nothing unsustainable, more communities clustering together, farming vertically, with zero waste, and hyperlocalism. I recognize that this is quite nearly impossible, but I do have the habit of asking people to tell me about their most utopian versions of the future. Some common themes often return. Remarkably, none involve oil, coal, combustion engines, fracking, strip mining, mountaintop removal, resource wars, climate conflicts, methane burps, Mad Max, Wall-E, or Idiocracy.

Driverless cars certainly aren't the end-all, but better batteries that can store solar- or wind-derived power for long periods of time and power some kind of transport system that removes human error would probably be better than what we have today.

[PufPuf93]

By the 1970s land use planners knew better and there was a slew of new environmental planning laws.

Alas intent and wisdom often fail to over come human vanity so we have today's world where the threats of environmental destruction, overpopulation, soil and water degradation, and war are supplemented by climate change, an extinction event, and heightened damage and threat from human use of nuclear technology.

A book, Design With Nature, by Ian McHarg had a tremendous influence and later became a major factor in the later use of GIS systems for landscape planning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_McHarg

"In presenting us with a vision of organic exuberance and human delight, which ecology and ecological design promise to open up for us, McHarg revives the hope for a better world." --Lewis Mumford

". . . important to America and all the rest of the world in our struggle to design rational, wholesome, and productive landscapes." --Laurie Olin, Hanna Olin, Ltd.

"This century's most influential landscape architecture book." --Landscape Architecture

". . . an enduring contribution to the technical literature of landscape planning and to that unfortunately small collection of writings which speak with emotional eloquence of the importance of ecological principles in regional planning." --Landscape and Urban Planning

In the twenty-five years since it first took the academic world by storm, Design With Nature has done much to redefine the fields of landscape architecture, urban and regional planning, and ecological design. It has also left a permanent mark on the ongoing discussion of mankind's place in nature and nature's place in mankind within the physical sciences and humanities. Described by one enthusiastic reviewer as a "user's manual for our world," Design With Nature offers a practical blueprint for a new, healthier relationship between the built environment and nature. In so doing, it provides nothing less than the scientific, technical, and philosophical foundations for a mature civilization that will, as Lewis Mumford ecstatically put it in his Introduction to the 1969 edition, "replace the polluted, bulldozed, machine-dominated, dehumanized, explosion-threatened world that is even now disintegrating and disappearing before our eyes."

from http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitl ... 1460X.html

[Freitag]

On June 4, 1963, the President of the Alweg Rapid Transit Systems, Sixten Holmquist wrote a letter[...]

So why didn't the L.A. County Board of Supervisors approve this proposal? It was opposed by Standard Oil.

Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, so I'm not getting the timeline here.

I have never watched any of the On the Road or related movies but was/am a heavy reader of beat and 60s literature.

The documentary Magic Trip has some cool footage of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, including Cassady.

Kerouac's novels were all so biographical, mainly Kerouac as a voyeur and recorder of the lives of his illustrious friends.

I just finished Big Sur, it's a good book but Kerouac is a sad figure in it, past his prime, a voyeur as you say.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

On June 4, 1963, the President of the Alweg Rapid Transit Systems, Sixten Holmquist wrote a letter[...]

So why didn't the L.A. County Board of Supervisors approve this proposal? It was opposed by Standard Oil.

Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, so I'm not getting the timeline here.

Specifically, that would be Standard Oil of California. In 1984, they changed their name to Chevron.

[NeonLX]

Hey! This is right up my alley (haw!)

I love public transit. For one thing, it's public. For another, I work in the field.

Now here is the weird part: I'm also a gearhead. My hobby is old vehicles. Or at least looking at them. I have a love/hate relationship with automobiles. I love the style, engineering and panache of the old ones, but I hate what the use of them has done to our built environment. I really fucking hate parking ramps. What a colossal waste of valuable real estate.

[Freitag]

Specifically, that would be Standard Oil of California. In 1984, they changed their name to Chevron.

Gotcha. I love that photo by the way! IIRC in order to maintain the trademark on "Standard Oil" they have to use that name in at least one business location.

[smoking since 1879]

Oh what a sad sad tale

here in sunny CZ we have communism to thank for our wonderful public transport system. the integrated bus, tram and metro system and czech rail are fantastic (most of the time) and cheap all of the time.

example:

yesterday : my apartment > prague main station via tram (metro was closed for maintenance - there was a replacement bus service but i missed that in my haste)
distance approx. 1.5 miles - 24kc for a half hour bus/metro/tram ticket.
prague main station > Tynec nad Labem, one change in Kolin, distance 75km (46.6 miles) according to what's printed on the ticket - 211kc for me and 40kc for the dog (return tickets, naturally

total cost (including return tram from the main station) 299kc, so about $12, or £10. if i had a monthly / yearly discount card it be cheaper still.

total journey time about two hours each way, a delightful walk in the woods with doggy and no stinky cars involved

see, it IS possible

[82_28]

If you are in CZ, do you mind telling me (us) what the name and recipe of that hella unhealthy cheese sandwich they have there? I guess I could look it up.