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Now!
The 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower's
signing of the Interstate Highway Act is a good time to dust
off this review of the PBS documentary, "Taken for a Ride"
that I wrote 10 years ago when President Clinton visited my city
during the 1996 presidential campaign.
Riding a "Presidential
Special" from Columbus to Toledo on tracks that no longer
carry passenger trains, Clinton crowed, "I'm goin' to Chicago
(for the Democratic Party convention) and I'm goin' on a train!"
I wanted to ask him why the
rest of us could no longer travel to our state capital by train;
why we are the only industrialized nation on earth that refuses
to subsidize its passenger rail system? And I asked a question
that makes me sick to my stomach to read 10 years later: "How
many more billions of dollars and how many more lives will we
pay for Mideast oil.?"
Of course I never got to ask
him those questions in person, but luckily, two fellow Ohioans,
Dayton-area independent filmmakers, Jim Klein and Martha Olson,
replied with their film, "Taken for a Ride."
Their documentary tells the
dramatic story of how America's passenger trains and streetcars
were systematically and deliberately killed by what we now call
the "highway lobby." What makes their film so important
is that it goes beyond vague conspiracy theories to name names.
Klein and Olson weave General
Motors promotional films, Congressional archives, interviews
with citizen activists, and Department of Justice memos into
a compelling pattern of events that make it clear: we didn't
get into the traffic jam we're in today by accident.
For example, "Ride"
explains, the oft-scorned highway lobby was not born of fuzzy
environmentalist folklore. The "most powerful pressure group
in Washington," began in June, 1932, when GM President,
Alfred P. Sloan, created the National Highway Users Conference,
inviting oil and rubber firms to help GM bankroll a propaganda
and lobbying effort that continues to this day.
Sloan, unhappy with a transportation
system in which the majority of people rode streetcars and trains,
not automobiles, bought out Omnibus Corp., the nation's largest
bus operating company, and Yellow Coach, the largest bus manufacturer.
With these, he began a campaign to "modernize" New
York City's railways with buses.
With New York as an example,
GM formed National City Lines in 1936 and the assault on mass
transit across America began with a vengeance.
Within ten years, NCL controlled
transit systems in over 80 cities. GM denied any control of NCL,
but the bus line's Director of Operations came from Yellow Coach,
and board members came from Greyhound, a company founded by GM.
Later, Standard Oil of California, Mack Truck, Phillips Petroleum,
and Firestone joined GM's support of NCL.
If you've inched through traffic
on a city bus or followed one for any distance, you know why
people abandoned NCL's buses for cars whenever they could. It
doesn't take a rabid conspiracy nut to see the subsequent benefit
to GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil.
"Ride" is most compelling
when it documents how the U.S. Justice Department prosecuted
NCL, General Motors, and other companies for combining to destroy
America's transit systems.
Brad Snell, an auto industry
historian who spent 16 years researching GM, said that key lawyers
involved with the case told him "there wasn't a scintilla
of doubt that the defendants had set out to destroy the streetcars."
For eliminating a system "worth
$300 billion today," Snell laments, the corporations were
eventually found guilty and fined $5,000. Key individuals, such
as the Treasurer of GM, were fined one dollar.
The post-war boom in housing,
suburbs, and freeways is a familiar story. Not so familiar is
the highway lobby's high-level efforts to determine our transportation
future.
In 1953, President Eisenhower
appointed then-GM President Charles Wilson as his Secretary of
Defense, who pushed relentlessly for a system of interstate highways.
Francis DuPont, whose family owned the largest share of GM stock,
was appointed chief administrator of federal highways.
Funding for this largest of
all U.S. public works programs came from the Highway Trust Fund's
tax on gasoline, to be used only for highways. Its formula assured
that more highways meant more driving, more money from the gasoline
tax, and more highways.
Helping to keep the driving
spirit alive, Dow Chemical, producer of asphalt, entered the
PR campaign with a film featuring a staged testimonial from a
grade school teacher standing up to her anti-highway neighbors
with quiet indignation. "Can't you see this highway means
a whole new way of life for the children?"
Citizens might agree that highways
meant a whole new way of life, but not necessarily for the better.
The wrecking ball cleared whole neighborhoods for the interstate
highways and public protestgrew accordingly. One Washington,
D.C. activist recalls, "this was a brutal period in our
history; a very brutal period."
The documentary concludes with
a peek into the future, interviewing corporate sponsors of the
Intelligent Vehicle Highway System, a computer-controlled vision
of travel which currently receives the lion's share of federal
transportation research funding.
"Taken for a Ride"
is more timely today than when it was made a decade ago.
Watch it.
Mike Ferner served as a Navy Corpsman during Vietnam
and is a member of Veterans For Peace, whose slogan is "Abolish
War!" He can be reached at: mike.ferner@sbcglobal.net
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