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A video showing street cars in the Chicago loop (Milwaukee Ave) in the 1940s and 50s. You can pick out a few Packards here and there. Scary how passengers where let out in live traffic lanes!

Chicago Loop Video

Thanks for this. Most cities and even big towns had trolleys, streetcars. In the upper Midwest, there were overnight interurbans with sleeping berths racing beneath the singing wires at 70-80 mph.

However, bus routes could be changed overnight. Which is why in 1949, a Chicago federal jury convicted General Motors of having criminally conspired with Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire, and others to replace electric trolleys with Diesel buses, monopolizing the sale of buses to local transportation companies in 45 cities throughout the nation including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore and Los Angeles, imposing a sanction of $5,000 on GM,
and, for his role in dismantling the $100 million electric interurban system serving Los Angeles, San Fernando, San Bernardino and Santa Ana, fined GM's treasurer H.C. Grossman the sum of

one dollar.

I think they died out because autos were rising in numbers post war and the tracks/stops interfered with the growing auto traffic. Also the makers of passenger rail cars were in decline economy of scale was worsened with rise of airlines. They were started as an extension of railroads to get rid of the horses in the urban realm. Later buses weren't as obtrusive but still slowed traffic and caused tailpipe emissions tradeoff which the electric trolleys didn't have. But fixed paths are subject to constraints in growth patterns with the rail determining possible pathways. Most of the urban centers were depopulated with the rise of suburbs. The interstates/loops solved some of that problem by directing more autos/trucks to them and allowed commuting. The same holds for the els, the elevating structure interfered with traffic below. (movie to watch "the French connection") Today we have light rail and they too conflict with auto traffic, necessitating stops and crossings. So it's the vertical element that gets glossed over in mass transport. Subways were one way to overcome that, but suffer the same ills of fixed path and added costs for excavating. Musk has tried the tube approach, but I haven't seen that catching on as it hasn't so far. It's a symptom of urban population density that's hard to solve.

Also, the streetcar system in general decayed faster than the amortized costs could make up for, so by the time they were replaced, most commuters were not particularly enamored with them.

Unfortunately, the same is often true with the suburban infrastructure of today, with the tax dollars from discrete homes and businesses with big lawns often not being enough to cover the eventual road and utility repairs needed.