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Originally Posted by D1136
I wonder why the city got the bright idea to rip it all out...the infrastructure was there and no one, not a single person in charge, had the foresight to consider congestion and urban flight issues...
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They didn't rip it all out. A lot of it is still there under the asphalt. There's an easily visible section on Richard Arrington/18th St. headed up to Vulcan from 5 Points.
The foresight they had at the time was that the streetcar companies weren't making any money anymore and that automobiles were reaching the mass market. So they sold the streetcars and bought busses.
Re: Congestion, they probably assumed that individual cars would give people freedom to use routes that weren't travelled by streetcar and would therefore RELIEVE the problems of congestion that they already had. And I'm sure they were right. It would have been remarkable if they had foreseen the entirely different congestion problems that cars eventually brought - which are not the direct result of ending light rail service, but are the result sprawling development that capitalized on auto ownership to turn a profit on cheap outlying parcels.
You want foresight? I'll give you foresight. Five lane streets throughout downtown showed INCREDIBLE foresight. There is no real congestion on downtown streets except at onramps and cruising hours. Sure, people complain about the traffic, but put them in any comparably-sized city at rush hour and let them compare.