WHERE HAVE ALL THE STREETCARS GONE? Long time readers of Cold Spring Shops know. Professor Munger recommends an instructive analysis by from Market Urbanism.

But if the suburban bug had infected America long before 1938 and failures of government were the real culprit, then why is the myth of the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy so pervasive? Martha Bianco has pointed to the universal desire for a clear villain/victim dichotomy in her study of the myth, but I think the reason is that politicians and progressive academics have too much at stake in the status quo explanations. American politicians have hitched their wagons too tightly onto the automobile to admit that it was a mistake. Progressive economists, historians, and planners, on the other hand, have invested so much intellectual capital into the idea of state regulation and control that they cannot admit that the urban planning profession in America is rotten to the core, and that the mere granting of these powers to government was the original sin. With car-borne constituents and an economic ideology to defend, modern day liberals have apparently found their own culpability in the rise of the suburbs too tough a pill to swallow, and so they’ve settled on General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tire as scapegoats. But just because they can’t face their history doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t.

That's preceded by a debunking, for the uninitiated, of the National City Lines canard, and a reminder that the network of public roads is anything but self-supporting. Yes, infrastructure enhances productivity, but streetcars and rapid transit lines are infrastructure also.