ROGER RABBIT DIDN'T INVESTIGATE THE GOVERNMENT.

The legend lives on from the cartoonists on down of the National City Lines conspiracy.

The story will never be given up for dead, when Kurt Hofer hops on the trolley.

In 2003 a long defunct rail line was rebuilt, connecting Pasadena, California, to Downtown Los Angeles. Like many Angelenos, I traveled on it a few times and patted myself on the back for relieving freeway congestion while not, in any meaningful way, integrating public transit into my day-to-day life. If you live in a Los Angeles suburb and take the light rail every once in a while—to go to a restaurant, or a Lakers game, for instance—you almost view it as a benevolent act of public service. You briefly imagine yourself sitting in solidarity with brash New Yorkers jostling to get to work or, better yet, you envision LA’s own paradise lost: the Edenic days of the streetcar. If only the streetcars hadn’t been torn up, you tell yourself, this could have been your way of life, just like the more refined urbanites back East.

That's no accident, dear reader, as the urban structure today took its form along the car lines of over a century ago.  "You could even take the rail system all the way to a tavern and hotel atop the San Gabriel Mountains via the historic Mount Lowe Railway. The unique features of Southern California’s geography and climate, from temperate beaches to orange groves and snow-capped mountains, were all within a day’s reach via the Pacific Electric red cars."

The Wise Experts, however, with an assist from the road lobby, had other ideas.

Even if they don’t buy into the Roger Rabbit myth, most Angelenos sense that something sinister was in the offing. How could such an impressive interurban transit system have been voluntarily dismantled by the will of the people? Nobody in their right mind would ever do such a thing. Greed and corporate malfeasance must have been the cause of the streetcar’s demise, and now we are all made to pay the price, wallowing in traffic and self-pity.

When I began teaching a Los Angeles geography class I was crestfallen when I learned that this was not the case—that democracy, with all its attendant imperfections, and not corrupt private interests, had killed the streetcar.

It might not be relevant to the story that in Los Angeles, Pacific Electric offered primarily an interurban or limited tramline service with Red Cars on standard gauge track, while the Los Angeles streetcars were yellow cars on narrow gauge track. (No, I don't have the history to hand. I grew up with The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company, operating streetcars in Milwaukee and suburbs, Racine, Kenosha, and Watertown, as well as interurban cars.)

Not that any of it mattered: the decline of interurban and city service alike was under way long before the Eisenhower presidency or Robert Moses.

Any public will to save the streetcars—if it had been there in the first place—was already lost. And all this was happening before the great explosion of postwar suburbs such as Levittown in Long Island, or the infamous phenomenon of white flight. By 1963, the 90-year streetcar experiment was over.

As Angelenos pour more of our tax dollars into recreating our own paradise lost and the green lobby continues to advocate for high-density housing alongside mass transit—so-called “smart growth”—it’s worth remembering a few lessons from the halcyon days. This is especially the case given that the above policies are likely to be incentivized at the federal level in the name of curbing CO2 emissions. Firstly, by repeatedly rejecting measures to municipalize the streetcar system, LA County residents showed that they measure their “best interest” in terms of the present, not the intermediate to long term. This is an ominous portent for government-sponsored attempts to encourage people to choose high-density housing and the abandonment of personal vehicles. Angelenos chose space, sprawl, and cars in the 20th century; they were not duped into doing so by the auto and oil industries. Sometimes, when given the option between the “right” choice and the choice they like, voters will choose the latter, consequences be damned.

It's possible that urban experts will find themselves with lessened authority as people, including in California, come to grips with the excesses of the past year of "believe the science" coronavirus tyranny.

If the old streetcar maps and their demise tell us anything, it’s that urban planning and democracy—particularly the direct democracy so championed by the left—are often incompatible. People, like facts, are stubborn things. Secondly, the reality that LA’s streetcar system was built mostly by market forces, not government foresight, should humble the managerial elites who believe they can will urban planning wisdom into being with the stroke of a pen.

We very well may end up with a post-suburban future of high-rise living and mass transit in Los Angeles, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that’s something Angelenos would have chosen if only they’d known. They did know, and they chose against it. In an era of ever-larger government and ever-larger regulatory power in lieu of legislation, we might not be fortunate enough this time around to make our own mistakes as a free people. When push comes to shove, our green future might be enacted more with the stick than the carrot.

It's no surprise that people will weight the present more heavily than the future, even in an economic environment of zero (current) interest rates. Bet on emergence.