Originally Posted by tandempower

It would be interesting to know what the ultimate intent behind the elimination of the streetcars and rails was. Maybe it was to subvert public transportation and force everyone into personal vehicle ownership, but maybe they really thought that it would be more efficient to use buses with standardized motors and parts shared with other vehicles.

Maybe the failure of the bus system resulted more from consumer fault than corporate fault. It is possible, after all, that GM would have been perfectly happy to have all the public-transit riders who used streetcars go on using buses instead, and maybe that would have been a more cost-efficient way of maintaining public transportation than the streetcar system. This is just speculation, of course, since I really don't know much about the details of what happened.