As newly prosperous autoworkers bought their first cars, the streetcars lost customers and gained competition for the roadway.

Traffic jams in Campus Martius were a dangerous mix of brave pedestrians, swarming automobiles, and hulking streetcars.

Streetcar accidents were often deadly, as pedestrians stood little chance against the lumbering behemoths. While the danger of automobiles was ignored, the public attacked the recklessness of the streetcar operators. In an attempt to deflect criticism, the traction company initiated a public relations campaign to promote street safety. The photo shown here was part of that effort.

The city installed manned traffic towers to regulate the mess. Automated traffic signals appeared later, but both only slowed the pace, not the choking volume.

The automobile eventually killed electric streetcars in cities across the United States but nowhere as viciously as in the nascent Motor City.

The Detroit Street Railway Commission pursued municipal ownership of the transit system. Attacks on the private traction companies were a popular political sop to the workingman whose employers usually paid him quite a bit less than the famous "five dollars a day" offered by Henry Ford.

In reality, the Detroit United Railway ran the system efficiently while taking modest profits. Nonetheless, the city, led by Mayor James "Big Jim" Couzens, finally took over in 1922. After adding routes in accordance with Couzens' campaign promises, the city-run system entered into a steady decline.

In 1913, two of the three Street Railway Commisioners had been auto executives, a trend that continued through the life of the commission. Couzens himself had risen to prominence as Henry Ford's business manager. This apparent conflict of interest went unnoticed in an age entranced by the automobile. While traction companies came under closer government regulation or control, autos went unchecked. Auto manufacturers lobbied heavily against excise and use taxes on automobiles while spurring the states and the federal government to improve and build roads.

Though there is some truth to the automakers' conspiracy against electric traction (established in court in the mid-1950's), Detroiters voted with their feet, willingly abandoning the street rail system.

Streetcars were yesterday's technology, clunky and unsexy at a time when automotive transportaion promised that each man could be king of the road. In Detroit, ridership surged briefly during the Great Depression and World War II, but post-war posterity put an automobile in nearly every household. Buses gradually took over the street rail system, and the last streetcars rolled in 1956. Their departure freed up new lanes in the middle of the major streets, but growing traffic quickly filled the space.

Today, bus lines in Detroit sketch nearly the same routes as their ponderous trolley predecesors, but at vastly reduced ridership and, some would say, with vastly inferior service. Fragments of the streetcar system can still be seen where tracks erupt through the city's crumbling pavement, such as at this turn-around on the city's east side.

The city revived trolley cars on Washington Boulevard and Jefferson in the mid 1970's, but merely as a poorly-maintained tourist attraction that runs irregularly.

Years of mass transit subsidies for proposed subways and elevated railways culminated in the mid-1980's in the construction of the Detroit People Mover. Intended to revive the central business district, this light rail system runs on an elevated concrete roadway that describes a circle around the decaying core of downtown. Ridership never materialized, and Detroiters now deride this federally-funded boondoggle as "the train that goes nowhere." Yet, the People Mover does enjoy heavy use during Red Wings games and the annual Detroit Auto Show, and it may play an important role in rebuilding the office space community downtown.

In the photo below, Detroit People Mover cars move past the glass-walled tourist trolley barn at Washington Boulevard and Grand Circus Park