“The electric streetcar system might have survived the impersonal forces of the marketplace, if only because the trolley was as efficient as any alternative form of intracity movement. But the automobile industry did not leave the existence of competitive forms of travel to chance. Beginning in 1926 and continuing for the next thirty years, General Motors operated a subsidiary corporation to buy nearly bankrupt streetcar systems and to substitute rubber-tire vehicles for the rail cars.” (170)

(Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.)