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As Los Angeles’s growth began to accelerate, Angelinos became increasingly frustrated with streetcar and train companies. Like many American cities, Los Angeles depended on private rail companies for the mass transit service. The city gave the Los Angeles Rail Company (LARY) and the Pacific Electric Company (PE) monopolies and they served as its exclusive rail providers. But as the city’s exclusive rail carriers, the companies became responsible for financing both rail service and expansion.
As immigrants poured into Los Angeles, streetcars and trains became increasingly crowded. During rush hours, both men and women were forced to stand on streetcars, and they could barely accommodate the growing number of commuters. Neither LARY nor PE could keep up with demand. The growing, decentralized layout of Los Angeles and the companies’ insistence on linking all the rail lines to the central business core complicated their efforts to expand their lines to meet customer demand. <ref>Bottles, 39</ref>
The rail companies also faced exceptionally high costs to expand their rail networks. Neither company was able to effectively expand their rail lines after 1913 because they could not “attract investment capital.” Investors were unwilling to finance the companies because they were saddled with enormous debt loads. The companies were not particularly profitable, and investors were understandably concerned that PE and LARY could not service their debts. <ref>Bottles, 40</ref> LARY’s and PE’s inability to meet passenger needs could have angered many Angelinos.
Finally, railroads had alienated Americans throughout the country during the last half of the nineteenth century because freight and passenger trains had “killed and maimed people with regularity” on America’s streets. Historian David Stowell argued that the railroads in Buffalo, New York in the 1870s had become extraordinarily unpopular among the city’s middle class. Middle-class Buffaloans had become angry with the railroads because they allied with rail workers during the “Great Strike” of 1877. <ref>See generally, Stowell, David. <i>Streets, Railroads and the Great Strike of 1877</i> (University of Chicago Press, 1999)</ref>
While the feelings of New Yorkers may not seem relevant to Los Angeles, it is important to note, that most Angelinos were not natives and they would have carried with them their opinions of railroads from their hometowns, such as Buffalo. Injuries on trains became so frequent through the country that during the nineteenth and early twentieth century American courts fundamentally altered tort law to force railroads to improve safety standards. <ref> See generally Barbara Young, Welke. <i>Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920</i>, (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001).</ref>
====The Rise of the Automobile====
