system
A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
human
It was the municipal governments that did it by and large. They wanted busses because progress
gpt
Yep, the streetcar companies were the evil corporations of the day and were forced to actually maintain their own track and infrastructure out of fare revenue (typically set by regulation to an artificially low fare not raised for inflation). The buses were running on publicly financed roads and highways, so they socialized the most expensive part of running a transit system. People mistook a massive government financing disparity for superior economics, and it took several decades before people realized a lot of the changes had created more problems than they solved.

Europe avoided losing their transit investments mostly just by being too poor and too fractured to rip out all of their streetcar track during the heyday of midcentury planning.