EPISODE 171 | A Thousand Universes: Public Transportation Weirdness

Even in the urban transportation space, usually reserved for city dwellers, NUMTOTs, NUMTOAs, and other transit geeks, conspiracy and weirdness manage to infiltrate. There’s the GM Streetcar Conspiracy, which might explain why the US has crap public transport. There’s the story of the Tucker 48, an innovative car that got shut down before is could get up and running. There are early electric vehicle rumors and other ways we might have made cars better, but powerful people made other choices for us all. Dieselgate showed that even big companies lie for profit. And then there are the histories and mysteries of underground networks – subways, tubes, metros – filled with oddities, ghost stations, and even a few actual ghosts.

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SECTIONS

1. 03:02 - L.A. State of Mind - The GM Streetcar Conspiracy
2. 13:53 - Trouble's Braids - The Tucker 48
3. 23:19 - Drive My Car - The GM EV1, Tom Ogle, Dieselgate
4. 31:40 - Down in the Tube Station at Midnight - NYC Subway oddities, London Underground oddities and hauntings
5. 45:50 - Give Up the Ghost - Ghost stations around the world, Berlin's Geisterbahnhöfe

• Music by Fanette Ronjat

More Info

• GM and the Red Cars
• Kennedy, 60 Minutes, and Roger Rabbit: Understanding Conspiracy-Theory Explanations of The Decline of Urban Mass Transit by Martha J. Bianco, Portland State University, 1998
• Why do traffic reduction schemes attract so many conspiracy theories? in The Guardian
• What Caused the Tucker Automobile Corporation to Fail? paper
• Top 10 Automotive Conspiracies: Scandals, Myths, and Urban Legends in AutoGuide
• 10 Secrets of the New York City Subway on Atlas Obscura
• Ghost stations: abandoned subways around the world on Love Exploring
• The weird afterlife of the world's subterranean 'ghost stations' in The Guardian
• Full list of the London Underground's abandoned 'ghost stations' including one 50 miles from the city on My London
• Abandoned Tube Stations
• London Underground’s 7 Most Haunted Stations on The Serpent's Pen
• 7 of Paris’ Abandoned Metro Stations and Abandoned Tunnels with Vintage Trains on Untapped Cities

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