Here’s something you don’t see everyday: The Vice-President of General Motors, Bob Lutz, calling higher gas prices in the U.S. in the long term. In most developed nations, there are substantially higher gas prices than in the U.S in order to pay for the long term costs of gas usage (such as environmental clean-up). On the other hand, Americans have long enjoyed bargain basement gas prices — and probably for a good reason. As Lutz tells us, “The whole U.S. system is based on the premise of cheap gasoline.” What he means is that unlike Europe where trains are readily available and affordable, the automobile is the central means of transportation in America. Whereas the Dutch have a long term love affair with the bicycle, Americans swoon over the latest car.

But it wasn’t always that way. In a deeply disquieting chapter from Joe Feagin and Robert Parker’s Building American Cities: The Urban Real Estate Game, they describe the ways in which the “auto-oil-rubber industrial complex” worked tirelessly to disrupt the extensive systems of electrically-operated mass transit developed in most American cities between the 1880s and 1940s. In just one example, Feagin and Parker tell the story of how Los Angeles went from having more than a thousand miles of trolley car track and 2,800 scheduled runs a day in the early 1920s to having a system based on diesel buses in the 1940s due to systematic efforts by General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil. GM was ultimately convicted in federal court of conspiring to convert trolley systems to diesel buses — the sales of which GM had a monopoly on.

And now, here’s the VP of the very same company, saying that we need to raise gas prices. Lutz believes that it will be affordable once we have a full range of fuel efficient hybrid cars. But maybe we should all be even more excited about the coming of high speed rail.