The same interests you are referring to spent decades and much effort to brainwash the US public in the notion that electric rail transit was a toonerville trolley, antiquated, dilapidated, obsolete, uncomfortable and retrograde in every respect.

OMG the overhead wires - cardiac arrest - and the those terrible tracks in the street importuning our heaven-sent automobiles, the pinnacle of transport progress. According to them God created the internal combustion auto to usher in Utopia, which looks curiously like Manhattan with many layers of elevated freeway.

What allowed the partial conversion to trolley coaches in SF in 1946 and their overhead wires was placating the electricians' union, Hetch-Hetchy power and Col. Marmion Mills a consultant brought in from Seattle who favored trolley buses. But as far as rail went what was forthcoming from Roger Lapham was the cable cars had to go and from Elmer Robinson the streetcars had to go. A few years later the trolley coaches were deemed unsightly and obsolete by the "expert authorities". The B streetcar line was straightaway converted to diesel despite the fact there was the trolley coach storage facility right there in the middle of the line at Presdio Yard.

IMHO Jetsons phallic futurism(the startichects' wetdream)has no real place for any mundane surface transit like buses or trams - only Buck Rogers or Muskian uber-exotic gadgetbahns in the sky.