To be fair, streetcars were sometimes a grift that weren't intended to work in the first place. Not all, but some.

See, electric companies pushed for new suburbs to be built with electric streetcars, because if you need to put in all the wiring for a streetcar, you might as well just electrify the entire suburb while you're at it. Which is what electric companies wanted; the streetcars were just an excuse to get the wiring in. They didn't actually care if the streetcars made sense or stuck around, as long as the electric wiring stayed put.

So electric companies would happily push for nonsensical streetcar layouts that maximised the number of electrified households, and then someone else would come along and say "this is idiotic, let's rip it up" (possibly because it's true, possibly because car/oil $$$) and the electric companies wouldn't push back, because they didn't care either way in the first place.