Nor did the fixed price controls they were often saddled with. It seems that politicians are congenitally completely incapable of considering inflation indexing as a concept when they are writing laws.

Street cars are a red herring anyway. Because street cars don't maintain anywhere near the same number of routes as free-form roads. It is a routing problem still, and railed vehicles perform much, much worse at it, which is why they need to be time multiplexed with rail schedules.