No idea about them trying to ban automobiles, but oil pipelines were invented to get around their friction. From _The Prize_, referencing the mid-1800s:

"From the first discoveries, teamsters, lashing their horses, had clogged the roads of the Oil Regions with their loads of barrels. They were more than just a physical bottleneck. Holding a monopoly position, they charged exorbitant rates; it cost more to move a barrel over a few miles of muddy road to a railway stop than to transport it by rail from western Pennsylvania all the way to New York. The teamsters’ stranglehold on transportation led to an ingenious effort to develop an alternative—transportation by pipeline."

But based on pure physics alone it seems obvious that moving single truckloads of cargo over several miles of muddy road would be more difficult (and expensive) than moving dozens of loads simultaneously by rail over a significantly longer distance? That’s like the point of trains. How is this an indictment of teamsters?