Influence in Getting Better Roads.
By far the direction in which the automobile has forced on conviction most strongly its economic potentialities, is in the matter of better roads. No greater tribute to the educational value of the automobile could have been paid than was paid to it by President Wilson when he signed the Federal Good Roads bill which puts $85,000,000 of national money against an equal amount by the states, into making better highways. It was the popular demand for better roads, following the general use of the automobile, that gave the country the improvements made in roads in the last fifteen years, and it was the demand from the same source for more of these improvements that resulted in the Federal Good Roads law.
Until the coming of the motor car the good roads issue possessed little vitality. For seventy-five years the Federal government exercised a passive policy toward building permanent highways. Railroads pushed into virgin territory, cities sprang up along the right of way, but the rural arteries of travel remained in the same hopeless condition as when the pioneers waded through them afoot or on horseback.
With the first motor car came the first feeble impulse to the good roads movement. The first cars were sold to city men, who very quickly found out that where city pavements ended, there ended all hopes of further travel. Pneumatic tires availed nothing against trackless stretches of gumbo mud or corduroy roads. With the mechanical improvements in motor cars, the owners chafed at their limitations and demanded better state roads.
As a result of the agitation, many states have become active in promoting their own road systems, and quite a little has been accomplished in some localities; but the sum total of improved roads in the United States today is only 250,000 miles out of a total of 2,275,000 miles of roads. The Federal roads bill will give an impetus to state work on roads, and as its appropriation covers the next five years, 1922 should see a large increase in the miles of improved roads in the country.
The results in benefit to the agriculture of the country in a general system of good roads, will be most felt through the facility it will give the farmer in marketing his products. With the aid of the motor truck, the farmer may be able to meet, in many cases, the congestion-of-freight-by-railroad problem.
Adding to its other benefits, the automobile promises to be an element in the reduction of the high cost of living, and if it does aid in this it will be in two directions, first, as a freight carrier, and, second, by displacing the horse.