iv
There will occur in connection with all this discussion of the necessity for a modern change in the Road the point of ways and means. Somebody must pay. How shall the payment be made? It has already become a matter of politics. Pretty well all that can be said upon it has been said, but as yet there is no agreement. I would maintain (very tentatively, hardly as more than a suggestion) that we shall never get a satisfactory settlement until we found ourselves upon three main principles:
(1) The making of a few great arteries, coupled with the making of proper exits from the great towns and of by-ways round the urban centres, is a national concern. You cannot, in the present state of society, regard it as local, nor even as chiefly concerning the direct users of the Road, for even these, who are apparently the people upon whom the burden should most justly fall, develop by their travel the district through which they pass.
I suggest, therefore, that you must start in this case with the fundamental principle of a national fund, and a national fund not proceeding from ear-marked receipts alone, but also drawn from general taxes.
(2) The second principle which I should suggest is that in so far as you tax travel for the purposes of this fund you should tax it not by any complicated combination of weight, power, fuel, and so forth, but through some one factor alone, otherwise you will be perpetually remodelling your scheme and as perpetually causing a grievance.
Now, the most obvious factor is fuel. One way and another, the fuel a man uses for his machine is the nearest test to the use he makes of the Road. A heavy weight needs more fuel, great speed and consequently greater wear and tear needs more fuel, and greater horse-power needs more fuel. The curves are, of course, not parallel. You can get equal speeds between heavy and light for nearly the same consumption of fuel. One type of machine will do more harm to the road surface for every gallon of fuel than another, and so on. But if you want to have easy revenue simplicity in taxation is vital: surely the taxation of fuel is the simplest and most direct method. It is easily collected. It does away with all chance of confusion. It can be imposed at source and in bulk, and it has that invaluable quality which has been often lost sight of in the last two generations: that it is paid gradually and at will and yet paid inevitably. So long, of course, as a false distinction is maintained between the commercial and the private use of vehicles you will have gross anomalies and injustice. To draw the line between economic waste in the use of the modern internal combustion engine and what is part of the general and normal life of the community is impossible. It would be better were the distinction to be wholly removed. We do not ask a man who takes a ticket from Birmingham to London whether he is going for fun or folly, for business or necessity. Men pay the same price for the ticket whatever the motive of their journey. It is an absurd anomaly as things now stand that the man who travels in a little Ford car from one town to another with, say, two members of his family—and travels therefore much more cheaply than he could upon the railway—should pay the rent of a house for the privilege of having his car, while the heavy vehicle of a tradesman who is distributing advertising matter—sheer economic loss to the community—should tear up the road for nothing.
(3) The grant for the new roads should include the purchase, if not of a continuous belt along each side, at least of blocks of land, especially in the neighbourhood of existing communications, near railway stations, near villages or other centres now established, etc. The price to be determined by arbitration upon the old price basis before the scheme of the Road was developed. If this were done the great difficulty for certain purposes (not residential, but other) of using these sites would accrue to the public purse and would gradually relieve the cost of construction.
This project touches, of course, upon one of those political theories which have been debated, as have all political theories in our time, with too much violence and with too much generality. If it be contended that we here introduce the principle of the “single tax” and of the nationalization of land, I can only say that nothing is further either from my thoughts in this essay or from my general politics—as any number of my public pronouncements suffice to prove. But we have here a very special case. These new roads, if we drive them (as we ought to drive them soon) between the main points of the island, will, unless some such scheme is adopted, make a direct and immediate present of millions to the chance owners of land upon their trajectory. It would be a gross case of actual endowment at the expense of the community. Conversely, the reservation of land on either side of the way for the purpose of helping to pay for the new scheme would be of direct advantage to the community and of disadvantage to no one.
At any rate, just as we must soon have a reform of the road system or suffer decline in our communications and therefore in our national life, so we must soon settle a reform in the matter of road maintenance and road taxation. For the new main arteries that should be built we must depend upon the general resources of the community, while for special taxes upon traffic we must establish as soon as possible a simple and universal system.
I need not add, for it is obvious, that such a scheme of new roads would involve a certain amount of individual hardship. It is impossible to avoid that, but it is in the temper of this nation to compromise closely and in detail upon all such things. Nor need it be added that the scheme would have to proceed by trial and error, and could only be, at first, tentative and applied experimentally to one or two chosen trajectories. But I think that it is upon these lines that the problem can be solved.