Motorists are evidently assumed to be made of money, if we may judge by the following statement made by a correspondent of Motoring Illustrated this year. He says, “One curious result of a car case, in which I was fined £10 for ‘scorching,’ is that in less than a week I have received upwards of seventy begging letters from charitable societies or individual beggars. Motor owner and millionaire are apparently one and the same thing in the popular mind.”
Mr. Leopold de Rothschild, who is entitled to speak with authority on the subject, frankly admits that there is much justification for the irritation in the public mind against motor-cars. He strongly condemns rash driving, but, at the same time, maintains that when motor-car owners obey the law and observe the courtesy of the road, they ought not to be looked upon by coachmen, cyclists, and pedestrians, as the enemies of mankind.[9] Nevertheless, he firmly believes that the dislike of motor-cars will die away in due time, just as did the dislike of cycles. The utmost caution ought, he concedes, to be exercised by drivers in the crowded thoroughfares of large towns.
On the question of their importance generally in relation to British industry Mr. Leopold de Rothschild says, “We should foster them by every means in our power. At the beginning not a single one was produced in this country, but at the present moment some of the machines turned out in English workshops rival those of the very best French make. In recent contests on the Continent, too, English cars have more than held their own. It is sometimes complained that the machines make a great noise. That defect is being gradually cured. Then it is urged that they raise a tremendous dust as they speed along. That evil is also being remedied, and will disappear altogether if the experiment of pouring petroleum on the roadways should prove successful. Where the motor-car is extremely useful, I consider, is in enabling people to go across country to attend hunt meets and visit distant golf links. Then, again, see what encouragement is given to wayside inns. When in Scotland the other day I visited a friend who lived twenty-five miles off, and did it comfortably between luncheon and dinner, and that, too, without endangering the life of myself or anybody else. I regard the motor-car as a source of intense enjoyment. Allow the owners greater freedom, but take care that in return they loyally observe the regulations which are framed by competent authorities for the safety of the public.”
MOTOR-CARS AND PUBLIC HIGHWAYS
Who can place a limit to the development of motors! The time may arrive when tram lines will disappear, the roads themselves being of steel and forming a broad rail upon which self-propelled coaches, omnibuses, cabs, and cars will ply in every direction, and far and wide into the suburbs. This is the idea of Mr. A. A. C. Swinton, who also thinks that eventually motor-cars will drive tram-cars out, because, as he says, “Tramways are merely a smooth place on a rough road, with a groove to keep the wheel in a smooth place,” and as one day the whole road will be smooth the tram-rails will disappear.
Something similar, I take it, was in Mr. Balfour’s mind when, in 1901, writing to the Warden of the Browning Settlement in Camberwell on the subject of homes for the workers, he said:—
“What I am anxious people should bear in mind is that trams, railways, and ‘tubes’ by no means exhaust the catalogue of possible improvements in transit; indeed, I am not sure that they are the means of communication for relatively short distances which some years hence will find most favour. What I should like to see carefully thought out by competent authorities would be a system of radiating thoroughfares, confined to rapid (say, fifteen miles an hour or over) traffic (that is absolutely essential), and with a surface designed, not for carts or horses, but for some form of auto-car propulsion. If the local authority which designed and carried out such a system chose to run public auto-cars along them, well and good. But this would not be necessary, and private enterprise would probably in time do all that was wanted. In such a thoroughfare there would be none of the monopoly inseparable from trams, the number of people carried could be much larger, the speed much greater, the power of taking them from door to door unique, while there would be none of the friction now caused when the owners of the tram lines break up the public streets. It may be urged—and, perhaps, with truth—that at present the auto-car industry has not devised an absolutely satisfactory vehicle; but we are, I believe, so near it that the delay ought not to be material.”
“It is, of course, obvious,” he continued, “that the present difficulty of locomotion in our streets is almost entirely due to want of differentiation in the traffic. We act as the owners of a railway would act if they allowed luggage trains, express trains, and horse-drawn trams to run upon one pair of rails. The radiating causeways, as I conceive them, would be entirely free from this difficulty. Neither the traffic of cross streets, nor foot passengers, nor slow-going carts and vehicles would be permitted to interfere with the equable running of fast cars. There would be no danger and no block; and as the causeway would be connected at intervals with the ordinary road and street system of the district, and would melt into that system at either end, every village in which there were enough residents who had to be in London at a fixed hour every day could have a motor of its own. It might be well worth a manufacturer’s while, I should suppose, to lodge his workpeople out of London, and to run them to and from his works.”
No electrician living can predict with certainty what the motor-car may not result in.
One thing only is probable—that our metropolitan streets will soon be congested with vehicles to such an extent as to leave no space for horses. And then will come the complete victory of the automobile.