The logical location for early lines of Roadtown will be at the end of present rapid transit or commuting facilities of our cities or will tap these lines far enough out to avoid high land values. Thus there will be ample vacant ground to start a Roadtown at the uptown end of the New York Subway that could build right through to Boston. Real estate within or near the city will, of course, be higher in price, but as such Roadtown dwellings will be able to compete in every sense with the present prevailing forms of two story houses seen in such districts, and have in addition all the Roadtown advantages including indoor rapid, noiseless and dustless transportation, they could afford to pay for the extra value of such land and still be the object of envy by the outside residents. As soon as it has passed beyond the present suburban or speculative belt, the Roadtown will at once take on the life of the city in the country as pictured in this book, yet all the inhabitants will have quick and cheap transportation services into the old cities.
The demand for such Roadtowns for commuting purposes will be so great at first as to prevent the earlier structures from coming into their full use as homes for a population that shall support itself by work within the Roadtown proper. How quickly this demand will be filled is a matter of speculation. The economic incentive will readjust wisely. It never fails. At present, with all the suburban development, the heart of the city is becoming more and more densely populated. We have not been able to get people out of the city as rapidly as the population increases. The Roadtown will materially aid in this fight to get the people out of the city to live.
A Real Remedy for Congestion.
But with the development of the Roadtown a new factor enters this fight against congestion. The suburbanite must depend upon the city for his livelihood, the Roadtowner need not. The result will be that the Roadtown as soon as built will begin to take people away from the city to work as well as away to sleep, and this means a real relief of city congestion, not simply the frantic piling up of humanity twice each day at the gates of the city.
You might ask, what will be the ultimate place of the Roadtown in the civilization of the world? The answer is as impossible as would have been an answer to the ultimate place of the railroad in the civilization of the world had that question been proposed seventy years ago. The railroad is a great civilizer. It carries with it all the material aids to civilization that can be hauled in a freight car. The Roadtown carries into the home what the railroad takes only to the freight and express office, and it carries in addition the civilization of pipes and wires which the railroad cannot transport. It would have been a wonderful vision for a man of the first quarter of the last century to have attempted to picture the ultimate effect of the railroad—but his vision would have fallen short of the reality. Try for a moment now to take the railroad out of civilization and substitute the methods of 1825. I believe the Roadtown will be to the twentieth century what the railroad was to the nineteenth and that my present efforts to predict its future would fall just as far short of the reality as would Stevenson’s dream of the railroad civilization of to-day.
CHAPTER XIII
IN ROADTOWN THERE WILL BE NO TRUSTS
THE only effective way to fight the trusts is to cease to patronize them and the only way to cease to patronize them is to move into an environment which is more economically efficient.
Every labor saving invention in the history of man has thrown someone out of work. The grain binders were broken and burned by the old fashioned harvest hands. The hand type-setters opposed the introduction of the linotype. But the economic invention came in spite of this opposition. The Roadtown is a new arrangement of civilization, a new plan for all commerce and all city building; it will do for the entire programme of transportation what the linotype did for the type setting industry. The entire industrial life of the world will desert the present economic system just as the farmers deserted the old scythes and flails. As a result a large proportion of the people who now work with the crude systems will be thrown out of employment. Who are these people? They are teamsters and expressmen, and clerks, messengers, and bookkeepers, and others too numerous to mention, but these people are merely the servants of private corporations. And the corporations own the warehouses, wholesale and retail stores, and the little shops, and street cars, and cabs, and conduits, and the gas and electricity, and hundreds of other things. These, corporation or trust owners, and their political henchmen who live on the fat of the land and who by employing a lot of servants distribute our goods and intelligence to us by a crude, wasteful, dishonest, and disorganized system, will also eventually lose their jobs. The men who drive the wagons will learn to raise vegetables, and the girls behind the hat counters will learn to make hats. But their bosses with appetites whetted to luxury will be out of a job “for fair” for with the exception of the mines and foreign commerce, the Roadtown will leave them no chance to graft off the producer and consumer by the aid of a privately owned and barbarously inefficient mechanism of distribution and house construction.
Verily, there will be weeping and wailing, and soft hands blistered, and fair names of the privileged families without prestige in the world, for the trusts will have lost their jobs, and there will be but one trust, and that will be owned by the people.