The rapid multiplication of the motor-car in the large American city seemingly has brought no larger problem in its wake than this very one of street traffic. In truth the streets of New Yorks, our St. Louises, our Chicagos, our Philadelphias, and our Bostons were never designed for the operations of fleets of vehicles, each bringing but one or two or three or four persons through them. Two or three years ago I rode through the streets of Detroit with a motor-car manufacturer of international reputation. We were speaking of the grave difficulties, political and economic, with which the local traction company was then laboring.
“We won’t see these yellow cars in our Detroit streets eighteen or twenty years hence,” he proclaimed quite grandly, with a wave of his hand at them.
I disagreed with him.
“In no city that two decades hence proclaims itself as truly metropolitan,” I argued, “can people come to and go from their work in its business heart in their own automobiles—none save the comparative few who can afford the luxury of a chauffeur. Adequate downtown garage facilities for an American city of a million people or more are almost out of the question. For these cities transportation must continue in mass rather than singly. It is not only possible but probable that in many of them the building of subways or the extension of existing ones will yet render possible the cleaning of the surfaces of downtown streets for motor-car traffic exclusively. In which case the trolley merely becomes a sub-surface unit, and continues purely as a civic necessity.”
If there were no other argument at all for the development of electric rapid transit installation in the metropolitan areas of our largest cities, this alone would be one well worthy of the considerate ear. The huge interurban trolley-car, so very valuable at one stage of our national progress and development, to-day is an interloper in the streets of even our good-sized towns. Nowhere has this been recognized more keenly than in two important up-state cities of New York—Rochester and Syracuse—where the completion of the new Barge Canal has left the pathway of the abandoned Erie Canal a desolate streak of muck and mud through their very hearts. Each of these York State towns is to-day a real hub of interurban trolley traffic, to an extent that adds greatly to their existing street congestion. It is now proposed that the old bed of the Erie be adapted and used as a sub-surface terminal and approaches for these heavy interurban cars—a suggestion that now seems quite certain of being put into effect. Both Rochester and Syracuse for a considerable time past have been fretted and perplexed by the amount of room these cars have taken in their streets. Their problem is one that is shared by many and many another ambitious city across the land.
There is a phase of American railroad operation that already I have touched upon and to which I shall again refer—the problem of the small branch line. In a following chapter when we shall discuss at some length the possibilities of the gasolene motor-car as applied to this small but always intensive transport problem, we shall go into the possibilities of this arm of the railroad—to-day its most neglected arm and, in consequence, shriveling terribly. There are many places where the withered arm can be made healthy and strong once more by electric treatment. Let me illustrate.
Here in one of our Northeastern States (yet out of the super-power area) is a line that runs from S—— through W——, a small city of considerable importance as a local metropolis, on to C——, a railroad center, and then up to B——, in the heart of the mountainous forest. For the first twenty-eight miles of its distance, from S—— to C——, this road runs through a fairly closely built industrial territory, where the intermediate towns all but touch one another. Forty years ago this line had four passenger-trains a day in each direction; to-day it has but four once again. There was a little time when it had five or six. The motor-car, privately operated, and the motor-bus, publicly operated, brought it back to four. And even these four are not well filled.
The people in its territory do not particularly like the motor-bus. They use it chiefly because of its frequency of service and the fact that it makes frequent intermediate stops along the line. Both of these factors are possible to that railroad with the installation of a light unit, traveling at frequent intervals. From one end to the other of this sixty-mile line there is abundant water-power. A good engineer of my acquaintance tells me that the whole route could easily be operated on 5,000 horse-power. Ergo, once again. The big and generally well-operated railroad system that owns and operates that little half-hidden branch is missing a good bet—for one reason for being so far removed in real headquarters from the line itself, of which much more in good time. The point is, here and now, the bet is being missed and a fair income opportunity lost. An aggregate of these small fair income opportunities would make a considerable dividend upon the stock even of a 12,000-mile railroad.