I should be the last to suggest that the New Haven make a low rate from New York or Boston for the Yale-Harvard or the Yale-Princeton games. It would be the height of absurdity to lower the rates when the traffic at full standard rates rises to a tidal wave which demands the full operating resources of the property for its handling; and that it always is well handled does credit to the New Haven’s potential powers of operation. Yet there are times when it might well afford to make an attractive excursion-rate between New York and Boston. Some of its existing trains between these two cities move at awkward hours and with an incredible slowness. They naturally are not crowded trains. An occasional attractive rate upon these trains alone might, and probably would, result in filling them to their capacity, while the people that traveled upon them would not in any large measure be those that ordinarily travel at the regular rates. The success for many years past of the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio in operating week-end excursions between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington ought to have been of some educational value to the New Haven, but apparently it was not.
I have no grudge against the New Haven. On the contrary, I have naught but sympathy for a railroad which earns upwards of $60,000,000 a year from its passenger traffic alone and yet shows so little knowledge of fundamental merchandising principles. Yet it is all too typical of many of its fellows. In my boyhood days in northern New York the annual event of the autumn was the big excursion to New York City. It ran at half-price and in crowded passenger-cars—parlor-cars, sleeping-cars, and coaches by the dozens. It attracted people who never went to the big city on the regular trains and at regular prices.
It has been a number of years now since the last of these excursions was operated. The people who used to ride on them do not go to New York any more, unless perhaps by automobile once in four or five years. Their traffic is lost to the railroad to-day. When they contemplate the regular rates—twelve to fifteen dollars in each direction, in addition to $3.75 for a lower berth each way—and put them alongside of that famous old round-rate trip of but $7, they decide that it is easier to stay at home or wait until Uncle John buys his new flivver and then run down with him.
When the Interstate Commerce Commission, yielding to certain influences both within and without it, put up the passenger-rates, it felt gleefully that it had done a very clever thing. Never before had it shown so pathetically its lack of real vision in the railroad question. Freight traffic—not always, but to a large extent—must move, no matter what the rate. But passenger traffic is a temperamental and a whimsical thing—never more so than in this golden age of the automobile. You may lead it to water but you cannot make it drink. You may put up the rates but you cannot make people ride. For a correct answer ask the executives of the New England roads who have been so steadily clamoring for passenger-rate advances. Already I have referred to a 23 per cent. loss in passenger traffic in 1921, as compared with 1920. It is impossible to debit this entirely to prevailing hard times. It comes in large measure from hard feelings.
The national feeling of resentment against the present passenger advances recently has found expression in the measure introduced in the United States Senate for the restoration of the mileage-book (also touched upon in an earlier chapter) as a low-priced inducer of travel at wholesale—a measure which at this writing seems certain of passage—with its rate to be fixed at three cents a mile or a trifle less. For once the Interstate Commerce Commission missed its usual astuteness in trying to gage the public demand.
Why not sell the mileage-book at a little lower cost than the railroad mile at retail? Can I not buy two dozen pairs of shoes for less than twenty-four times the cost of a single pair? And is it not good business anyway for a railroad to try to get its existing patrons to ride more miles as well as to gain brand-new patrons, along lines which I have already suggested?
In Belgium and in Switzerland one may buy the equivalent of a card-pass upon an American railroad, good for a week or a fortnight or a month, according to the price paid. During the extent of its life it is good for unlimited travel by the person whose photograph it bears. The French have an even better system. For a matter of five or six hundred francs one purchases a similar card which for the ensuing twelvemonth gives the right, not for unlimited travel, but for the purchase of an unlimited number of tickets at one-half the regular prices; after which, for the holder of the card, the game inevitably becomes one of buying enough separate tickets to beat the first prices put down for the card.
Transportation salesmanship?
Properly played it is one of the most subtle games in the world, and one of the most fascinating—and for the railroad, one of the most profitable.