A passenger-mile, as we know already, is one of the units in estimating the traffic revenue of a railroad. It is passenger-miles, by the hundreds and the thousands, that the railroads of New England are losing today. When one stands beside one of the well-traveled pathways of the Ideal Tour, the Real Tour, or the Mohawk Trail and sees touring cars loaded to the gunwales with luggage go whizzing by him, ten, twenty to the hour, he begins to realize this.[10] More than 50,000 visiting automobiles were registered in Massachusetts this last summer. There were last year in the United States, 2,445,664 automobiles. With a carrying capacity averaging five persons to a car—12,000,000 persons all told—they can seat three times as many persons as all our railroad cars in the country combined. Not all of these folk would travel by train if there were no motor cars. Some of them are riding for the pure joy of automobile touring. But many of them would go to the mountains or the coast anyway and so make a large addition to railroad passenger revenues. The vast increase in trunks handled over reasonably long distances by the express companies in these last few years is, in itself, something of an index of the volume of this through business, which is today traveling by motor.
Now cross the country and take a quick glimpse at the situation in the Northwest. The president of an important steam road at Portland—which in turn controls both city and interurban lines extending out from Portland and Spokane—is peculiarly qualified to speak of the situation there.
“Our road has suffered severely from this new form of automobile competition,” he says. “We lost last summer quite a proportion of our passenger business moving from Portland to the beaches because of the completion of a hard-surface wagon road between it and them. We were compelled to withdraw several local trains, to lay off a number of trainmen because of this new competitor. With us the question is vital. It is still more vital with our electric interurban properties. Throughout California, Oregon, and Washington this class of railroad has suffered most severely from motor competition, and with the decreased cost and increased effectiveness of the automobile I expect such losses to increase rather than to diminish. In all these states there have been large expenditures for improved highroads during the past five years; many times under the guise of providing easy and inexpensive transportation for farm products to markets. But these highroads instead of being built from the transportation centers out into the producing region, so as to serve the farms, have almost invariably paralleled steam and electric lines. As a result the transportation companies have been heavily taxed to construct and maintain highways for the benefit of competitors who are carrying both passengers and freight in direct competition with them.”
The Southern Pacific, whose lines cover California like a fine mesh, has been hard hit by this new form of competition. The fine new highways and the even climate of the Golden State, which brought the jitney to its highest strength there, are giving stimulus to its bigger brother—the long-distance motor bus. These have multiplied in every direction until today there are central stations in the larger cities, providing waiting, smoking, and reading rooms in charge of a joint employee, who usually acts as starter and information clerk and is liberally supplied with large printed schedules advertising automobile service to various points. From these stations the routes radiate in almost every direction; one may ride from San Francisco to Stockton, 80 miles; or to Fresno, 200 miles; connecting there with a public automobile for Los Angeles, some 250 miles farther. From Los Angeles there are still more routes: to Bakersfield, 124 miles over the new Tejon Pass route; to Santa Barbara, about 100 miles; to San Diego, about 125 miles, and from San Diego on to El Centro in the Imperial Valley, another 116 miles.
These routes are generally covered with touring cars—generally second-hand but tried and capable of efficient and reliable service. But there is a tendency toward larger cars, where the volume of travel warrants; several companies operating large busses, seating from twenty to twenty-five persons each. A very good example of this is the Peninsular Rapid Transit Company, which operates between San Francisco and San Mateo and between San Mateo and Palo Alto.
Fares by automobile in California are generally somewhat lower than the railroad fares. There are instances, however, where the fares are equal and yet the motor cars enjoy the bulk of the business, perhaps from their ability to pick up or discharge passengers anywhere along the route—in town or in country, perhaps from their frequency and flexibility of service. Several attempts made by the railroads to regain their traffic by reducing rates have shown these things to be real factors in the situation.
As far as the Southern Pacific is concerned, it finds today that the automobile has taken the bulk of its one-way and round-trip short-haul business, leaving it the long-haul and commutation traffic. In some instances the gasoline buggy has helped itself to long-haul traffic as well; as between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, where the distance by motor car over the wonderful new Tejon Pass highroad—to which the Southern Pacific, as chief taxpayer in California, has contributed most generously—is but 124 miles, against 170 miles, the shortest rail distance. The gasoline buggy can climb grades and round curves that the iron horse may not even attempt.
There is genuine feeling among many of the railroad companies of the land that the new competition is unjust. They make a good case for themselves. Complaints are coming in from the rail carriers all the way across the land. New York has appropriated and expended nearly $100,000,000 in building a system of improved highways over the entire state. Like the highways of California, they, too, are superb roads. Not only do they link all the big cities and the big towns but they sometimes stretch for many miles through the fastnesses of the forest—you may drive for twenty miles through the Adirondacks on as perfect a bit of pavement as any city park may boast and yet not pass more than one or two human habitations in all that distance. All of which is glorious for the motorist and his friends, to say nothing of the hotel keepers and the garage owners on the route. But how about the New York Central Railroad, which covers the greater part of New York State like a web and which, because of the fact that it is its chief taxpayer, becomes automatically the heaviest contributor to these highways? It knows that every mile of improved road that is completed is going to mean a lessening of its revenues from local passenger traffic. And it can have, from that point of view, small comfort from seeing the increasing list of motor-car owners in the New York State towns.
For the moment leave the purely pleasure uses of the motor car. Consider a commercial possibility that is increasing almost overnight. The auditing departments of concerns that have from 50 to 500 salesmen out in the field are beginning to acquaint themselves with gasoline and tire performances. They soon will have need of such special knowledge. A single case will illustrate:
Two drummers working out of Syracuse—the one for a typewriter concern and the other for a wholesale grocery—decided to cooperate. Together and out of their own funds they purchased an inexpensive car—had its body so adjusted that back of the driving seat there was a compartment large enough for a goodly quantity of samples and the valises that held their personal effects. They had figured that upon many of the local lines of railroad, operating but two or three trains a day in each direction at the most, they could not under the most favorable conditions “make” more than four towns a day. From twenty to thirty per cent of their time was spent in the lobbies of hotels or country stations waiting for the up local or the down. With their automobile they now can get out of a town as soon as their business is done there. And during the past three months they have averaged six towns a day.