The population, not only of London, but of great towns in general, is undergoing a considerable redistribution. Land at greater distances from urban centres, and hitherto devoted only to agriculture or market gardens, is being utilised more and more for building purposes; the increasing values of land within the radius of these outer suburbs improves the position on urban markets of producers in rural centres whose lower rents may more than compensate for their slightly heavier cost of transport as compared with the suburban growers; the health of town workers taking to what are not merely suburban but country homes should improve. Social and domestic conditions generally are, to a certain extent, in a state of transition; while the trunk railways are getting back from their long-distance suburban traffic some—though not yet, perhaps, actually the whole—of the revenue they have lost on their short-distance traffic.
On the other hand, results are being brought about in the inner suburbs which are viewed with much uneasiness by the local authorities. The removal from the inner suburbs of considerable numbers of those who can afford to live further away from their business means (1) that population in the inner suburban circle is decreasing, or, alternatively, that a better-class population is giving place to a poorer-class one; (2) that much of the house property there is either standing empty or is fetching considerably lower rents; and (3) that the taxable capacity of the areas in question is declining, although the need for raising more by local taxation is to-day greater than ever.
Where the local authorities who are experiencing all these consequences of an interesting social change have themselves helped to bring them about by setting up municipal tramways to compete with the railways, thus, among other consequences, driving the latter to resort to measures of self-defence, they may find that attempts to change, if not to control, the operation of economic forces have their risks and perils; while the position for the authorities concerned will be even worse if their municipal tramway, in turn, should suffer materially from the competition of the motor-omnibus.
Private motor-cars may appear to have deprived the railways of a good deal of their passenger traffic, and they certainly constitute a most material and much-appreciated increase in the facilities now available for getting about the country. It must, however, be remembered that a very large proportion of the journeys taken in them would probably not be made at all if the motor-car did not exist, and if such journeys had to be made by train instead. The actual diversion of traffic from the railway only occurs when journeys which would otherwise be made by rail are made by motor, in preference. Here the railway certainly does lose.
Against the loss in the one direction in railway revenue, owing to the greater use of motor-cars, there can at least be set the constant growth in the taste for travel which the railway companies (partly, again, to make up for the competition in suburban traffic) have done their best to cultivate by means of abnormally low excursion or week-end fares based, as one leading railway officer put it to me, "not on any idea of distance, but on the amount that the class of people catered for might be assumed to be willing to pay."
The travel habit has thus undergone a greater expansion of late years than has ever before been known, so that a falling-off of railway traffic in some directions ought, sooner or later, to be compensated for by increases in others, if, indeed, that result has not already been attained.
The actual position in regard to passenger travel on the railways of the United Kingdom during the years 1901-10 is shown by the following figures, taken from the Board of Trade Railway Returns:—
| YEAR. | PASSENGER JOURNEYS.[[72]] | RECEIPTS FROM PASSENGERS. |
| £ | ||
| 1901 | 1,172,395,900 | 39,096,053 |
| 1902 | 1,188,219,269 | 39,622,725 |
| 1903 | 1,195,265,195 | 39,985,003 |
| 1904 | 1,198,773,720 | 40,065,746 |
| 1905 | 1,199,022,102 | 40,256,930 |
| 1906 | 1,240,347,132 | 41,204,982 |
| 1907 | 1,259,481,315 | 42,102,007 |
| 1908 | 1,278,115,488 | 42,615,812 |
| 1909 | 1,265,080,761 | 41,950,188 |
| 1910 | 1,306,728,583 | 43,247,345 |
These figures give evidence of, on the whole, a substantial advance in railway passenger journeys and receipts, notwithstanding all the competition of alternative facilities, and we may assume that although tramways, motor-cars, motor-omnibuses and even the latest new-comer, railless electric traction, may supplement and more or less compete with the railways, there is no suggestion that they are likely entirely to supplant them for passenger travel.
In the matter of goods transport in general, it is the fact that during the last ten or fifteen years, more especially, there has been an increasing tendency for the delivery of domestic supplies to suburban districts or towns within an ever-expanding radius of London and other leading cities to be effected by road, instead of by rail. The same has been the case in the distribution by wholesale houses of goods to suburban shopkeepers, and, also, in the reverse direction, in the sending of market-garden or other produce to central markets.