Highways and Highway Transportation

by George R. Chatburn

The savage determination with which the American is sticking to his automobile despite the drop in his income is an occasion for wonderment and no little irritation with a lot of us. For the sake of economy we may have to exchange our seven passenger for a light six or one of the little fours. Beyond this we need not go. But the farmer, yelling his head off at the fall in corn prices, what does he mean by sticking to his car? Your mechanic resisting the inevitable fall in wages, would be well enough off if only he would give up trying to ride like a millionaire. These merchants, claiming they aren’t making a living, don’t give up their cars, you will observe. Why pity them, then?

Thus does the general assumption that the automobile is a super-luxury impinge upon the fact that the automobile has become a prime necessity. You laugh. Well, go inquire what are the other things the people will sacrifice before yielding up their speed machines. A sharp automobile manufacturer assured a gloomy harvester manufacturer the other day that not only would the men do without harvesters rather than lose their cars, but the women would yield up their very chewing gum. Yea, more than that, their pretty clothes. Food is, of course, a superior necessity, but even that can be reduced and simplified in favor of gasoline.

As to houses, we like to be conservative, but there is a perfectly obvious disposition to put house shelter second to automobile shelter. That is why the house shortage isn’t hurting us as we expected it to hurt. The people are in automobile camps. Observe the sudden energy in developing automobile camps. They are wise. It looks now as if half the population will have deserted houses and flats for their automobile tent within another year or two.

In winter time a corner of the garage will do well enough for a living room during the few minutes at a time we are at home. If we insist on a separate house, then the tendency is toward a very small one. What is the sense in maintaining a big house not to live in? That is the way our minds run now. This will help the lumber men to understand why building doesn’t pick up as it should. And that is how we manage to keep the car while incomes fail. It is done by cutting out such unnecessaries as houses and furniture and clothes and heavy dinners.

America has been living at a fast gait on its nerves. Isn’t that which we see now the natural reaction from the nervous overstrain of fixed habitation and the relaxing ways of the nomad? The automobile came along in the nick of time to furnish the transportation, and off we go. The universal gypsy is breaking out in us. This isn’t more than half moonshine. It is at least half solid fact, with economic and social consequences which, whatever they prove to be, will be important.

The above editorial indicates that people are beginning to notice the social changes being brought about by the automobile, and more, they are ascribing them to the automobile. Changes usually come about so gradually that, like the hands on a watch, the movement can be noticed only by comparing what is with what was some time previous.

Rapid transportation and rapid communication has extended Broadway clear across the continent. One writer by taking an automobile tour found the American world extends from ocean to ocean, that the hat she purchased in New York had its duplicate in every millinery window all the way across to Los Angeles. She further found that the people between were not all “hicks,” and that farmers did not go around with alfalfa on their chin and straws in their mouths as shown in the cartoons of the funny section. Some farmers play golf on their own pastures. The fact that the sack containing their clubs is often tied with binding twine is of no consequence.

The social intercourse which good roads and the rapid moving automobile makes possible between neighbor and neighbor and between country and town tends to produce a more homogeneous people. Each gets the view point of the other, which reacting modifies his own. Factions are largely broken up. Tolerance gains sway and more satisfaction and happiness results.

High wages and profits during and following the war led the average citizen to purchase some of those luxuries which before then he was unable to afford. He has had a taste of a “higher standard” of living. No wonder he objects to a return to pre-war conditions, no wonder he objects to giving up his automobile, the thing which has furnished him with more pleasure than his previous humdrum life believed possible. No, he will fight to maintain the new standard and new living conditions. A social revolution has taken place, and in traveling about the spiral the world is one step higher.

And while some will for a short time be content to live in one corner of the garage, as the editorial writer opines, the natural longing for a home will assert itself. By the aid of the automobile property will be bought in farther-out district where lots are cheaper, where taxes are not so high, where there is more breathing space, and healthful conditions are more likely to prevail. Men of wealth can build suburban estates, and men of less means comfortable homes leaving the downtown apartments and tenements to those who cannot yet afford motor cars, and many there be, more’s the pity.