5. Water-consumption savings.—The railroads’ expenditure in maintenance of way and structure is reviewed, necessary wastes noted, and it is estimated that easily attainable savings in the consumption of water alone would amount annually to $12,600,000.
6. Service of supply savings.—The expenditure of the railways for supplies has been inquired into and the avoidable losses surveyed, and it is estimated that the wastes and abuses amount annually to not less than $75,000,000.
7. Shop accounting savings.—Attention has been given to the matter of uniform railroad statistics and the use of efficient methods of cost accounting. An annual saving would be feasible to the amount of $10,900,000.
8. Labor turn-over savings.—The industrial losses due to unnecessary labor turn-over and to inadequate training of personnel have been reviewed, and it is estimated that the avoidable wastes incident to labor turn-over alone amount to more than $40,000,000.
9. Loss and damage savings.—Inquiry has been made into the amount of the annual damage account of the railways and into preventable causes of such losses, and it is estimated that an annual saving might be effected to the amount of $90,000,000.
Other alleged losses, he says, would bring the total waste to over a billion.
[166] Report of the Joint Commission on Agricultural Inquiry.
CHAPTER VII
AUTOMOTIVE TRANSPORTATION
Automotive transportation is a matter of such recent growth that only a few of the elements entering it have as yet become fixed or standardized—the whole question is still in the experimental or growing stage. The next few years will probably see as many, if not as radical, changes in equipment and operation as have the past few. The law of evolution seems to include a period of slow growth or sort of weak feeling-out; then a period of very rapid growth, developing usually along several lines; and finally a ripening or fixing period in which standardization is reached. The automotive industries are now beginning the third period. Revolutionary changes are not to be expected, but there will be many minor ones seeking efficiency or economy. The machinery of transportation, the motor car and the roadway, are, perhaps, in a later stage of standardization than are the social and legal phases of the subject. The relative rights of the people on the street and driver of the car have yet to be determined. The relation between automotive transportation and the older forms of transportation is still in a very formative stage. Plans and organizations for operating systems of highway transport and methods of accounting which shall be fair to owner and patron have in a large measure yet to be developed.
These things must necessarily be true in a new and growing industry. Why, encyclopedias published in the ’eighties make no mention whatever of the motor car or automobile. In fact, the first practical automobiles were put on the market after 1893, and trucks were not sold as such until 1903, ten years later. This was about the period when automobiles were being made over by change of body into “business wagons.” But so rapidly has the use of the motor car grown, automobile registrations increasing from about one million in 1912 to more than eleven millions in 1922, that, so it is stated, 80 per cent of all cars manufactured are still in use.