Chief MacDonald also warned of another threat to free highways in the possible resurgence of the private toll road, for which the Italian autostrade were the current models. These roads had been built in the early 1920’s on private rights-of-way, with limited access, and were for automobiles only. The bonds were guaranteed by the Italian government. MacDonald said:
The motor road on a closed right of way takes on the characteristics of a railroad. A highway cannot be so transformed and continue to serve in a universal way. . . . If de luxe service roadways to a limited extent are needed on private rights of way their development should be , undertaken by the existing railways, not in competition with them. Much harm without compensating bene- fits will otherwise result. Once let franchises be granted to private interests with the necessary power of eminent domain, and inconceivable harm would result to the financial structure of the railways in that area.[1]
Railroads Versus Highways
The steam railroads experienced a remarkable recovery from the postwar doldrums in 1921.[N 1] Even so, their net operating revenue for that year returned them only 3 percent on their investment—not enough to cover fixed charges.[2] Some railroad executives blamed the failure to make a better showing on truck competition, which, they claimed was “subsidized” by the free use of public highways paid for, in part at least, by the railroads’ own property taxes. Some railroads mounted a publicity campaign to protest the “unfairness” of this subsidized competition, and their arguments were given some substance by President Harding’s December 1922 address to Congress in which he said that motor haulage would be wasteful if burdened with its proper share of the highway cost.[3]
However, there were realists in the railroad industry who realized that trucks and improved highways had come to stay and that the railroads would have to accommodate them. One executive said flatly that low-volume unprofitable branch railroads should be replaced by truck lines and that trucks could help the railroads by collecting and delivering carload freight for long hauls.[4] In the east a number of railroads made determined efforts to reclaim the short-haul business from the trucks, but these efforts were only partly successful. Practically all hauls under 30 miles were gone for good, but the railroads were able to get back a good part of the over-70-mile business, at least temporarily.
For the electric railroads, highway competition was disastrous and eventually fatal. In the early 1920’s, few States regulated buses as common carriers, and bus and stage lines sprang up by the hundreds, competing fiercely with each other for business.[N 2] These operated over most of the roads radiating out from the cities, reaching hundreds of rural families who were not served by the electric railroads. However, many buses ran in direct competition with the interurban lines on parallel roads, carrying both passengers and express.
By 1923 interurban buslines were operating pneumatic-tired vehicles that would carry 30 passengers and some even 60 passengers in relative comfort at fares of about 4 cents per mile, which closely approximated the rates charged by steam and electric railroads. For the convenience of both passengers and buslines, the business interests in many cities, small as well as large, organized terminal associations to provide waiting rooms and other terminal facilities for the convenience of the public.[5] Through competition between themselves and financial mergers, the buslines rapidly became formidable competitors of both the steam and electric railroad lines for passenger traffic, and by 1930 most of them were placed under State regulation as common carriers.
Buses were not the only competitors for passenger traffic. Rapidly increasing motor car ownership was equally damaging to the railroads, and by the end of the 1930’s, most of the electric railroads were in receivership. So rapid was the obsolescence and decline of this form of transportation that some of these were only 20 years old when they ceased operation.
- ↑ The Government returned the railroads to their owners in 1920.
- ↑ There was a short-lived parallel trend in the cities where unregulated “jitneys” made huge inroads into street railroad revenues with their flexible routings and cut-rate fares. The usual fare was 5 cents, or “one jitney” in current slang, hence the name. Jitneys were clearly in violation of the traction companies’ charters and were eventually outlawed by most cities, along with competing intracity buslines.
Heavy Trucks Shake the Foundations of Highway Engineering
Up to 1917, the main problems of highway engineers were financial, not technological. Roadbuilding was an established art practiced essentially according to the precepts laid down by Tresaguet, Telford and McAdam more than a century earlier. The principal innovation, and perhaps the earliest application of research to roadbuilding, was the successful development of bituminous surfaces in the early 1900’s to combat dusting. The roads built prior to World War I were narrow and thin, but they were adequate for automobiles and farm vehicles.
This feeling of technological well-being came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1918 with the widespread failure of roads of all types under heavy trucking. Prevost Hubbard, the BPR’s chief chemist and expert on bituminous pavements described the disaster as follows:
Hundreds of miles of roads failed under the heavy motor-truck traffic within a comparatively few weeks or months. Roads with bituminous surfaces, bituminous macadam roads, and bituminous concrete roads all failed alike, together with other types used in State and county work. These failures were not only sudden but complete, and almost overnight an excellent surface might become impassable . . . A very large proportion of the failures have been characterized by an almost simultaneous destruction of the entire road structure, and not merely the disintegration of the wearing course or pavement proper.[6]
Director Page made the investigation of these massive failures his first order of business for 1918. He sent the OPRRE experts into every part of the country to investigate and report. Highway Engineer J. L. Harrison found two kinds of failure in Illinois
- ↑ Id., pp. 7, 8.
- ↑ Railroad Revival, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 88, No. 1, Jan. 5, 1922, p. 4.
- ↑ An Industrial Message to Congress, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 89, No. 24, Dec. 14, 1922, p. 1006.
- ↑ W. Lyford, Urges Co-operation Between Railroads and Motor Trucks, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 89, No. 22, Nov. 30, 1922, p. 933.
- ↑ G. Chatburn, Highways and Highway Transportation (Thomas Crowell Co., New York, 1923) pp. 429–432.
- ↑ P. Hubbard, Efficiency of Bituminous Surfaces And Pavements Under Motor Truck Traffic, Public Roads, Vol. 1, No. 10, Feb. 1919, p. 25.
