Highways and Highway Transportation by George R. Chatburn

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. Automotive transportation may be considered to include all conveyance from one place to another by means of motor vehicles. A motor vehicle is one which carries within itself the source of mechanical power which propels it providing that source be not muscular. This definition would include the tractor, the road roller, the torpedo, and the locomotive, which are ordinarily excluded. For the purposes of this discussion an automobile or motor car may be considered as a self-propelled vehicle which transports a burden other than itself as a weight upon its own wheels. This will exclude the tractor and the locomotive, which though self-propelled, are intended to draw other vehicles rather than to carry the load; also the road roller and the torpedo, which have no burden to transport other than their own weights. Some definitions would confine a motor vehicle to one designed to move on common roads or highways. However, motor cars are now being used on railroad tracks; they are entitled to and should be allowed the use of the name. The automobile may have as the source of power internal-combustion engines using such fuel as gasoline, kerosene, benzol, and alcohol; it may use steam generated by these fuels; or an electric storage battery charged by sources outside the engine may furnish the propelling force. The load transported will either be passenger or freight. Passenger traffic may be classified as business or pleasure. If a vehicle is used mostly for business, first cost and economy of operation may play a more important part in the purchase of the car than if used for pleasure, in which case appearance and luxurious appointments may be the deciding factor. [Illustration: THE EVOLUTION OF THE STEAM AUTOMOBILE