Public transportation

“ Transportation on the public highway, whether of raw products to the market or finished products to the consumer, is denominated primary; transportation by railroads, canals, and ships as secondary. Practically all secondary transportation is of products which were first or last or both subjects of primary transportation. ”

“ The degree to which a nation or a community perfects its transportation facilities is an index of its industrial progress and public highways constitute an important element in the national transportation system. ”

“ Designated public transportation.— The term "designated public transportation" means transportation (other than public school transportation) by bus, rail, or any other conveyance (other than transportation by aircraft or intercity or commuter rail transportation (as defined in section 241) ) that provides the general public with general or special service (including charter service) on a regular and continuing basis. ”

“ Transportation is one of the major fields for both public and private investment. Our facilities for transportation and communication must be constantly improved to serve better the convenience of the public and to facilitate the sound growth and development of the whole economy. ”

“ Railroads, street car lines, express and steamship service would be among the principal means of transportation; while included in the list of principal means of communication there would be the public telephone and telegraph systems. Automobiles, horses and carriages, if used without the assistance of hired labor, would not be considered as being principal means of transportation. ”

“ Every railway corporation in this state which now is, or may hereafter be, engaged in the transportation of persons or property, shall give public notice of the regular time of starting and running its cars, and shall furnish sufficient accommodations for the transportation of all such passengers, baggage, mails, and express freight as shall, within a reasonable time previous thereto, be offered for transportation at the place of starting, at the junction of other roads, and at the several stopping places ”

“ Transportation is essential to American life. Our safe, fast, economical, and convenient movement of people and goods is the cornerstone of our country's social and economic welfare and of our national defense. Now, as in the past, our transportation systems-highways, airports, inland waterways, railroads and public transit, our merchant fleet and the Great Lakes and St. ”

“ Sound public opinion can help both the farmer and the railroads in the important work of the farmer and of the railroad. It is important that fairness and consideration be shown to both: to the farmer, that he may have every encouragement and the assistance of the best agricultural education, scientific research, and extension work, so as to produce a larger food-supply; and to the railroad, that it may help the general prosperity by being able to provide sufficient transportation when it is needed. ”

“ Start out in the morning, number your every minute’s occupation, watch what your neighbors are doing. The man on the stairs, the wagon on the street, the rumbling subway train in a three million dollar a mile right of way, the elevator in the skyscraper, the office boy at beck and call—it is all transportation. Run over in your mind the work of the office and brain workers in a city business section, how many of them are engaging in planning, directing and accounting the various forms of transportation. ”

“ As our cities grew, transit systems developed to provide people with affordable and convenient transportation. This century brought the automobile, truck, intercity bus, and an expanded road system that includes thousands of miles of Interstate Highways. ”

“ Farmers, merchants, manufacturers, and the traveling public have all had their troubles with the transportation lines, and the difficulties to which these struggles have given rise have produced that problem which is even now apparently far from solution. ”

“ Passenger transportation obviously has to meet the following needs:—First, carrying people to and from work; second, carrying people about their business during working hours, including shopping; third, carrying people about on social, educational, and recreative objects. ”

“ The trolleys, or surface lines, carry something like two million passengers per day, and the elevated railways nearly a million and a half, while the subways take in just about a million fares, But there is a transportation system here in this city that carries more than all the rest put together—eight million passengers per day. ”

“ By contrast, have you ever seen an ad for public transit showing people zooming to work in a modern transit train, while they were snoozing, chatting or reading the newspaper, and racing ahead of a parallel highway clogged with trucks, vans and cars moving in slow motion? ”

“ Transportation is the most exacting, the most diversified, the most far-reaching of commercial and industrial activities. It follows then, under the law of the survival of the fittest, that those who can survive in the art and science of transportation must be the fittest of the fit. ”

“ The traffic with which we are concerned does not move on through bills of lading, but the movement is, nevertheless, from points of origin to a foreign or coastal destination, or vice versa, and is therefore essentially through transportation. ”

“ Cabs, hackney-coaches, ‘shay’ carts, coal-waggons, stages, omnibuses, sociables, gigs, donkey-chaises—all crammed with people (for the question never is, what the horse can draw, but what the vehicle will hold) , roll along at their utmost speed; the dust flies in clouds, ginger-beer corks go off in volleys, the balcony of every public-house is crowded with people, smoking and drinking, half the private houses are turned into tea-shops, fiddles are in great request, every little fruit-shop displays its stall of gilt gingerbread and penny toys; turnpike men are in despair ”

“ Altogether, forming one continuous system of broad, free highways, the finest the world ever saw! Aided by trains of horseless carriages, there will be developed between the centers along this highway, a new system of transportation, distribution, commerce and exchange. ”

“ It is remarkable, however, that, notwithstanding the large increase of population in the West, the facilities afforded for travel, reduction in rates, and a general increase in railroad business, passenger traffic has decreased, indicating, as the auditor believes, either that the people could not afford to travel, or that the railroad companies have not yet solved the problem of passenger transportation. ”

“ To all the processes of industry and commerce, the service of transportation is essential, and it is a plain duty of the people of this country to keep the railways from “loss, decay, or injury,” and to preserve them from destruction. ”

“ The expanse of the greater city, together with its peculiar physical characteristics, render exceedingly difficult any effort to provide rapid and cheap transportation for its residents and the crowds of outsiders who travel therein daily for business or pleasure. ”

“ Cable-cars whizzed northward as far as Fifty-ninth Street on the west side and all the way to Eighty-seventh on the east, while horse-cars furnished convenient crosstown transportation every few blocks. ”

“ In the subways of New York the congestion is a vexation to the mind and a torture to the body, which is a condition affecting a large part of our population. Municipal transportation everywhere has deteriorated. ”

“ In exercising authority over their passenger fares, no distinction has been made between those interurban roads which were engaged in the general transportation of freight in addition to their passenger and express business and those which were not. ”

“ To a town of pure business, transportation was the first requisite, and the newer roads have been encouraged to penetrate as far into the city as they could. Now that it is necessary to make it a city to live in safely and agreeably, the railways are regarded from another point of view. I suppose a sociologist would make some reflections on the effect of such a thorough permeation of tracks, trains, engines, and traffic upon the temperament of a town, the action of these exciting and irritating causes upon its nervous centres. Living in a big railway-station must have an effect on the nerves. ”

“ UT—Union Transport, spread the meshes of its transportation service through almost every city of Earth and the hamlets and roads and bus and railroad and airlines between—and even to the few far ports where mankind had found a toehold in space. ”

“ To have this great transportation machine work smoothly, with the fewest points of obstruction and interruption—the least amount of friction—and with the greatest harmony among all its constituent parts, means, in the long run, the furnishing of the best transportation service to the people of New England. ”

“ Transportation, the first handmaiden of progress, is in active attendance every day of the year. Those who worship at her shrine and follow her teachings must lead the strenuous life and love the voice of duty. The splendid, virile performance of the past, handicapped often by crude facilities and forced expansion, must and will be eclipsed under the intense, trying conditions of the present and the future. In no profession more than in ours is there eternity of opportunity. ”

“ It is necessary, however, first to ex [Pg 32] plain, for the benefit of those readers of this book who may never have had opportunities to become acquainted with the usages of great cities, that there are two separate systems in use in such cities for the transportation respectively of baggage, and of persons, from place to place. ”

“ Transportation is an all important consideration both as regards time and expense. There are beautiful countrysides fairly near large centers that are so hampered by poor train service as to be almost out of the question for the everyday commuter. ”

“ Auto-transportation companies, maintaining a mixed service of light passenger cars and the heavier, immense autobuses, have elaborated and organized an ideal system for speed and safety in this unsettled region. ”

“ A cheap form of transportation, either electric trolley, with or without track, or buses, is absolutely necessary. Buses and individual jitneys cannot, where the business is heavy, carry passengers as cheaply as the electric street car, but for a more limited traffic the buses may take their place, and for still less traffic jitneys can find a useful occupation. ”

“ The cheap and rapid transportation of passengers on the elevated rail, when its capacity shall have been fully developed, will give healthful and pleasant homes in rural territory to the toiling millions of our commercial and manufacturing centres. ”

“ Greater stress than in the past on the improvement of urban transportation and the development of transportation plans calculated to raise the quality and satisfaction of urban life.
3. Additional emphasis on the coordination of highways with other modes of transport, both intra- and interurban, to ensure the optimum provision of the best features of all modes and continuing emphasis on making the highway a salutary influence on the environment, both in rural and urban areas. ”

“ Importance of roads in the present transportation292 system.—A word of warning may be advisable before we leave this subject to study more recent means of transportation. Not many years ago a French economist estimated that not one twentieth of the settlements of the inhabited world were within less than a day’s distance from a railroad. Even in the most advanced countries the extent of roads far exceeds that of railroads, and only in the rarest cases do products reach the consumer without having traversed a stretch of common road. ”

“ Hardly were they practical means of transportation that could be relied on day in and day out, before commutation tickets were offered for those hardy enough to endure daily trips of a dozen miles or more between home and office. ”

“ Therefore the street railroad should properly serve the public that gives the road its value.
Next in importance to the traveling public come the human beings that work on the street railroad—the conductors, motormen, gatemen, gripmen, engineers, etc. ”

“ It will be observed that the principal, indeed almost the sole, object contemplated by the projectors of the undertaking was the improved carriage of merchandise and coal, and that the conveyance of passengers was scarcely calculated on, the only paragraph in the prospectus relating to the subject being the following: "Moreover, as a cheap and expeditious means of conveyance for travelers, the railway holds out the fair prospect of a public accommodation, the magnitude and importance of which can not be immediately ascertained." ”

“ Some of the difficulties and inadequacies of the transportation machine of the United States to-day are the result of drifting away too far from the idea that transportation is business, which, in the long run, must be governed by the same great human and natural laws that affect all human affairs. ”

“ You have none of you ever heard of a second-class railway carriage—didn’t know that such things were made. You want a first-class Pullman car reserved for each two of you. Some of you have seen an omnibus in the distance, and have wondered what it was used for. To suggest that you should travel in such a plebeian conveyance, is to give you a shock that takes you two days to recover from. You expect a private carriage, with a footman in livery, to take you through the mountains. You, all of you, must have the most expensive places in the theatre. ”

“ Great quantities of money have been spent to make safe river transportation. Elaborate national and international codes of rules for navigation have been adopted. Laws to regulate railways have been passed. The newest form of transportation, aviation, has already been a subject for the law makers’ wisdom. ”