Roadmaker

“ People traverse it, not with the object of arriving at any particular destination, but for the delight of the road itself, of the joy it gives to the eye and to the imagination. Its only traffic is what the transport agent would call “holiday traffic”; for when the idle season ends the highway is deserted. In earlier days there would rumble along the road the carriage and four of the traveller of great means; then came the humbler vehicle hired from the town; then the sleek motor; and finally, as a sign of democratic progress, the char-à-banc, the omnibus, and the motor-brake. ”

“ On the big road the great motor lorries slip and strain and beat the surface into huge ruts. When a car is stranded it is pushed into the ditch by the side. The men attached to it paddle about barefooted, hopelessly, doing little things they know will do no good. They must wait for the road to come to its senses. The pack-trains abandon the road completely and strike across the open country.
Ox-carts the final reliance of transport department But the ox-carts groan and creak and waggle on. The little oxen sway and grunt under the goad. Progress is infinitely slow, but there is progress. ”

“ But in so extensive a concern as the system of roads, involving so great an expense, we may naturally look for small beginnings and very gradual advancement. Accordingly, we find in the first formation of highways, before their utility could be fully understood or experience had shown the benefits of science in the practice of the engineer, the early road-maker only increased the breadth of the horse-track, and strewed it over with gravel from the neighbouring brook. ”

“ From the great stores which keep their "fleet" of delivery cars, and from the furniture-remover who wants the equivalent almost of a traction-engine down to the draper, the grocer or the butcher who is content with a modest three-wheel auto-carrier for loads up to five or ten cwt., every class of trader is to-day finding that, to keep pace with the times, and to deliver goods as promptly and at the same distances as his competitors, he must needs have a quicker means of road transport than a horsed-vehicle. ”

“ On the road one must ever have a regard for what may happen, and roadside repairs, however necessary, are seldom more than makeshifts which enable one to arrive at his destination.
If you break the bolt which fastens your cardan-shaft or a link of your side-chains, you and your friends will have a chance to harden your muscles a bit pushing the machine to the next village, unless you choose to wait, on perhaps a lonely road, for a passing cart whose driver willing, for a price, to detach his tired horse to haul your dead weight of a ton and a half over a few miles of hill and dale. ”

“ The right course is to call in an engineer and throw the road around the end or along the side of steep hills instead of continuing to go over them, or to pull the road up on dry solid ground instead of splashing through the mud and water of the creek or swamp. Far more time and money have been wasted in trying to keep up a single mile of one of these "pig-track" surveys than it would take to build and keep in repair two miles of good road. ”

“ We who contemplate making the trip ensconced in the upholstered comfort of a machine rolling on air-filled tires, will, perhaps, be less petulant of some strip of roughened macadam, less bewildered by the characteristic windings, if we recall something of the first back-breaking cart that—not so very long ago—crashed over the stony road, and toilsomely worked its way from devious lane to lane. ”

“ The answer is that although a vast amount of road-making or road-repairing was going on, at the very considerable expense of the road users, and to the advantage of a small army of attorneys, officials and labourers, it was not road-making of a scientific kind, but merely amateur work, done at excessive cost, either with unintelligent zeal or in slovenly style, and yielding results which mostly failed to give the country the type of road it required for the ever-increasing traffic to which expanding trade, greater travel, and heavier and more numerous waggons and coaches were leading. ”

“ The keen-sighted business men who conduct these enterprises have already realised what the public has not, that all the world and his wife live on the road, and that the roads are indeed, as I have said, the nerves and sinews of the land. Very naturally then, they are striving to obtain the right to lay their lines along the roads, and so obtain the great profits that arise from place to place traffic. ”

“ They are not only matters of convenience, but they are really matters of great economy in every community. The farmer with one team of two horses is able to move on a good road more than he could move with four horses and a wagon of much greater strength on a poor road. This I have tested personally many times. Farmers are constantly in need of the use of highways to transport their property and to move themselves from place to place. The average farmer is five miles distant from the nearest railway station and his surplus produce must be moved that distance year after year. ”

“ With the large wholesale and retail houses the use of the road motor is a matter not simply of economy in transport but, to a still greater degree, of doing a larger business, in less time, and over a wider area, than if horsed vehicles were used. ”

“ The plow breaks up the compact surface which age and traffic have made tolerable. Earth roads can be rapidly repaired by a judicious use of road machines and road rollers. The road machine places the material where it [Pg 119] is most needed, and the roller compacts and keeps it there. The labor-saving machinery now manufactured for road-building is just as effectual and necessary as the modern mower, self-binder, and thrasher. Road graders and rollers are the modern inventions necessary to permanent and economical construction. ”

“ If the steam railroads are feeling the competition of the motor, the interurban trolley lines and the street-car companies are harder hit. The interurban lines are most of them short and depend upon local traffic. Their cars stopped at any cross-road along the way to pick up passengers and freight. But the motor transport is going them one better; it picks up its load at the front gate, saving the trouble of even a short walk, or in the case of freight, of loading and unloading and a short haul to the track. ”

“ Day and night the Row is a river of flowing traffic; gasoline fumes mingle with heavy odors of ripened fruit and the clank of hurried machinery. Above the roar of trucks and motors, the sounding of horns, and the shouts of drivers, rise the hoarse whistles of railroad locomotives and warning switch engine bells. In a mounting crescendo of industrial activity, peaches, pears, and apples follow each other in season. ”

“ Leaving the old world there is sketched all too briefly the development in the United States of transportation facilities from the coastal and natural waterways, from the pack and trail, used by the aborigine and early settlers, through the treks of the pioneers, the periods of canal digging, the toll road competition, and the railway frenzy, to the advent of the modern road with the coming of the bicycle and automobile and their wonderful accelerative impulse. ”

“ They built roads for military and commercial purposes, and the wisdom of their enterprise was apparent even in that early day. European nations to-day regard road-making as one of their economic questions, and it does seem that our Government in its honest endeavor to benefit the agricultural classes, should have thought of good roads long ago. We want and must have splendid highways, owned not by corporations but by the people. They will be an economical investment, and an untold comfort to the traveler. ”

“ If loose earth is dumped into the middle of [Pg 111] the road and consolidated by traffic, the action of the narrow-tired wheels cuts it or rolls it into uneven ruts and ridges, which hold water, and ultimately results, if in the winter season, in a sticky, muddy surface, or if it be in dry weather, in covering the surface with several inches of dust. If, however, the surface be prepared with a road machine and properly rolled with a heavy roller, it can usually be made sufficiently firm and smooth to sustain the traffic without rutting, and resist the penetrating action of the water. ”

“ If that is the case, would it not be necessary to lay considerable rate of toll upon those Carriages, for the purpose of affording the means of executing those improvements?—It is found, that lowering the hills, and improving the surface of all the roads, is productive invariably of a great increase of thoroughfare; and although lowering the hills might be attended with the first expence, any excitement that would induce the Trustees of the Roads to keep them in good order, would be at the same time productive of economy, a good road being always the cheapest. ”

“ The general increase of heavy traffic soon after the middle of the eighteenth century did not escape the notice of those responsible for the condition of the roads. Incompetent road-surveyors, ignorant of the science of road construction and employing unsuitable materials and unskilled labour, saw the highways they had mended with mud, road-scrapings and gravel continually falling into ruts and sloughs, often from twelve to eighteen inches deep. ”

“ From the colonial period and well down into the nineteenth century, the construction and maintenance of roads was, in diminishing degree, a private enterprise, operated by turnpike companies primarily for the benefit of their stock-holders rather than that of the public. Gradually road making came to be regarded as a public function, at first in respect to the repairs upon the private toll roads and then in original construction. ”

“ These road-motors, operated between lines of railway and recognised depôts at centres some distance therefrom, are calculated to confer on agriculturists a degree of practical advantage, in the matter of cheaper transport, limited only by the present unfortunate inability of many country roads to bear so heavy a traffic, and the equally unfortunate inability of the local residents to bear the expense of adapting the roads thereto. ”

“ It was mainly the desire of new-fledged motorists in the cities for a comfortable ride into the country beyond the reaches of their paved streets, the similar deferred hope of more humble cyclists, and the competing aims of merchants in each town and city to enlarge or at least to hold, each his own rural trade, that prodded a long-talking “good roads movement” into actual construction. ”

“ Added to that the facts that the gasolene motor-car of the steel highway is protected at all times by the flange of the rail—skidding is not an infrequent accident upon the paved road—and by the telegraphic order—collisions are not unheard-of things upon the State highways—and operated by a skilled and trained employee are other talking points that would have quick appeal to any man of advertising sense. ”

“ Here swaggered the hordes of miners coming off shift from a hundred working properties in the neighboring hills, grimy, spattered with candle grease, and adding to the bustle and confusion of the gold-mad crowd, was the torrent of traffic that surged up and down the rough, rocky thoroughfare—wagons of every description from the slim rattletrap buckboard, up through the various stages of all known vehicles, great freighter’s outfits, horse-drawn hacks, carts, automobiles ”

“ Freight cars by hundreds of thousands go bumping all over the different railroads of the land, and all the while they are getting bumped and broken in accidents—large and small. In such cases they are hauled to the nearest shop of the railroad upon which they are travelling and there repaired at the cost of the road that owns them. In earlier days, the job of master mechanic was no sinecure, for each road built its cars upon its own plans and no two of these plans were alike. ”

“ I should imagine the operative part of preparing roads cannot be effected without procuring a more skilful set of sub-surveyors; young men, brought up to agriculture and labour must be sought, and regularly instructed. It is a business that cannot be taught from books, but can only be acquired by a laborious practice of several months, and actual work upon roads, under skilful road-makers. ”

“ A few hundred sappers and engineers, with proper tools, would soon go a long way towards making the road fairly fit for traffic, but nothing can be done without tools and wheel-barrows, or at least hand-barrows for carrying stones. ”

“ Whatever, again, the dangers and discomforts of so many even of the new turnpike roads, there is no doubt that a distinct stimulus was given to trade and travel as the result not only of the better roads but of the better vehicles that could be, and were being, used on them. Agriculture, industries, commerce and social progress all, in fact, took another step forward as these opportunities for transport and communication relatively improved. ”

“ The taking over by motor trucks of short-haul freight and passenger traffic, even though it cause the discontinuation of unprofitable branch lines may prove to roads but a pruning which will be beneficial and inure to the growth of the main trunk and remaining healthy branches. ”