Traffic (transportation)

“ Naturally so much traffic induced men to make packing a means of livelihood. They became so numerous and strong that when wagons began to take over the business of freighting they considered it an infringement upon their vested rights. But as goods could be transported more easily and cheaply by wagon the old had to make way for the new. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Trucks, delivery wagons, ice-wagons, etc., frequently stop back of the line of parked automobiles in the street restricting the way and causing all passing vehicles to go over to the wrong side of the street thus congesting traffic and furnishing a source of danger. ”

“ It originates in pressing industrial expansion and broad education, it flows through modern channels, and along those thorny, old-fashioned highways of endeavor such as persistent, methodical solicitation of passenger and freight traffic, a conscientious interest in its handling and disposition after acceptance, and above all depends upon the good will and very essential aid of each one of that many sided army employed by the transportation corporations whose arteries provide the means for commercial life’s activities. ”

“ Compare the railways, canals, highways, cars, automobiles, ships, and aircraft of the present-day United States with the pack animals and ox-carts of many less favored nations and the further evidence of amount of traffic and travel per person, will be unnecessary to establish the relative states of civilization. ”

“ A third cause of diversion of traffic is akin to the second; and concerns the practices in pro-rating. Much circuitous transportation is due to the existence of independent transverse lines of railway which may participate in the traffic only on condition that it move by an indirect route. This situation is best described by reference to the following diagram. Let us suppose traffic to be moving by two routes passing through [Pg 282] points B and C, and converging on A, which last-named point might be Chicago, St. Louis, New York or any other railroad centre. ”

“ Freight Traffic. —When it comes to freight traffic cost and time will be the principal factors to determine the type of performance. The element of pleasure is here eliminated and only cold economical features remain. Already horse trucking is rapidly disappearing as it seems to be able to compete with the motor only where many stops are to be made. In large cities motor trucks are utilized to haul packages to certain districts at considerable distances from the store, where they are turned over to small wagons for delivery. ”

“ The installation of devices for this purpose may become advisable as the amount of traffic increases. Storage room should be provided for those articles which are to wait some little time for shipment. A check stand to care for parcels is a convenience to passengers and furnishes the company some revenue.
The Social Aspect of Motor Transportation. —The change from poor roads and horse-drawn vehicles to good roads and motorized vehicles has produced in society changes quite as radical. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is no doubt but that the automobile tourist traffic has had its effect, too, upon them. Each spring they clean and spruce up with the idea of securing as much of this traffic as good service reported by the camaraderie of travelers all along the way will bring to them.
Mention has been made of the country people going to the larger cities to market their products and purchase goods wanted. It is not considered at all unusual for country and small town people to auto 30 miles to patronize the large department stores in the city. ”

“ Now, therefore, I, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, under and by virtue of the powers vested in me by the foregoing resolutions and statute, and by virtue of all other powers thereto me enabling, do hereby, through Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War, take possession and assume control at 12 o'clock noon on the twenty-eighth day of December, 1917, of each and every system of transportation and the appurtenances thereof located wholly or in part within the boundaries of the continental United States and consisting of railroads, and owned or controlled systems of coastwise and inland transportation, engaged in general transportation, whether operated by steam or by electric power, including also terminals, terminal companies and terminal associations, sleeping and parlor cars, private cars and private car lines, elevators, warehouses, telegraph and telephone lines and all other equipment and appurtenances commonly used upon or operated as a part of such rail or combined rail and water systems of transportation, to the end that such systems of transportation be utilized for the transfer and transportation of troops, war material and equipment to the exclusion so far as may be necessary of all other traffic thereon, and that so far as such exclusive use be not necessary or desirable, such systems of transportation be operated and utilized in the performance of such other services as the national interest 140may require and of the usual and ordinary business and duties of common carriers. ”

“ They also decided that "when a greater charge in the aggregate is made for the transportation of passengers or the like kind of property for a shorter than a longer distance over the same line in the same direction, the shorter being included in the longer distance, it is not sufficient justification therefor that the traffic which is subjected to such greater charge is way or local traffic and that which is given the more favorable rates is not ”

“ It has thus, in the absence of available information, often puzzled inquiring minds in the present generation to understand how the heavy passenger traffic was conducted between London and the outlying towns and villages within a radius of twenty miles. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many of us will live to see railway companies in places pulling up their rails and making their tracks suitable for motor-car traffic, charging a toll for private vehicles and carrying the bulk of the traffic in their own motor-cars. ”

“ We may here observe that by the foregoing arrangements, without which the through passenger traffic could not possibly be practically carried out, 2,700,000 persons are annually saved the inconvenience of changing their carriage during their journey. ”

“ Considering the increase of traffic, they treat us very well indeed. I have the curiosity sometimes to count the trucks on the goods’ trains, and they’re well over fifty—well over fifty, at this season of the year. ”

“ There have been those who have said that the hoot of an automobile’s horn would drive even the “sense of traffic”—a new sense recently discovered by the Parisian medical journals—from out of the brain of even the most careful of persons! This is as naught compared to the Breton cab-driver’s stentorian “He, la-bas!”
As one comes to the open country again, he leaves all these distractions behind, and revels in nature, and if he be travelling by road, in the stubbornness of cows and sheep and the aggressiveness of geese and ducks, all road-users like himself. ”

“ The fact of intercourse and traffic, again, embraces all the means, instruments, and places by and in which intercourse and traffic are carried on, and, further still, comprehends the act of carrying them on at these places, and by and with these means. The subject-matter of intercourse or traffic may be either things, goods, chattels, merchandise, or persons. ”

“ And the vehicular traffic of the street is essentially the high road traffic very roughly adapted to the new needs. The cab is a simple development of the carriage, the omnibus of the coach, and the supplementary traffic of the underground and electric railways is a by no means brilliantly imagined adaptation of the long-route railway. ”

“ The reviewer, too, is mistaken in hastily assuming, as he appears to do, that passenger traffic is remunerative to railway companies in a high degree, while goods traffic, especially of the heavier classes, is carried with a small margin of profit. ”

“ When one observes the countless impediments that embarrass the movement of twentieth-century traffic through the eighteenth century streets of some eastern cities one wonders how long it will be, with the assured further increase in traffic, before complete congestion will result. ”

“ Commuters and truck-wagons ain't any sweet haulin', but I tell you they're a heap better 'n cuttin' out refrigerator-cars or oil-tanks. Why, I've hauled—"
"Haul! You?" said the Mogul, contemptuously. "It 's all you can do to bunt a cold-storage car up the yard. Now, I—" he paused a little to let the words sink in—"I handle the Flying Freight—e-leven cars worth just anything you please to mention. On the stroke of eleven I pull out; and I 'm timed for thirty-five an hour. Costly-perishable-fragile-immediate—that 's me! Suburban traffic's only but one degree better than switching. ”

“ While, with the increasing facilities for road transport, the railways must expect to lose more of their short-distance traffic, they should be able to retain their long-distance traffic, and more especially their long-distance traffic in bulk, commercial motors notwithstanding. ”

“ The travel habit has thus undergone a greater expansion of late years than has ever before been known, so that a falling-off of railway traffic in some directions ought, sooner or later, to be compensated for by increases in others, if, indeed, that result has not already been attained. ”

“ Passengers, luggage, horses, carriages, dogs, merchandise, minerals and live stock constitute the whole of the traffic, as well as the whole of the receipts of railway companies, with one only exception. ”

“ We were on a bus whose "route" terminated some five miles from home, which we proposed to reach by a tram, and, the hour being late, it was our chances of catching a car that were worrying Mary.
"Never get flurried," I went on. "If people would only go ahead calmly and steadily.... What causes half our traffic congestion? Flurry. What makes it so difficult to move quickly in the streets? Flurry. What is it clogs the wheels of progress everywhere?" ”

“ It takes an abnormally intelligent people to grasp at first blush the truism that railways should charge “what the traffic will bear” for the same good reason that the corner grocer makes all the profit the business will survive. ”

“ Several traffic studies reveal that common carriers have lost considerable traffic which they formerly handled and, at the same time, have been unable to share proportionately in the additional traffic generated by the Nation's expanding economy. ”

“ In the first three countries here named, the excess is very largely in favor of the freight traffic; in England, the values of the two kinds are more nearly equal, while in Italy and Denmark the excess is on the side of the passenger traffic. ”

“ The separation of freight from passenger traffic, after the system pursued on railroads, is destined to be an important factor in facilitating the construction of passenger-vessels of increased speed. ”

“ To simplify the matter somewhat, the different classes of traffic to which roads are subjected may be divided into five groups, which may be called city, urban, suburban, highway, and country road traffic, respectively. City traffic is a traffic so great that no macadam road can withstand it, and is such as exists on the business streets of large cities. ”

“ All the traffic with the interior is carried on by mules, strings of which, laden with panniers or with skins full of oil, jostle the passenger at every turn in the street. It is hardly necessaiy to add that wheeled carriages are unknown. ”

“ It should never be employed for roads carrying any considerable volume of passenger automobile traffic or motor truck traffic. If surfaced with a bituminous material it will carry up to 1200 passenger automobiles per day, but not to exceed fifty trucks. ”

“ The amount of motive power and cost of working it, depends in a great degree upon the disposition of grades as regards the direction of the traffic movement. The most economically worked road will be either a level one, or one where the bulk of the traffic is moved down hill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Both classes of traffic are at times carried in the same car, and when this is not the case, the cars in which they are carried are frequently commingled in the same train and in the switching and other movements at terminals. ”