Transportation

“ Transportation.—A third industry that has its centre in the city but extends across continents and seas is the business of transportation. Manufactured goods are conveyed from the factory to the warehouse and the store, goods sold in the mercantile establishment are delivered from door to door, but enormous quantities of the products [205] of economic activity are hauled to greater distances by truck, car, and steamship. The city is a point to which roads, railways, and steamship lines converge, and from which they radiate in every direction. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By a study of the transportation—travel, movement of goods and commodities—and the means and facilities for its accomplishment, the relative civilization of any people, their rank and position may be accurately surveyed, graduated, and estimated. The highways of a nation, whether they be of the land or sea, or both, are most vital elements in its progress and could almost as well as transportation be considered the measuring rod of civilization. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we just live long enough, we will have lived in every state in the Union.”
But transportation as we understand it to-day refers to the moving of freight, express, and mail, as well as to the moving of men and women. Man himself was the original burden-bearer and became the first transportation system, carrying combined freight and express. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It only remains to be stated that there is regularly established transportation daily between all the principal points, that the distances are not fatiguing, that the charges are reasonable, and the equipment everything that could be desired. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here is a really great phase of railroad energy. We find our way to a gaunt freight-house, to whose door no truck has ever backed, and which is hemmed in by many rows of sidings and of sheds. In this building one of the busiest functions of the whole transportation business goes forth by day and by night. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To transportation of persons over a route wholly or partly within a national park or state park where such transportation is sold in conjunction with or as part of a rail trip or trip over a regularly operated motor bus transportation system or line; ' (6) To the transportation of passengers by a person who is driving his own vehicle and the transportation of persons other than himself and members of his family when transporting such persons to or from their place of employment and when the owner of such vehicle is driving to or from his place of employment ”

“ The term 'transportation' shall include cars and other vehicles and all instrumentalities and facilities of shipment or carriage, irrespective of ownership or of any contract, express or implied, for the use thereof, and all services in connection with the receipt, delivery, elevation, and transfer in transit, ventilation, refrigeration, or icing, storage and handling of property transported ”

“ It is not contended that civilization follows the improvement of transportation, although that is no doubt sometimes the case, but that the state of transportation follows up and down with the state of civilization. ”

“ The primary objects have therefore been, to sketch briefly and simply the development of the transportation systems of the United States, to indicate their importance and mutual relations, to present some practical methods used in the operation of highway transport and to make occasional suggestions for the betterment of the road as a usable machine for the benefit and pleasure of mankind. ”

“ One's earthly goods must be carried either on the backs of men or on the street-cars. If the first mode of transportation be resorted to, it is generally necessary to dispatch a trusty servant of the household with each load of goods, lest the cargador find it convenient to take his departure, with your valuables, for some unknown locality. ”

“ The significance of the facilitation of passenger transportation is derived principally from its effects on social conditions, civilization, and customs. One of the most important of these effects is illustrated in emigration, which has assumed grand dimensions under the operation of the new methods of communication. ”

“ In the United States three new methods of transportation made their appearance at almost the same time—the steamboat, the canal boat, and the rail car. ”

“ TRANSPORTATION. The carrying of persons and goods from place to place. The part which transportation plays in the practical life of a community depends most directly upon the complexity of its economic system. ”

“ The most important service performed by the railways is the transportation of freight. Not everybody has to travel, but everybody must have food, clothing, shelter, and fuel, and nearly all of the food, clothing, shelter, and fuel of the people of this country is carried all or part of the way from producer to consumer in freight-cars. ”

“ Among the Americans who contribute to transportation are the hundreds of thousands who build machines, construct the facilities, operate and maintain the equipment, and provide the services that make our transportation systems work. Countless others labor to make transportation better and to meet the needs of our changing times. ”

“ To illustrate this thought, let us assume that a railroad needs one hundred flatcars to carry its peculiar freight and needs one hundred passenger cars for the accommodation of the people. It is self-evident that if the road uses all the flatcars and half the passenger cars to carry its freight, the balance of the passengers will have to make some other provision for transportation or walk. ”

“ The question of transportation lies at the root of all industrial success, and the revolution in transportation which has taken place during the last half century has been the most important factor in the growth of the new industrial conditions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the third point, conveniences of transportation make a farm more profitable, and these are whether the roads are in such condition that wagons can use them smoothly, or whether there are rivers nearby which can be navigated. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The general rule is that where transportation has acquired an interstate character 'it continues at least until the load reaches the point where the parties originally intended that the movement should finally end.' Ill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And on the crowded routes and in the thickly-populated cities, if one vehicle of transportation cannot render the service now requiring two, at least in many cases four such vehicles can render the service now requiring five. ”

“ And as no small part of these accomplishments are the means and amount of travel and traffic and associated developments and organization made necessary by the vast industries which now supply the world’s wants, once more it may be asserted that the civilization of the world can be measured by its 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 inventive mechanic and the engineer, learned or unlearned, have, in the course of the nineteenth century, given to the world the locomotive and our whole system of general continental and transcontinental transportation, the steamship and all our contemporary ocean and river, freight and passenger lines, the automobile and the beginnings of a new and still more widely helpful system of common highway transportation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of great dynamic forces which have been set to work and are bringing about a complete reconstruction of the social structure, improvements in transportation and communication were the most vital—first, turnpikes, then the steamboat, railroad, and telegraph ”

“ 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. ”

“ In those early days the natural obstacles everywhere to be overcome were great, all means of transportation were crude and the burdens laid on the people by the transportation companies of that day were heavy. ”

“ The construction of roads, and in particular of railways, connecting the advanced stations with the coast, and permitting easy access to the inland waters, and to such of the upper courses of the rivers and streams as are broken by rapids and cataracts, with a view to substituting economical and rapid means of transportation for the present system of carriage by men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whether traveling by road, rail, water, or air, Americans can choose among a large number of options in reaching their destinations. But beyond moving people, our diverse transportation system also makes possible the delivery of countless products throughout the country. ”

“ The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army. ”