ROAD TRANSPORT

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 11, 12 July 1930, Page 25

ROAD TRANSPORT

QUICK CROWING USE

ECONOMIC ASPECT

The "Commercial Motor" looks forward to a quick growing uso of trailers in connection with motor traiiic, heavy traffic in particular. . Thero are so many advantageous features connected with the use of trailers,,it says, that commercial operators will attach -greater importance to them as time goes on. The paper proceeds to speak of the traffic problem the trailer will create, both as regards itself and other vehicles. The big problems are the cutting of corners, "snaking" and correct breaking. ," The trailer, it says, can no longer be regarded as a horse-drawn vehicle adapted for coupling to a self-propelled machine, but must be designed from tlie very outset as a high-speed unit capable of working as ono with the machine that draws it.

,Tho paper considers that trailers

designed upon true scientific lines and hauled by machines designed to work with them will do much •to improve transport. It adds that if England lags behind in the matter of tho production of such vehicles people in tho Empire abroad who desire the utmost efficiency in the transport of goods will be compelled to look to tho foreigner for supplies. England cannot afford to neglect so xjptential a market. This, of course, is looking forward to the time when the highways have become the railways. For many years people have been quite familiar with the sight, in Canterbury especially, of steam traction engines drawing rakes of grain or wool-laden waggons behind them, and there is nothing to prevent an oil-driven engine from doing the same thing. Indeed, many tractors are on the market that re quite adapted for road haulage, and are so used. Any common adoption of the tractor lorry, however, is bound to introduce a roading problem the merest fringe of which has as yet been touched. Canterbury is a flat country, of very wide roads, presenting no great difficulty whero a String of attached vehicles is concerned, but throughout the rest of the Dominion roads for tho most part are narrow, corners sharp, grades heavy, and danger threatening everywhere from the fact that the roads wind along beside the banks of rivers, through gorges and ravines, along hillsides, and often over the tops even of high mountains, to roach populous farming centres in valleys below. !

The country has just witnessed a heavy cut in the operation of its railway system, a cut unquestionably due in large part to the loss of railway traffic to motor transportation. It 13 quite on the books that with the passing of the years the railway lines will have to give way entirely to road transport, just as it is possible that the service car will have to give way to the "aeroplane—or perhaps the airship *—in the carriage of passengers and mails. It is very difficult to predict just whither the world is trending, but it is quite 7obvious that evory year the problem of roads is becoming ever and ever * more acute. It is useless attempting to grab hold of the hands of the clock to hold it back; the clock will ,win, and people must simply face this fact. This includes motor operator! themselves. Transportation is rapidly going on to the roads, and the roads may have to carry it. To do this an immense revenue will be required, and it is to the motor and the goods it carries that the people will look for the funds required. There seems no other economic way out.

The carryiag of children to school in the United States now employs 42,000 buses not in commercial use and another 3000 and more partly used for commercial purposes. The routo miles total 425,750, and the number of schools is 16,525. , The children number nearly 1,300,000. This sounds like an enormous figure, and, of course, it is, but America is a big place, as may be gathered from the stupendous fact that there are 5,677,500 motor vehicles on its farms, 4,9J.0,300 cars, and 767,200 trucks.