SAVING PETROL

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12549, 11 September 1926, Page 18

SAVING PETROL

WHAT GOOD ROADS MEAN. America still has a big mileage of bad roads, and tbe following figures of what such roads mean in increased petrol consumption have their moral for New Zealand motorists. They are taken from the “American Motorist” : “According to experiments conducted recently by the Kentucky Highway Department, the unimproved road as compared with the improved road imposes a tax of two and one-half cents a mile on drivers of cars. By taking the average of over 60 cars, they have found that it costs 50 per cent, more to drive an automobile on poor roads than it does on good roads. The exact figures were 6.72 cents a mile for improved roads. These amounts include the cost of gasoline, oil, and grease, tyres and repairs, but not storage or depreciation, on unimproved roads ;

fuel consumption was 35 per cent, higher on poor than on good roads. “Anybody who has tried to push or pull a motor-car on a sandy or muddy road appreciates well why it costs so much more to drive a car on unimproved roads. Ten times as much force is required to pull a car on a muddy or rough road as on a smooth paved road. It is around 400 pounds for a car in the former case, against only about 35 pounds in the latter. • “How much better for the American motorist to contribute toward good roads than to spend his money, a thing which so far lie has been forced to do too much, as a tax on the poor roads he has had to travel. Such an investment yields a big income in the form of increased pleasure and decreased cost of driving a motor-car, not to mention the time that it saves. “If it is assumed that bad roads in America, of which we still have many, are adding one cent a mile to the cost of motoring, and that the average car is driven 5000 miles in a year, our annual poor roads tax is 50 dollars a year a car. For the 15,000,000 motor-cars in service this totals 750,000,000 dollars, 25 per cent, more than all the money appropriated by Congress for building roads since the passage of the Federal Aid Road Act in 1916. Even at 35,000 dollars a mile, this is enough to build aver 20,000 miles of new improved roads every year —six highways clear across this great country of ours. But we do not needhigliways so much as we need byways branching in every direction from our cities and towns. A saving of even one-half a cent per motor-car mile would construct 10,000 miles of brick, concrete, or asphalt roads every year. How much this would help in improving communication —in making the motor-car more useful I” | One jet of gas will consume as much air as four adults.