The Montgomery advertiser., 1908-03-20
WILL IF woRKf


 Looking at the matter from this dis tance it seems to us that the New York Street Railway Company is laying up trouble for itself and its employees. It proposes about the first of April to in- stal is5 ''pay-as-you-enter" cars on its fine. and if the scheme works satisfac- tortly we shall be surprised. These ears will have two doors at the rear and one in front. Each passenger must enter at one of the rear doors. hand the exact fare to the conductor and then so forward to the seats. Passengers can leave the cars either by the front doors Or by one of the rear ones but all must enter through the latter. If a passenger gets on without the exact fare he or she must step aside into a compartment prepared for that pur- pose and wait till the conductor has time and opportunity to make the proper change. The company will is- sue plain instructions to the public set ting forth what is required of all who propose to ride on their cars and how the instructions must be carried out. There are quite string Of these rules. and the public win have to learn its lesson and obey it. we suppose.
 Can this scheme be carried out suc- cessfully without much friction and trouble? There are." says The New York Commercial. "myriads of passen- gers who never do have the exact change or, if they do don't produce 1t; and until they get educated up to aI- ways having 1t or get forced to the thing. the small rear compartments are likely to be uncomfortably crowded with change-waiters. The street car hogs and the chronic kick CTS will no doubt seek to embarrass the conductor in enforcing all the necessary new reg ulations. And then there is the wo- man who always persists in digging around with Q gloved hand in a shop ping bag for five loose pennies and won't give up any other coin or bill un- til she has found number nve-what will become of her? Can these new cars reform" her? Or will they make of her double the nuisance that she now Is? The City Railway Company has apparently devised an excellent scheme for materially lessening strap hanging. and if 1t accomplished only half the good claimed for it. all the other surface lines will naturally fol- low its exampIe--or else be forced to-"
 And that is not all. If there were none to patronize these cars except the New Workers themselves 1t might be possible to 50 train and instruct them that under ordinary conditions the sch eme might work as hoped. but that Is not the case. Every day there are thousands of visitors to New York who will know nothing about these rules and who will naturally expect to enter the car and find seat and then wait for the conductor to come and get their fare. Then. again, there are occasions, even in the smaller cities where scores and hundreds of people will be waiting for a car and will all try to get on at once. as Is usual in such cases. Will the car stand still while each passen- ger finds and pays out the exact change? If. so there's apt to be more complaint about delay in starting than there now is about collecting fares. The street car problem in New York has always been a puzzling one.. and many have been the efforts to improve the conditions in various directions. This plan of forcing passengers to pay as they enter the cars is about the Iat- est, and if 1t can be made to operate