Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1912-03-23

1t is asserted by many automobile men
that the motor car is one of the great
forces that will reduce the cost of living,
although there are those who are equally
positive that it tends to drive the price
of our daily bread higher. 1t is claimed
that. after all. the main factor in the
high prices of the things We buy is the
great cost of distribution. The claim is
further made that anything that tends to
bring down the cost of distribution tends
to drive up the retail purchasing power
of dollar. The automobile salesman
goes to the groceryman and declares that
he can operate his delivery service at
greatly reduced cost if he will employ
delivery cars instead of delivery wagons.
Wherever the groceryman has tried it
out the test, almost without exception.
has been against the horse. Yet few
persons have bought a pound of butter
or a dozen eggs cheaper because the
grocer has lately acquired a delivery
car.
city growth. Whereas population in
former days had TO follow the suburban
street car tracks and the city expanded
unevenly, today the automobile makes 1t
possible for the gaps to be filled up and
the city to extend itself more evenly. In
some cities suburban property, which
was not worth > cents square foot In
days before the automobile became
necessity, is now worth four to ten times
as much, because the automobile makes
it accessible. 1t also has proved a great
boon to the city business man. Thousands
of men in every important city now can
spend the day in town and the nights
in beautiful suburban homes, made &C
cessible through the use Of the motor
car.
There is perhaps no other class of city
people who make better and more profit
able use of the
Autos Useful to automobile than
Real Estate Men. d tne reA :. s'dt ts
estimated that in proportion to the num-
Der of men engaged in any given vocation
the real estate dealers are the best buy
ers of automobiles in the country. One
need only go to the curb in front of
hustling real estate office at a dull hour
10 find verification of this. In front of
one Office in Washington there were
counted ten machines, and eight in front
of another-and they were all machines
for taking customers out to see properties
of one kind and another. The psyche |
logical effect of an exhilarating ride is |
not to be despised by the seller of real
estate.
That the automobile already has wrought |
no inconsiderable change in urban life is |
patent 10 any man who will look around |
him. The most obvious change it has |
wrought is the reduced number of horses |
now being kept in city stables One |
needs only to count the number of horse |
drawn and self-propelled yehicles passing |
any street corner in an average city to |
Discover that many more than half OF the |
vehicles passing that way are self-pro- |
lodi = I,of rrIo hot oil n0vo
of horse flesh as means of |
has not fallen off, and that |
the demand for horses is just as heavy |
today as ii was a decade ago. But when |
one stops to think how much business in
the average city has expanded since 1900 |
he will discover how many thousands of
horses would have been needed to meet |
the growing burden of urban Transporter
ton.
There are but few cities in the country
where business has not almost doubled /
since 1900. 1t takes all of the automo-
biles and all of the horses that both fac
tory and farm can produce TO meet the !
present day demands of urban trans !
portation. The same phenomena is wit |
messed today that was observed in the |
day when the electric and cable cars sue |
ceeded DObbin-drawn street cars. Every
body then predicted that the city demand |
for horses must fall off. But the cable |
EAR and the electric successor SO promoted
city expansion and business growth that
there came about even greater demand
for horses than before. Now it was draft
horses instead of street car horses.
X x
But the rise of the pleasure car and
the auto truck have supplanted horses in
untold t h o u
Thousands of sands of places.
Horses Supplanted. his process
has been even more rapid than others,
and has progressed so far as to fore
shadow the long predicted horseless era
That such change would prove a God
send TO the public health of the urban
is the opinion of nearly all
sanitarians In the first place, it would
remove much of the dust and dirt on the