The public ledger. [volume] (Maysville, Ky.) 1913-1968, 1914-10-29
THE GOOD ROADS ISSUE
A VITAL PROPOSITION

In view of the approaching meeting
of the American Road Congress in At
lanta, the first time the Congress has
ever met in the South ,-and the indi-
cation that it will be the most import
ant meeting ever held in this or any
other country in behalf of good roads
and good streets, the Manufacturers
Record has turned this week s issue into
special Good Roads publication with a
cover piece carrying the statement:
Good Roads
Mean Progress and Life.
Bad Roads
Mean Poverty and Death
Every phase of the road question is
discussed and broadly covered. Details
of expenditures that are being made by
the sixteen Southern States show that
the South is now annually putting out
over $50,000,000 in the building and
maintenance of roads without counting
its expenditure on street improvements
in towns and cities. The work that is
being done in every State is covered by
letters from the Governors or from the
Highway Commissioners, or other au-
thorities who are handling the road
question in the various States. Experts
discuss various road building materials,
including sand-clay, brick, cement,
maeadam and all other phases of road
work.
In the opening editorial outlining its
reasons for the work which it has been
doing for years in behalf of good roads
the Manufacturers Record says:
Reader! Are you a road engineer, a
road builder, a road supervisor, or are
you a county or town official charged
with responsibilities of road and street
building or maintenance?
Are you maker or a seller of road
machinery or road building equipment,
or are you, as a taxpayer, encouraging
the building of good roadsl
If to any one of these questions you
can answer, l am, then rejoice that you
are numbered among those whose work
is more than material in its scope. Per
chance you think only of the material
side of it. If so, look to the higher
side and idealize your work as part of
great campaign for human advance
ment; a campaign for extending the
highest benefits of civilization, and the
moral, religious and educational life of
a nation. Yours is more than a bust
ness. 1t is a vocation, a calling that
should in its wide scope include in your
thought the ideaism of the work a,
well as the routine of the business.
1t is difficult to measure the good ac
complished by the building of good
roads or to catalogue their advantages
1t is equally difficult to enumerate the
disadvantages which necessarily inur,
to bad roads. The good road opens to
the country and TO the city possibiitl
for larger business and for larger profits
on the business done. 1t increases the
value of all adjacent land; but it does
this by increasing the net profits
farming or of business carried on on
these adjacent lands. The farmer who.
lives on mud road is hampered il
summer and in winter. The burden OF
hauling to and from the farm costs him
many times more than all the freigi
rate that he pays the railroads. If
one-tenth of the energy that has been
expended in the last ten years in try
ing to regulate railroads and reduce
freight rates had been given to the
betterment of the highways of the coun-
try, infinitely larger results would have
been achieved for the good of every.
body.
The railroad freight rate is a small
item to the farmer as compared with
that heavy burden he bears when he
hauls the product of his farm over n
mud road, or brings back to the farm
the various things-whether they be
dry'goods, Or groceries, or lumber-that
he buys in the neighboring town or
city Not only is his ability to do
business to profit lessened by bad roads
and broadened by good roads, but in
the former case his family is shut up
for much of the year and deprived of
the advantages of social and educational
life; while the man who lives on a
good road gives to his family the ad-
vantages of religious and educational
and social facilities not possible to
those who live where wheels are mired
to the hub in winter Time, or where