The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-04-09
185 STATE STREET.

New York That is a proposal to use a heavy truck car. operated on the four-motop, four-wheel-drfve principle; and not to give people bearing. gasoline automobile at all It is claimed that three of these trucks. operating for the past three years in Atlantic City, have had com bined repair costs of $S35 and are nearly as good as when they were new.
 The proposers of this service have simply adapted the principle of the electric motor truck, which has all ready proved it's usefulness in heavy to the problem of transporting peo- pie. With something like a trolley car body on truck chassis. they contend, they could give g. service superior both to trolley car and gas- oHne bus. Opponents of the system claim that their proposal to charge a five cent fare is a blanket for what is actually a zone system of charges which would make it cost a man if teen or twenty cents, for instance, to. ltgo from the Battery to the Bronx. The promoters, on the other hand say that they will engage to carry passengers over the whole of any route in which the existing bus lines of the city charge ten cents, for half.
 So far, the electric bus proposals have not been put to sufficient test in actual practice for any final con- clusions to be drawn K. K. Car rick, writing recently in the Public Service Journal upon Motor Bus Operation as tried in London, Paris and New York, found the advantages to be greater flexibility of movement. due to independence of tracks and troIleys and easy change or route. greater convenience in handling pas sengers direct from the sidewalk, and slightly greater speed as compared with trolleys.
 Meanwhile, however, hundreds of thousands of nickeIs are being -di- verted from the street cars. It is to be noted that the experience usually is that. after the jitneys have been operating a. month in a city, none of the first drivers is to be found. The conclusion Is that they do not find the golden profits in the business that they looked for, and that when they discover their cars are fast go- ing to pieces under the strain, they drop out In some cities the number of cars has shown a rapid falling off after the first rush of novelty; but in many, new drivers and opportunist promoters swarm in to take the places of the first deserters and keep up the mum berS. Also, secondhand cars are being rushed into the service. A student of the problem curious to know to just what extent second hand cars were being used investi- gated the New York market for such machines; and declares that he found it stripped almost bare. It is an in teresting indication of the type of equipment that it is being found prof itab1e to use.
 All this has bearings upon estab-
 ished car lines that none but a tech nicaI expert in their problems could be expected to see. The pressure comes in this way. The jitneys, in the main, operate only over the crowded thoroughfares, where trade is easy The result is that they take away from the car lines many of the passen gers on the routes most used, which are. depended on to maintain through their large margin of profit the less-used long routes into the . comes one, say electr1c-Iine opera tors, either of raising fares on the long lines or stopping them.
 Taking Out the Cream
 One man has express 1t by say ing that the proposal of the short haul jitney owner is in essence that of a man going into a, dairy with a cream separator, offering it to the farmer upon the single condition that he should be allowed to have only the cream.
 A statistician, working out figures upon basis of averages for large cities, has come to the conclusion