Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1921-03-17
Stage Coach and Airb1ane
OVERS of the picturesque who lamel


the passing Of the stage coach and
chafe under the track-bound COM
monplaceness of street cars and railway
trains may find some measure OF CONSIGNMENT
in the ever widening motorization of travel.
No piece of mere mechanism, we imagine,
could give quite the heartfelt and adven-
ture of His Majestys mail as De Quincy
knew it in the glory and fire of its horses;
and surely no "honkhonk" could ever match
the music of the horn to which Mr.. Pick
wick's soul expanded as he sat atop the mer-
ry coach to Dingley Dell. Still, the motor car
has at least freedom and individualness
which trains and trolleys want 1t is not pre-
destined to follow a track of steel all the
days of its life; it can explore green coun-
try by-ways and turn in as many directions
as the winds of heaven blow; it can be neigh
borly or intimate; it can be romantic.
This may throw light on certain remark
able incidents set forth in the current num-
Der of Popular Mechanics. Automobiles"
says that obseryant magazine. "are slowly
but surely crowding the tram cars off the
streets of scores of American cities, but
Bowling Green, Kentucky, is perhaps thS
first community where the traction company
has shouted 'Kamerad' and given up" That
.. thriving town of some fifteen thousand souls
boasts more automobiles than any other place
of its size-one to every three inhabitants.
V
gradually obsolescent and at last fell off
altogether, as the tails Oh mans ape-like pre-
decessors are said to have zone? 'The final
blow" says Popular Mechanics, "came when
one Of the cars met one Of the few remain
ing pedestrians 'head-on' at a street inter-
section The victim brought suit against the
traction company ana won his case. The
company, being unable to pay the damages
awarded, turne over the entire equipment
to the thankless plaintiff. The latter rightly
considered the further operation of the tram
cars an improbable venture and promptly
junked it. Rails and wire were removed
from the streets and sold as scrap metal,
and the automobile now holds full sway on all
the highways and byways Of Bowling Green,
an early example of the future motorized
city"
means Of transport have had much to do
with the changes of human history, political
and social as well as economic. Mr.. Wells
reminds us in his engaging Outline" that
it took Napoleon, after the Russian disaster,
three hundred and twelve hours to travel
from Wilma to Paris a journey of some
fourteen hundred miles; and that an ordl-
nary traveller, lacking special aids and ad-
vantages, would have required twice that
time Those were about the same rates, 1t
is recalled, that travellers between Rome and
Gaul had known in the first century A. D.,
or between Susa and Sardis in the fourth
century B. C. Then, after all those ages, came
the steam engine and the railway train, re-
ducing distances to 1.-THE of what they had
been. The effect upon mankind's affairs was
vastly far-reaching. But we have yet to meas
ure the millonfo1d effects Of motor vehicles
rs means Of transport, as distance-reducers
and time-savers; and beyond them, above
them, incomparab1y more wonderful In pos
sibilities, scars the airplane!