The Waterbury Democrat., 1931-04-16

road traffic which the roads nave been losing? MT Flynn analyses ths situation as follows:
 |afe 47,250,000,0O0 passenger miles In 1929 they. took care of S1,25O,' % O0,O0O passenger miles. They have lost a third of their passenger busi ness. Where has this passenger traffic gone? The busses have no gotten, in long hauls, more than c. 500, 0,0OO,GO0 passenger miles. IT other words, at the most, they have gained about one-sixth what ths railroads have lost.
 What has become of the other five e-sixths? There is only one an. swer. It is the private automobile There are 24,00O,000 private auto mobiles in the United States. Ii each car in year travelled 52O miles with single passenger in it outside it's ordinary town driving, the loss in railroad travel could be accounted for.
 What can the railroads do about this? They demand that automobile busses be brought under regulation by the interstate commerce commis- sion just as the railroads are. But it Is pretty obvious that even if the railroads were to eliminate all the passenger busses they would not have reached the real cause of their loss of traffic. Their real, effective foe is the private car. It is not a common carrier. It cannot be regu- lated by the interstate commerce commission. There is almost no way will drive motor car users off the public highways and into the pas senger coaches of railroad trains. The problem Is baffling one.
 "All this has to do with passenger traffic. Competition between rail- roads and trucks for freight traffic is something entirely different. Eight-two per cent of all trucks are owned by shippers-manufacturers and merchants-who use them en- tirely to transport their own goods. Another II per cent belongs to con- tractors who hire their vehicles out to shippers. Thus 93 out of every 100 trucks cannot be considered as common carriers and cannot be regu- lated by the interstate commerce commission. Nevertheless these trucks take enormous amounts of freight away from the railroads. For 40 years railroad traffic had been increasing around 80 per cent
 
 1880 it increased only eight per cent. This is not because there was a smaller increase in traffic. Quite the contrary. But more than 90 per cent of the increase went to trucks and other forms of transportation. It is difficult to estimate how large this freight traffic carried by trucks IS.
 Ut is not easy to say what the railroads can accomplish against the truck. However, there is an inces- sant campaign in progress in most states to regulate trucks, to fix maxi mum sizes, to limit speed to 35 miles an hour, to limit loads, to increase taxes and to compel owners to con- form to more rigid rules in treat ment of employees.
 Possibly the roads may accom- plish more Tn their war upon the built and supported waterways. Professor Ripley calcu- lates the cost of hauling freight on waterways at 10:85 per ton mile and the government charges at 4.23 cents per ton mile. On railroad the shipper has to pay the whole cost of carrying his freight, plus a profit to the roads and taxes. On the waterway he pays less than one- half of it; the government pays the other half.
 "As one follows these matters one gets the impression that economic law is swatting the railroads in many places. For instance. pipe lines. Gas is brought in pipes from Texas. Oklahoma, Kansas, Louisiana to St Louis. Kansas City. Memphis, New Orleans, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and countless other towns in between. Of course these pipe lines don't take any traffic directly from the railroads. But they put an end to coal consumption where they bring gas and thus knock into a cooked hat one of the most impor- tant trafflc divisions of the carriers It is serious matter which fills the soul of a rail executive with horror.
 This is not the whole story. Gaso- line transportation by pipes threat ems to take actual freight business away from the roads. One rail ex- ecutive insists that this Is the most serious menace the roads face. The