A NEW CONCEPTION OF TRANSPORTATION
When I use the word transportation in relation to Roadtown I do not
mean what the term usually implies. You often hear the expression,
“our transportation systems,” but your conception of its meaning is
limited to railroads, boats and street cars. The other crude links
in our transportation system are invariably called by other names
such as trucks, carts, delivery wagons, dumb-waiters, elevators, etc.
It is true that these last named links are sometimes referred to as
transportation devices, but not as a part of a comprehensive system of
transportation.
Roadtown transportation includes all the links in the system of
transportation automatically coupled into one system. This is what I
mean by a _new conception of transportation_.
The functions of housing and transportation are fully coördinated by
Nature in the individual animal--legs are her vehicle of passenger
transportation, talons and arms are her freight system, the animal body
is the house. Housing and transportation exist together, being mutually
interdependent. They are inseparable, the building is worthless without
transportation and conversely there would be no need for transportation
without the house.
There is no better illustration of the need for a proper combination
of transportation and housing than that of the human body. The baby’s
first task is to learn to use its transportation devices, otherwise
its house or body is useless. Life is full of lessons of the necessity
of the harmonious combination of the functions of transportation and
consumption. The monkey was provided with means for transporting
himself up the banana tree and an efficient means of getting the
banana from the stalk to his mouth. Gold carried from mines in Peru to
a jewelry shop in Madrid; men carried from their homes in Brooklyn
to their offices in Wall Street; food carried from a farm in Canada
to a dining-room in a Boston hotel; gas carried from retorts to the
burner in a parlor chandelier; electricity carried from the generator
in Niagara to the motors in Rochester; a pound of steak carried by
the delivery boy to the basement of your house and pulled up in a
dumb-waiter; a letter carried by a postman; the song of a Prima
Donna sent scintillating through the air by a wireless phone--all
these things and a million others are but a civilized man’s arms and
legs--his means of transportation.
_Transportation in Nature._
The game of life in wild nature is but the getting of food and water to
the consuming plant or animal, or getting the more adaptable animal to
the food or water or some warm spot, or the society of his fellows. So
the life of man, whether it be the family with the single house or the
city with its many houses, shows a similar relation--things needed by
the inhabitants, things taken from the place where they are and to a
place where we want them--that is transportation.
Start out in the morning, number your every minute’s occupation, watch
what your neighbors are doing. The man on the stairs, the wagon on the
street, the rumbling subway train in a three million dollar a mile
right of way, the elevator in the skyscraper, the office boy at beck
and call--it is all transportation. Run over in your mind the work of
the office and brain workers in a city business section, how many of
them are engaging in planning, directing and accounting the various
forms of transportation.
In fact, every hour of existence we are performing some act of
transportation except when asleep. If we allow eight hours for rest we
find that two-thirds of our lives are spent in transporting ourselves
to our wants or our wants to ourselves.
The basic principle of Roadtown is a plan to give the social body
proper arms and legs, to make them not as they are, separate and
uncoördinated functions, but as part, in fact the most important part,
of the scheme of civilization.
The members of society are all engaged in transporting themselves
and their belongings a goodly portion of their time, and besides a
large group is exclusively engaged in the work of transportation.
Moreover, the so-called productive labors are at every step interwoven
with operations of transportation. Analyze for a moment the work of
the factory, of the farm--how much of it is production, how much is
transportation? Could we, like Aladdin, rub a mystic lamp and cause
things to be created from nothing, we would indeed be well served. But
could we command the génie of transportation, the will to wish what
is from where it is to the place where we want it, our power would be
equally miraculous and quite as useful.
Our methods of production, though still extremely wasteful, are
constantly growing in efficiency. In this age a minority of mankind
produce for the entire population. A constant stream of people from the
farm pours into the city. These people produce nothing and expect to
live by distributing goods to each other; but congestion of population
in large cities introduces insolvable mechanical difficulties in
distribution, until railroads, ware houses, trucks, wholesale and
retail stores, delivery wagons, grocery boys and dumb-waiters, become
congested; the machine clogs and thus the growing efficiency of modern
production is lost through a more rapidly growing waste in distribution.
The increasing number of those who get their living by taking a slice
of profit and the growing expense due to the ever increasing mechanical
difficulties in distribution are evils that aggravate each other.
As the makers of law live principally by the profits of distribution,
they will not change the scheme, nor can the wealthy, with their
country villas legislate the modern city tenant back to the loneliness,
long hours and lack of conveniences of farm life. A proposition that
would combine cheaper rents, greater conveniences and give all an
opportunity to engage in productive work would be a real solution for
the high cost of living. Roadtown eliminates all possible waste and
relieves the army of distributors of nine-tenths of their present work,
thus throwing these people into productive labors.
Labor which results in the creation of a concrete product--something
that can be eaten or worn is generally appreciated. Transportation, the
far greater necessity, is not so readily appreciated as a source of
wealth, nor is the waste in transportation so quickly seen or remedied.
_Our Disjointed Civilization._
Our factories and our farms--the places of production--our houses
and cities--places of consumption, and our railroad trucks, delivery
wagons and dumb-waiters, means of transportation, have been developed
by separate minds--they work together--clumsily--wastefully.
Civilization is a black cabinet of plates and doughnuts, arms and
legs, and consuming mouths dancing around in an uncoördinated fashion,
occasionally getting together and serving each other, but more often
missing the mark--two hands going to one mouth, another hand missing
the mouth altogether; there is no plan, no unity, no harmony, no mind
behind it all. The farm and factory, the railroad and the city grow
separately, each to serve the other it is true, but the machine as a
whole is woefully disjointed and inefficient. We may liken our present
system of living to old style harvesting. A binder, wonderful enough
in itself, left the bundles of grain strewn about the field. They were
shocked by hand. Later they are gathered into wagons and hauled to
the farm yard and built into stacks. Then the thresher comes and with
another complex machine delivers the grain, loose, through a running
spout, where men weigh it and sack it and load it into wagons, which
are as crude as the threshing machine itself.
Compare this system, wonderful though it be, with the combined
header-thresher, which at one operation cuts, threshes and delivers
the grain weighed and sacked into the wagon. In the combination of
the previous operations many of the steps, the binding and hauling
and stacking and weighing drop out. The machine simplified the whole
process, it eliminates waste, it represents a unity of plan, a harmony
of operation.
Our modern complex systems of production, transportation and
consumption, like the old-fashioned method of harvesting, require many
separate machines. Take the one product of butter for illustration:
the farmer produces milk, the milk hauler carts it to town, the
creamery man manufactures the butter, then packs it into tubs and
sells it to a dealer; the dealer ships it to the city by rail and then
another truckman delivers it to a jobber which means more trucking;
the jobber molds the butter into prints and boxes them. A wagon takes
it to a grocer where it is again stored, sold, and goes the round of
another wagon, a dumb-waiter, a pantry, a waiter, a table, and at last
consumption. This is a sample story of civilization, a heterogeneous
mass of independently acting individuals and separate mechanisms, full
of mechanical waste, full of human waste, full of financial waste. The
butter fat as is now wastefully produced is worth twenty cents in the
farmer’s milk pail, it cost two cents to skim it and churn it, the rest
is transportation. It is worth forty cents at the grocery store and
fifty cents to one dollar on your table, according to how much of your
household distribution is done by your wife who gives services gratis
and how much by servants whose arms and legs move only in response
to the rattle of the shekels. And how much would this service of
transportation cost if production, transportation and consumption, like
the modern header-thresher, were built upon a plan of coördination,
that is, if the farmer’s dairy was on a transportation line with the
creamery, and the creamery on a line with the kitchen where machinery
and specialized labor are available, and the kitchen was on a line with
the consumer’s dining-room, and the only expense of transportation was
the cost of power to move the material object and the cost of labor
to perform the actual processes of manufacture that intervene between
production and consumption.
The Roadtown is a single unified plan for the arrangement of these
three functions of civilization--production, transportation, and
consumption.