It is proposed in this book to present in as orderly an arrangement as
the necessarily diffused nature of the subject admits, certain
speculations about the trend of present forces, speculations which,
taken all together, will build up an imperfect and very hypothetical,
but sincerely intended forecast of the way things will probably go in
this new century.[1] Necessarily diffidence will be one of the graces of
the performance. Hitherto such forecasts have been presented almost
invariably in the form of fiction, and commonly the provocation of the
satirical opportunity has been too much for the writer;[2] the
narrative form becomes more and more of a nuisance as the speculative
inductions become sincerer, and here it will be abandoned altogether in
favour of a texture of frank inquiries and arranged considerations. Our
utmost aim is a rough sketch of the coming time, a prospectus, as it
were, of the joint undertaking of mankind in facing these impending
years. The reader is a prospective shareholder--he and his heirs--though
whether he will find this anticipatory balance-sheet to his belief or
liking is another matter.
For reasons that will develop themselves more clearly as these papers
unfold, it is extremely convenient to begin with a speculation upon the
probable developments and changes of the means of land locomotion
during the coming decades. No one who has studied the civil history of
the nineteenth century will deny how far-reaching the consequences of
changes in transit may be, and no one who has studied the military
performances of General Buller and General De Wet but will see that upon
transport, upon locomotion, may also hang the most momentous issues of
politics and war. The growth of our great cities, the rapid populating
of America, the entry of China into the field of European politics are,
for example, quite obviously and directly consequences of new methods of
locomotion. And while so much hangs upon the development of these
methods, that development is, on the other hand, a process comparatively
independent, now at any rate, of most of the other great movements
affected by it. It depends upon a sequence of ideas arising, and of
experiments made, and upon laws of political economy, almost as
inevitable as natural laws. Such great issues, supposing them to be
possible, as the return of Western Europe to the Roman communion, the
overthrow of the British Empire by Germany, or the inundation of Europe
by the "Yellow Peril," might conceivably affect such details, let us
say, as door-handles and ventilators or mileage of line, but would
probably leave the essential features of the evolution of locomotion
untouched. The evolution of locomotion has a purely historical relation
to the Western European peoples. It is no longer dependent upon them,
or exclusively in their hands. The Malay nowadays sets out upon his
pilgrimage to Mecca in an excursion steamship of iron, and the
immemorial Hindoo goes a-shopping in a train, and in Japan and
Australasia and America, there are plentiful hands and minds to take up
the process now, even should the European let it fall.
The beginning of this twentieth century happens to coincide with a very
interesting phase in that great development of means of land transit
that has been the distinctive feature (speaking materially) of the
nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with
the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if
it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam engine
running upon a railway. This period covers the first experiments, the
first great developments, and the complete elaboration of that mode of
transit, and the determination of nearly all the broad features of this
century's history may be traced directly or indirectly to that process.
And since an interesting light is thrown upon the new phases in land
locomotion that are now beginning, it will be well to begin this
forecast with a retrospect, and to revise very shortly the history of
the addition of steam travel to the resources of mankind.
A curious and profitable question arises at once. How is it that the
steam locomotive appeared at the time it did, and not earlier in the
history of the world?
Because it was not invented. But why was it not invented? Not for want
of a crowning intellect, for none of the many minds concerned in the
development strikes one--as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare, or Darwin
strikes one--as being that of an unprecedented man. It is not that the
need for the railway and steam engine had only just arisen, and--to use
one of the most egregiously wrong and misleading phrases that ever
dropped from the lips of man--the demand created the supply; it was
quite the other way about. There was really no urgent demand for such
things at the time; the current needs of the European world seem to have
been fairly well served by coach and diligence in 1800, and, on the
other hand, every administrator of intelligence in the Roman and Chinese
empires must have felt an urgent need for more rapid methods of transit
than those at his disposal. Nor was the development of the steam
locomotive the result of any sudden discovery of steam. Steam, and
something of the mechanical possibilities of steam, had been known for
two thousand years; it had been used for pumping water, opening doors,
and working toys, before the Christian era. It may be urged that this
advance was the outcome of that new and more systematic handling of
knowledge initiated by Lord Bacon and sustained by the Royal Society;
but this does not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the new
habits of mind that spread outward from that centre played their part.
The men whose names are cardinal in the history of this development
invented, for the most part, in a quite empirical way, and Trevithick's
engine was running along its rails and Evan's boat was walloping up the
Hudson a quarter of a century before Carnot expounded his general
proposition. There were no such deductions from principles to
application as occur in the story of electricity to justify our
attribution of the steam engine to the scientific impulse. Nor does this
particular invention seem to have been directly due to the new
possibilities of reducing, shaping, and casting iron, afforded by the
substitution of coal for wood in iron works; through the greater
temperature afforded by a coal fire. In China coal has been used in the
reduction of iron for many centuries. No doubt these new facilities did
greatly help the steam engine in its invasion of the field of common
life, but quite certainly they were not sufficient to set it going. It
was, indeed, not one cause, but a very complex and unprecedented series
of causes, that set the steam locomotive going. It was indirectly, and
in another way, that the introduction of coal became the decisive
factor. One peculiar condition of its production in England seems to
have supplied just one ingredient that had been missing for two thousand
years in the group of conditions that were necessary before the steam
locomotive could appear.
This missing ingredient was a demand for some comparatively simple,
profitable machine, upon which the elementary principles of steam
utilization could be worked out. If one studies Stephenson's "Rocket" in
detail, as one realizes its profound complexity, one begins to
understand how impossible it would have been for that structure to have
come into existence _de novo_, however urgently the world had need of
it. But it happened that the coal needed to replace the dwindling
forests of this small and exceptionally rain-saturated country occurs in
low hollow basins overlying clay, and not, as in China and the
Alleghanies for example, on high-lying outcrops, that can be worked as
chalk is worked in England. From this fact it followed that some quite
unprecedented pumping appliances became necessary, and the thoughts of
practical men were turned thereby to the long-neglected possibilities of
steam. Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping,
because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because
at any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit's mouth for
weeks together, whistling for a gale or waiting for the water to be got
under again. But steam had already been used for pumping upon one or two
estates in England--rather as a toy than in earnest--before the middle
of the seventeenth century, and the attempt to employ it was so obvious
as to be practically unavoidable.[3] The water trickling into the coal
measures[4] acted, therefore, like water trickling upon chemicals that
have long been mixed together dry and inert. Immediately the latent
reactions were set going. Savery, Newcomen, a host of other workers,
culminating in Watt, working always by steps that were at least so
nearly obvious as to give rise again and again to simultaneous
discoveries, changed this toy of steam into a real, a commercial thing,
developed a trade in pumping engines, created foundries and a new art of
engineering, and almost unconscious of what they were doing, made the
steam locomotive a well-nigh unavoidable consequence. At last, after a
century of improvement on pumping engines, there remained nothing but
the very obvious stage of getting the engine that had been developed on
wheels and out upon the ways of the world.
Ever and again during the eighteenth century an engine would be put upon
the roads and pronounced a failure--one monstrous Palæoferric creature
was visible on a French high road as early as 1769--but by the dawn of
the nineteenth century the problem had very nearly got itself solved. By
1804 Trevithick had a steam locomotive indisputably in motion and almost
financially possible, and from his hands it puffed its way, slowly at
first, and then, under Stephenson, faster and faster, to a transitory
empire over the earth. It was a steam locomotive--but for all that it
was primarily _a steam engine for pumping_ adapted to a new end; it was
a steam engine whose ancestral stage had developed under conditions that
were by no means exacting in the matter of weight. And from that fact
followed a consequence that has hampered railway travel and transport
very greatly, and that is tolerated nowadays only through a belief in
its practical necessity. The steam locomotive was all too huge and heavy
for the high road--it had to be put upon rails. And so clearly linked
are steam engines and railways in our minds that, in common language
now, the latter implies the former. But indeed it is the result of
accidental impediments, of avoidable difficulties that we travel to-day
on rails.
Railway travelling is at best a compromise. The quite conceivable ideal
of locomotive convenience, so far as travellers are concerned, is surely
a highly mobile conveyance capable of travelling easily and swiftly to
any desired point, traversing, at a reasonably controlled pace, the
ordinary roads and streets, and having access for higher rates of speed
and long-distance travelling to specialized ways restricted to swift
traffic, and possibly furnished with guide-rails. For the collection and
delivery of all sorts of perishable goods also the same system is
obviously altogether superior to the existing methods. Moreover, such a
system would admit of that secular progress in engines and vehicles that
the stereotyped conditions of the railway have almost completely
arrested, because it would allow almost any new pattern to be put at
once upon the ways without interference with the established traffic.
Had such an ideal been kept in view from the first the traveller would
now be able to get through his long-distance journeys at a pace of from
seventy miles or more an hour without changing, and without any of the
trouble, waiting, expense, and delay that arises between the household
or hotel and the actual rail. It was an ideal that must have been at
least possible to an intelligent person fifty years ago, and, had it
been resolutely pursued, the world, instead of fumbling from compromise
to compromise as it always has done and as it will do very probably for
many centuries yet, might have been provided to-day, not only with an
infinitely more practicable method of communication, but with one
capable of a steady and continual evolution from year to year.
But there was a more obvious path of development and one immediately
cheaper, and along that path went short-sighted Nineteenth Century
Progress, quite heedless of the possibility of ending in a _cul-de-sac_.
The first locomotives, apart from the heavy tradition of their ancestry,
were, like all experimental machinery, needlessly clumsy and heavy, and
their inventors, being men of insufficient faith, instead of working for
lightness and smoothness of motion, took the easier course of placing
them upon the tramways that were already in existence--chiefly for the
transit of heavy goods over soft roads. And from that followed a very
interesting and curious result.
These tram-lines very naturally had exactly the width of an ordinary
cart, a width prescribed by the strength of one horse. Few people saw in
the locomotive anything but a cheap substitute for horseflesh, or found
anything incongruous in letting the dimensions of a horse determine the
dimensions of an engine. It mattered nothing that from the first the
passenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered, and crowded in the
carriage. He had always been cramped in a coach, and it would have
seemed "Utopian"--a very dreadful thing indeed to our grandparents--to
propose travel without cramping. By mere inertia the horse-cart gauge,
the 4 ft. 8½ in. gauge, _nemine contradicente_, established itself in
the world, and now everywhere the train is dwarfed to a scale that
limits alike its comfort, power, and speed. Before every engine, as it
were, trots the ghost of a superseded horse, refuses most resolutely to
trot faster than fifty miles an hour, and shies and threatens
catastrophe at every point and curve. That fifty miles an hour, most
authorities are agreed, is the limit of our speed for land travel, so
far as existing conditions go.[5] Only a revolutionary reconstruction of
the railways or the development of some new competing method of land
travel can carry us beyond that.
People of to-day take the railways for granted as they take sea and sky;
they were born in a railway world, and they expect to die in one. But if
only they will strip from their eyes the most blinding of all
influences, acquiescence in the familiar, they will see clearly enough
that this vast and elaborate railway system of ours, by which the whole
world is linked together, is really only a vast system of trains of
horse-waggons and coaches drawn along rails by pumping-engines upon
wheels. Is that, in spite of its present vast extension, likely to
remain the predominant method of land locomotion--even for so short a
period as the next hundred years?
Now, so much capital is represented by the existing type of railways,
and they have so firm an establishment in the acquiescence of men, that
it is very doubtful if the railways will ever attempt any very
fundamental change in the direction of greater speed or facility, unless
they are first exposed to the pressure of our second alternative,
competition, and we may very well go on to inquire how long will it be
before that second alternative comes into operation--if ever it is to do
so.
Let us consider what other possibilities seem to offer themselves. Let
us revert to the ideal we have already laid down, and consider what
hopes and obstacles to its attainment there seem to be. The abounding
presence of numerous experimental motors to-day is so stimulating to the
imagination, there are so many stimulated persons at work upon them,
that it is difficult to believe the obvious impossibility of most of
them--their convulsiveness, clumsiness, and, in many cases, exasperating
trail of stench will not be rapidly fined away.[6] I do not think that
it is asking too much of the reader's faith in progress to assume that
so far as a light powerful engine goes, comparatively noiseless,
smooth-running, not obnoxious to sensitive nostrils, and altogether
suitable for high road traffic, the problem will very speedily be
solved. And upon that assumption, in what direction are these new motor
vehicles likely to develop? how will they react upon the railways? and
where finally will they take us?
At present they seem to promise developments upon three distinct and
definite lines.
There will, first of all, be the motor truck for heavy traffic. Already
such trucks are in evidence distributing goods and parcels of various
sorts. And sooner or later, no doubt, the numerous advantages of such an
arrangement will lead to the organization of large carrier companies,
using such motor trucks to carry goods in bulk or parcels on the high
roads. Such companies will be in an exceptionally favourable position to
organize storage and repair for the motors of the general public on
profitable terms, and possibly to co-operate in various ways with the
manufactures of special types of motor machines.
In the next place, and parallel with the motor truck, there will develop
the hired or privately owned motor carriage. This, for all except the
longest journeys, will add a fine sense of personal independence to all
the small conveniences of first-class railway travel. It will be capable
of a day's journey of three hundred miles or more, long before the
developments to be presently foreshadowed arrive. One will change
nothing--unless it is the driver--from stage to stage. One will be free
to dine where one chooses, hurry when one chooses, travel asleep or
awake, stop and pick flowers, turn over in bed of a morning and tell the
carriage to wait--unless, which is highly probable, one sleeps
aboard.[7]...
And thirdly there will be the motor omnibus, attacking or developing out
of the horse omnibus companies and the suburban lines. All this seems
fairly safe prophesying.
And these things, which are quite obviously coming even now, will be
working out their many structural problems when the next phase in their
development begins. The motor omnibus companies competing against the
suburban railways will find themselves hampered in the speed of their
longer runs by the slower horse traffic on their routes, and they will
attempt to secure, and, it may be, after tough legislative struggles,
will secure the power to form private roads of a new sort, upon which
their vehicles will be free to travel up to the limit of their very
highest possible speed. It is along the line of such private tracks and
roads that the forces of change will certainly tend to travel, and along
which I am absolutely convinced they will travel. This segregation of
motor traffic is probably a matter that may begin even in the present
decade.
Once this process of segregation from the high road of the horse and
pedestrian sets in, it will probably go on rapidly. It may spread out
from short omnibus routes, much as the London Metropolitan Railway
system has spread. The motor carrier companies, competing in speed of
delivery with the quickened railways, will conceivably co-operate with
the long-distance omnibus and the hired carriage companies in the
formation of trunk lines. Almost insensibly, certain highly profitable
longer routes will be joined up--the London to Brighton, for example, in
England. And the quiet English citizen will, no doubt, while these
things are still quite exceptional and experimental in his lagging land,
read one day with surprise in the violently illustrated popular
magazines of 1910, that there are now so many thousand miles of these
roads already established in America and Germany and elsewhere. And
thereupon, after some patriotic meditations, he may pull himself
together.
We may even hazard some details about these special roads. For example,
they will be very different from macadamized roads; they will be used
only by soft-tired conveyances; the battering horseshoes, the perpetual
filth of horse traffic, and the clumsy wheels of laden carts will never
wear them. It may be that they will have a surface like that of some
cycle-racing tracks, though since they will be open to wind and weather,
it is perhaps more probable they will be made of very good asphalt
sloped to drain, and still more probable that they will be of some quite
new substance altogether--whether hard or resilient is beyond my
foretelling. They will have to be very wide--they will be just as wide
as the courage of their promoters goes--and if the first made are too
narrow there will be no question of gauge to limit the later ones. Their
traffic in opposite directions will probably be strictly separated, and
it will no doubt habitually disregard complicated and fussy regulations
imposed under the initiative of the Railway Interest by such official
bodies as the Board of Trade. The promoters will doubtless take a hint
from suburban railway traffic and from the current difficulty of the
Metropolitan police, and where their ways branch the streams of traffic
will not cross at a level but by bridges. It is easily conceivable that
once these tracks are in existence, cyclists and motors other than those
of the constructing companies will be able to make use of them. And,
moreover, once they exist it will be possible to experiment with
vehicles of a size and power quite beyond the dimensions prescribed by
our ordinary roads--roads whose width has been entirely determined by
the size of a cart a horse can pull.[8]
Countless modifying influences will, of course, come into operation. For
example, it has been assumed, perhaps rashly, that the railway influence
will certainly remain jealous and hostile to these growths: that what
may be called the "Bicycle Ticket Policy" will be pursued throughout.
Assuredly there will be fights of a very complicated sort at first, but
once one of these specialized lines is in operation, it may be that some
at least of the railway companies will hasten to replace their flanged
rolling stock by carriages with rubber tyres, remove their rails,
broaden their cuttings and embankments, raise their bridges, and take to
the new ways of traffic. Or they may find it answer to cut fares, widen
their gauges, reduce their gradients, modify their points and curves,
and woo the passenger back with carriages beautifully hung and
sumptuously furnished, and all the convenience and luxury of a club. Few
people would mind being an hour or so longer going to Paris from London,
if the railway travelling was neither rackety, cramped, nor tedious. One
could be patient enough if one was neither being jarred, deafened, cut
into slices by draughts, and continually more densely caked in a filthy
dust of coal; if one could write smoothly and easily at a steady table,
read papers, have one's hair cut, and dine in comfort[9]--none of which
things are possible at present, and none of which require any new
inventions, any revolutionary contrivances, or indeed anything but an
intelligent application of existing resources and known principles. Our
rage for fast trains, so far as long-distance travel is concerned, is
largely a passion to end the extreme discomfort involved. It is in the
daily journey, on the suburban train, that daily tax of time, that
speed is in itself so eminently desirable, and it is just here that the
conditions of railway travel most hopelessly fail. It must always be
remembered that the railway train, as against the motor, has the
advantage that its wholesale traction reduces the prime cost by
demanding only one engine for a great number of coaches. This will not
serve the first-class long-distance passenger, but it may the third.
Against that economy one must balance the necessary delay of a
relatively infrequent service, which latter item becomes relatively
greater and greater in proportion to the former, the briefer the journey
to be made.
And it may be that many railways, which are neither capable of
modification into suburban motor tracks, nor of development into
luxurious through routes, will find, in spite of the loss of many
elements of their old activity, that there is still a profit to be made
from a certain section of the heavy goods traffic, and from cheap
excursions. These are forms of work for which railways seem to be
particularly adapted, and which the diversion of a great portion of
their passenger traffic would enable them to conduct even more
efficiently. It is difficult to imagine, for example, how any sort of
road-car organization could beat the railways at the business of
distributing coal and timber and similar goods, which are taken in bulk
directly from the pit or wharf to local centres of distribution.
It must always be remembered that at the worst the defeat of such a
great organization as the railway system does not involve its
disappearance until a long period has elapsed. It means at first no more
than a period of modification and differentiation. Before extinction can
happen a certain amount of wealth in railway property must absolutely
disappear. Though under the stress of successful competition the capital
value of the railways may conceivably fall, and continue to fall,
towards the marine store prices, fares and freights pursue the sweated
working expenses to the vanishing point, and the land occupied sink to
the level of not very eligible building sites: yet the railways will,
nevertheless, continue in operation until these downward limits are
positively attained.
An imagination prone to the picturesque insists at this stage upon a
vision of the latter days of one of the less happily situated lines.
Along a weedy embankment there pants and clangs a patched and tarnished
engine, its paint blistered, its parts leprously dull. It is driven by
an aged and sweated driver, and the burning garbage of its furnace
distils a choking reek into the air. A huge train of urban dust trucks
bangs and clatters behind it, _en route_ to that sequestered dumping
ground where rubbish is burnt to some industrial end. But that is a
lapse into the merely just possible, and at most a local tragedy. Almost
certainly the existing lines of railway will develop and differentiate,
some in one direction and some in another, according to the nature of
the pressure upon them. Almost all will probably be still in existence
and in divers ways busy, spite of the swarming new highways I have
ventured to foreshadow, a hundred years from now.
In fact, we have to contemplate, not so much a supersession of the
railways as a modification and specialization of them in various
directions, and the enormous development beside them of competing and
supplementary methods. And step by step with these developments will
come a very considerable acceleration of the ferry traffic of the narrow
seas through such improvements as the introduction of turbine engines.
So far as the high road and the longer journeys go this is the extent of
our prophecy.[10]
But in the discussion of all questions of land locomotion one must come
at last to the knots of the network, to the central portions of the
towns, the dense, vast towns of our time, with their high ground values
and their narrow, already almost impassable, streets. I hope at a later
stage to give some reasons for anticipating that the centripetal
pressure of the congested towns of our epoch may ultimately be very
greatly relieved, but for the next few decades at least the usage of
existing conditions will prevail, and in every town there is a certain
nucleus of offices, hotels, and shops upon which the centrifugal forces
I anticipate will certainly not operate. At present the streets of many
larger towns, and especially of such old-established towns as London,
whose central portions have the narrowest arteries, present a quite
unprecedented state of congestion. When the Green of some future
_History of the English People_ comes to review our times, he will, from
his standpoint of comfort and convenience, find the present streets of
London quite or even more incredibly unpleasant than are the filthy
kennels, the mudholes and darkness of the streets of the seventeenth
century to our enlightened minds. He will echo our question, "Why _did_
people stand it?" He will be struck first of all by the omnipresence of
mud, filthy mud, churned up by hoofs and wheels under the inclement
skies, and perpetually defiled and added to by innumerable horses.
Imagine his description of a young lady crossing the road at the Marble
Arch in London, on a wet November afternoon, "breathless, foul-footed,
splashed by a passing hansom from head to foot, happy that she has
reached the further pavement alive at the mere cost of her ruined
clothes."... "Just where the bicycle might have served its most useful
purpose," he will write, "in affording a healthy daily ride to the
innumerable clerks and such-like sedentary toilers of the central
region, it was rendered impossible by the danger of side-slip in this
vast ferocious traffic." And, indeed, to my mind at least, this last is
the crowning absurdity of the present state of affairs, that the clerk
and the shop hand, classes of people positively starved of exercise,
should be obliged to spend yearly the price of a bicycle upon a
season-ticket, because of the quite unendurable inconvenience and danger
of urban cycling.
Now, in what direction will matters move? The first and most obvious
thing to do, the thing that in many cases is being attempted and in a
futile, insufficient way getting itself done, the thing that I do not
for one moment regard as the final remedy, is the remedy of the
architect and builder--profitable enough to them, anyhow--to widen the
streets and to cut "new arteries." Now, every new artery means a series
of new whirlpools of traffic, such as the pensive Londoner may study for
himself at the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue with Oxford Street,
and unless colossal--or inconveniently steep--crossing-bridges are made,
the wider the affluent arteries the more terrible the battle of the
traffic. Imagine Regent's Circus on the scale of the Place de la
Concorde. And there is the value of the ground to consider; with every
increment of width the value of the dwindling remainder in the meshes
of the network of roads will rise, until to pave the widened streets
with gold will be a mere trifling addition to the cost of their
"improvement."
There is, however, quite another direction in which the congestion may
find relief, and that is in the "regulation" of the traffic. This has
already begun in London in an attack on the crawling cab and in the new
bye-laws of the London County Council, whereby certain specified forms
of heavy traffic are prohibited the use of the streets between ten and
seven. These things may be the first beginning of a process of
restriction that may go far. Many people living at the present time, who
have grown up amidst the exceptional and possibly very transient
characteristics of this time, will be disposed to regard the traffic in
the streets of our great cities as a part of the natural order of
things, and as unavoidable as the throng upon the pavement. But indeed
the presence of all the chief constituents of this vehicular
torrent--the cabs and hansoms, the vans, the omnibuses--everything,
indeed, except the few private carriages--are as novel, as distinctively
things of the nineteenth century, as the railway train and the needle
telegraph. The streets of the great towns of antiquity, the streets of
the great towns of the East, the streets of all the mediæval towns, were
not intended for any sort of wheeled traffic at all--were designed
primarily and chiefly for pedestrians. So it would be, I suppose, in any
one's ideal city. Surely Town, in theory at least, is a place one walks
about as one walks about a house and garden, dressed with a certain
ceremonious elaboration, safe from mud and the hardship and defilement
of foul weather, buying, meeting, dining, studying, carousing, seeing
the play. It is the growth in size of the city that has necessitated the
growth of this coarser traffic that has made "Town" at last so utterly
detestable.
But if one reflects, it becomes clear that, save for the vans of goods,
this moving tide of wheeled masses is still essentially a stream of
urban pedestrians, pedestrians who, by reason of the distances they have
to go, have had to jump on 'buses and take cabs--in a word, to bring in
the high road to their aid. And the vehicular traffic of the street is
essentially the high road traffic very roughly adapted to the new needs.
The cab is a simple development of the carriage, the omnibus of the
coach, and the supplementary traffic of the underground and electric
railways is a by no means brilliantly imagined adaptation of the
long-route railway. These are all still new things, experimental to the
highest degree, changing and bound to change much more, in the period of
specialization that is now beginning.
Now, the first most probable development is a change in the omnibus and
the omnibus railway. A point quite as important with these means of
transit as actual speed of movement is frequency: time is wasted
abundantly and most vexatiously at present in waiting and in
accommodating one's arrangements to infrequent times of call and
departure. _The more frequent a local service, the more it comes to be
relied upon._ Another point--and one in which the omnibus has a great
advantage over the railway--is that it should be possible to get on and
off at any point, or at as many points on the route as possible. But
this means a high proportion of stoppages, and this is destructive to
speed. There is, however, one conceivable means of transit that is not
simply frequent but continuous, that may be joined or left at any point
without a stoppage, that could be adapted to many existing streets at
the level or quite easily sunken in tunnels, or elevated above the
street level,[11] and that means of transit is the moving platform,
whose possibilities have been exhibited to all the world in a sort of
mean caricature at the Paris Exhibition. Let us imagine the inner circle
of the district railway adapted to this conception. I will presume that
the Parisian "rolling platform" is familiar to the reader. The district
railway tunnel is, I imagine, about twenty-four feet wide. If we suppose
the space given to six platforms of three feet wide and one (the most
rapid) of six feet, and if we suppose each platform to be going four
miles an hour faster than its slower fellow (a velocity the Paris
experiment has shown to be perfectly comfortable and safe), we should
have the upper platform running round the circle at a pace of
twenty-eight miles an hour. If, further, we adopt an ingenious
suggestion of Professor Perry's, and imagine the descent to the line
made down a very slowly rotating staircase at the centre of a big
rotating wheel-shaped platform, against a portion of whose rim the
slowest platform runs in a curve, one could very easily add a speed of
six or eight miles an hour more, and to that the man in a hurry would be
able to add his own four miles an hour by walking in the direction of
motion. If the reader is a traveller, and if he will imagine that black
and sulphurous tunnel, swept and garnished, lit and sweet, with a train
much faster than the existing underground trains perpetually ready to go
off with him and never crowded--if he will further imagine this train a
platform set with comfortable seats and neat bookstalls and so forth, he
will get an inkling in just one detail of what he perhaps misses by
living now instead of thirty or forty years ahead.
I have supposed the replacement to occur in the case of the London Inner
Circle Railway, because there the necessary tunnel already exists to
help the imagination of the English reader, but that the specific
replacement will occur is rendered improbable by the fact that the
circle is for much of its circumference entangled with other lines of
communication--the North-Western Railway, for example. As a matter of
fact, as the American reader at least will promptly see, the much more
practicable thing is that upper footpath, with these moving platforms
beside it, running out over the street after the manner of the viaduct
of an elevated railroad. But in some cases, at any rate, the
demonstrated cheapness and practicability of tunnels at a considerable
depth will come into play.
Will this diversion of the vast omnibus traffic of to-day into the air
and underground, together with the segregation of van traffic to
specific routes and times, be the only change in the streets of the new
century? It may be a shock, perhaps, to some minds, but I must confess I
do not see what is to prevent the process of elimination that is
beginning now with the heavy vans spreading until it covers all horse
traffic, and with the disappearance of horse hoofs and the necessary
filth of horses, the road surface may be made a very different thing
from what it is at present, better drained and admirably adapted for the
soft-tired hackney vehicles and the torrent of cyclists. Moreover, there
will be little to prevent a widening of the existing side walks, and the
protection of the passengers from rain and hot sun by awnings, or such
arcades as distinguish Turin, or Sir F. Bramwell's upper footpaths on
the model of the Chester rows. Moreover, there is no reason but the
existing filth why the roadways should not have translucent _velaria_ to
pull over in bright sunshine and wet weather. It would probably need
less labour to manipulate such contrivances than is required at present
for the constant conflict with slush and dust. Now, of course, we
tolerate the rain, because it facilitates a sort of cleaning process....
Enough of this present speculation. I have indicated now the general
lines of the roads and streets and ways and underways of the Twentieth
Century. But at present they stand vacant in our prophecy, not only
awaiting the human interests--the characters and occupations, and
clothing of the throng of our children and our children's children that
flows along them, but also the decorations our children's children's
taste will dictate, the advertisements their eyes will tolerate, the
shops in which they will buy. To all that we shall finally come, and
even in the next chapter I hope it will be made more evident how
conveniently these later and more intimate matters follow, instead of
preceding, these present mechanical considerations. And of the beliefs
and hopes, the thought and language, the further prospects of this
multitude as yet unborn--of these things also we shall make at last
certain hazardous guesses. But at first I would submit to those who may
find the "machinery in motion" excessive in this chapter, we must have
the background and fittings--the scene before the play.[12]