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116 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 1 (1924)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0116 and id is 1 raw text is: The Motor's Part in Transportation By Roy D. CHAPIN Vice-President, National Automobile Chamber of Commerce T RANSPORTATION is the basic idea of the automobile. The man who purchases a car desires it because it will take him from one place to an- other place. The buyer of a truck finds use for it in carrying goods from one point to another point. These statements are so obvious as to seem almost superfluous; but they are apparently necessary at the start of a paper on the automobile industry today, when one sees the great variety of approaches to the subject which seem to ignore the transportation thought. THE CONSIDERATION OF MOTOR TRANSPORTATION Most surprising is it to study cat- alogues of many of our large univer- sities and note that under the heading of transportation there are many courses dealing with waterways, elec- tric routes, particularly with the rail- roads, and yet in many cases there is no consideration of motor transportation. There are in the United States today more than thirteen and a half million passenger cars and over a million and three-quarter trucks. The various traffic surveys indicate that the average number of passengers carried daily by the automobile is about 2.5. If we estimate the average annual mileage of an automobile as 5,000, which from the scattered record on the subject is conservative, we find that the annual passenger miles of motor travel is 168,750,000,000. When we compare this with the passenger mile- age on Class I railroads in 1923, total- ing 37,957,009,111, it appears that we have before us a very considerable field for transportation study. Probably the chief reason why only a few universities have recognized that the motor vehicle is an additional form of transportation is that the automo- bile has been sold chiefly to the indi- vidual. Like the character in one of Mo- liere's plays, who was surprised to learn that he had been talking prose all his life, the average car owner might be surprised to learn that he is in the transportation business. He has purchased this object be- cause it satisfies his own particular de- sires, and he has not stopped to realize that in the aggregate his automobile, along with the others, forms a great informal system of carriers. With the volume of vehicles on the highways, there is coming a greater need, however, for systematizing of control, and a greater realization on the owner's part concerning his respon- sibility in traffic. As this sentiment develops, there will probably be an in- creasing public recognition of the motor car and motor truck as elements of transportation, and a growing popular interest in the subject. MOTOR INDUSTRY AND ECONOMICS Much of the present growth of the automobile industry may be laid first, to the fact that there existed a need for rapid, flexible individual transpor- tation and second, to the fact that the men manufacturing the vehicles thought of their business in terms of economics. They realized that they were making rolling stock, that their product was related to other indus- 1

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