THE REASONS FOR IMPROVING ROADS

Good roads are desirable for three distinct reasons, which may be called social, business and pleasure reasons.

Social Benefits from Good Roads.-The social reasons for road improvements appeal to persons living in the country. The women who dwell in the country districts know better than any others what bad roads mean to themselves and their sisters on other farms, and how utterly drab and hopeless is life in the country with inadequate means of communication between themselves and almost their next-door neighbors. The country parson can tell what a handicap bad roads are in his work. Preaching two sermons on Sunday is but a part of his labors. He must visit his parishioners if he is to be the guide, counselor and friend he aspires to be. He knows by hard experience the difficulty of riding or walking over muddy roads and through oceans of slush to those longing for his comforting presence in time of sickness and death, and how hard it is to convey to those who are ill the things necessary for their recovery. The country doctor can likewise bear witness to the restraint and even suffering caused by bad roads. Taking men as they are in the large, the wonder is that there are any who would choose his profession, the most devoted and consecrated of all that serve humanity. He comes when he is called and where. His charity is unmeasurable, his rewards are insignificant. Time with him and with the patient waiting his aid is often the deciding factor between life and death; he knows full well the death rate due to isolation by poor highways.

We cannot state in percentages the increase in the satisfaction of people with country life which follows the certainty a doctor can be obtained when he is needed. It is not yet possible to state in numerals how much better a man is for attending church regularly or how much better a farmer's wife is for driving over a good road whenever she wishes to call on her neighbors. But there is one thing to which everybody will agree; the schools of our rural territory are one of the great defenses of our national prosperity, and the education of our children is one of our best safeguards for the wise government of our republic. And so everyone will admit the importance of these figures: In eight typical rural counties studied by the U. S. Office of Public Roads during a period of five years, the average school attendance increased from 66 out of every 100 pupils enrolled before the roads were improved, to 76 out of every 100 after the improvements.

Ten per cent more children were helped, therefore, to become better citizens by an increase in taxation for roads amounting to only 9 per cent of the total tax for all purposes.

Business Benefits from Good Roads.-The business advantages of road improvements to the owner of a farm can be stated even more definitely, for they can be measured in dollars and cents. In the investigation by the U. S. Office of Public Roads, just mentioned, the observations were carried out in New York, Virginia, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi, in districts which represent typical dairying, farming, mining and lumbering conditions, before and after the construction of roads. The amount of road improvements done in each of them, which produced the improved conditions which will be stated, were as follows:

The investigations by the government's experts were not hasty observations from a buggy or automobile; they were painstaking searches through real-estate transfers, public records, railway reports, school reports and like sources of information, studied on the spot until their accuracy was fully established. They were made from year to year, moreover, to make sure that the local conditions were fully understood and the annual effect of a road improvement was ascertained beyond question.

Real estate transfers showed that the percentage of increase in the value of rural property along these improved roads in about five years was as follows: Franklin, 9 to 114; Spotsylvania, 63 to 80; Dinwiddie, 68 to 194; Lee, 70 to 80; Wise, 25 to 100; Dallas, 50 to 100; Manatee, 50 to 100; Lauderdale, 25 to 50. The transfers on which these figures are based are mostly for property within a mile of the improved roads.

In each county the extent of the districts sending vehicles to the improved road was carefully determined in much the same way that the drainage area of a stream is ascertained. The products of these districts and the proportion of them hauled over the roads were then ascertained. The railway shipments from and

into the districts were investigated. In case of doubt the actual travel on the roads was ascertained by counts of the vehicles and their loads. The average length of the haul on the roads was found out. From all these statistics, given in detail in the report, it is shown that the cost of hauling one ton one mile on the roads of these counties was decreased from an average of 33.5 cents before highway improvements were made to 15.7 cents afterward. This saving of 17.8 cents per ton per mile amounts to $627,409 in all. To accomplish it the additional taxes amounted to only 6.3 cents per ton per mile, leaving a net saving of 11.6 cents per ton per mile.

Roads as Sources of Enjoyment.-It is unfair to object to including the pleasure obtained by riding comfortably through the country as one of the returns we receive from our road taxes. It is just as proper to include that kind of pleasure as a justifiable object of expenditure as the investments for liquors, tobacco, the theatre and confectionery. E. W. James, one of the road experts of the United States government, recently made the following statement on the subject:

The people of the United States spent in 1915 $2,500,000,000 for spirituous and malt liquors $800,000,000 for tobacco, $450 000,000 for the "movies," $300,000,000 for candy, $200,000,000 for soda water and $50,000,000 for chewing gum. The total for these pleasures is $4,300,000,000. So I think it conservative to say that the average man is willing to pay something for pleasure. There can be no question about the pleasure derived from riding on good roads, and that a part of the money invested in such roads can be logically justified on the score of this pleasure. After all, the total annual expenditures on roads in the United States is only equal to our purchase of candy and merely one-eighth of the money spent on liquor.

The Townsman's Interest in City Roads.-When the average townsman dresses in the morning, a large part of the clothes he puts on are made of cotton, which has to be teamed over a good many miles from the plantations to the shipping points. If he has fruit, cereal, eggs and toast for breakfast, let us say, about everything he eats has been hauled over several miles of roads, either to be shipped to him or to the mills where it is prepared for shipment. A large part of the furniture in his home and at his office has been made from hardwood hauled over the roads. These and other things which anybody can list for himself must all vary in price to the townsman with the cost of hauling them from the farms and forests to the mills or railroad stations. Just what this fact means has been stated by J. E. Pennybacker, the highway economist of the United States Office of Public Roads, as follows:

The public roads throughout the country, which constitute the primary means of transportation for all agricultural products, for many millions of tons of forest, mine and manufactured products, and which for a large percentage of farmers are the only avenues of transportation leading from the point of production to the point of consumption or rail shipment, have been improved to only a slight extent. By reason of this fact, the prevailing cost of hauling over these roads is about 23 cents per ton per mile. More than 350,000,000 tons are hauled over these roads each year, and the average haul is about 8 miles, from which it can readily be seen that our annual bill for hauling over the public roads is nearly $650,000,000. The cost per ton-mile for hauling on hard surfaced roads should not exceed 13 cents. It is therefore evident that if our roads were adequately improved a large annual saving in the cost of hauling would result.

The difference between 23 and 13 cents is 10 cents, which is the ton-mile tax of poor roads which the city people pay, for most of the hauling is toward markets or shipping points and the cost of this hauling is part of the total expense of products of the land to the consumer. The total is about $280,000,000, which the 45,000,000 people living in the cities and towns of the United States pay annually on account of poor roads. This averages over $6 a year per person.

Poor roads put a much more serious drain on the townsman's pocket-book, however. His food is costing him more every year, and he therefore has a very close, personal interest in having the agricultural lands farmed in such a way that they yield their largest returns at the lowest working cost. This means more than producing milk and vegetables at a low cost; it also includes raising at low expense the wheat and corn from which his flour and meal are made, producing fowls and hogs economically, and reducing the cost of growing cotton. How many intelligent young men, able to earn a good living in a city, will live in the country if they have to travel through miles of mud or dust, at decided physical discomfort, in order to market their products, meet their friends or buy their supplies? How many young women will be willing to live in the country where bad roads isolate them, with only the sparrows for companions, with the doctor almost inaccessible, the schools difficult for the children to reach, and church-going a real labor? Yet if the townsman is to have the things he eats grown for him efficiently and economically he must take his part in making country life agreeable and profitable to these intelligent young people. It means a saving of dollars and cents to him.

Our American Roads.-The length of the rural roads in the United States at the close of 1915 is given in the table on page 192. This table shows that only 11.3 per cent of the total mileage at that time had been surfaced, and that only 2 per cent had

been built by the state highway departments or with more or less financial or engineering assistance from the states.

It has been estimated that about 80 per cent of the total travel on these roads is done on about 15 per cent of their total length. The percentages vary in different states. The Iowa Highway Commission found that from 10 to 15 per cent of the roads of each county are main traveled routes, which it is proper to construct and maintain, under the Iowa highway laws, at the expense of the county as a unit. The remaining roads are of less general use and are constructed and maintained by the townships through which they pass.

This division of our highways into main routes and local roads is of fundamental importance in road administration. Public money must be used so as to yield the greatest good to the greatest number of people. But it is human nature for a man living a mile or more from a main road to complain that he is unfairly treated if he must travel over a dirt road part of the way to town while a neighbor has a good, hard-surfaced road running by his place. As a matter of fact, although the hard road does not reach his farm it does help him materially, as Prof. B. K. Coghlan, of the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College has shown by a recent investigation. He reports:

Where a farmer lives at a considerable distance from the improved road he will still derive some benefit. In one county, where the gravel roads extend only about 8 miles from town, the farmers living several miles beyond haul wood during the dry spells and pile it at the end of the gravel road; then when bad weather comes and it is impossible to work in the fields they haul this wood to town. In another case two teams are used until the improved road is reached, when one team is unhitched and left with a friend, and the man proceeds to town with the other. In a third instance, where it formerly took two days to haul a load to market, since a good road has been built for about one-half of the distance, two wagons, with two teams each, haul one day until the good road is reached when all the load is put on one wagon, which proceeds to town with one team, the other three teams returning home.

Our main roads which carry four-fifths of the traffic present problems which are often quite different from those of the local roads. Highways must be built to carry the traffic over them at the lowest possible cost for both construction and maintenance. Where the traffic is light, as on local roads and some main roads, comparatively inexpensive types of construction can be maintained at small expense and are therefore better than more expensive types because more miles of them can be provided for the same total cost than is the case with expensive types of construction. As a rule, however, we are trying to get too much work from inexpensive roads and at the same time we are neglect