OCR Text |
Show BIG CAR USELESS WITHOUT HIGHWAY "I would rather own and drive a $400 car in a state with good roads, and pay $400 a year to the good-road fund, than to have a $10,000 sedan in a state that had no road system," said a caller at the Minnesota highway high-way department recently. "With a low-price car and good roads I would get somewhere, and get a lot more of comfort and enjoyment than the man with the big limousine and no road. "Of course," he added, "It is not necessary to go to either extreme. But I think we should always try to maintain the right ratio between road expenditures and car expenditures. We are spending about $30,000,000 for roads in Minnesota this year, and about a billion in the United States as a whole, including state, county, town and municipal road work. That Is a lot of money. "But the people of the United States spent about $4,000,000,000 for new cars and trucks in 1924, $055,-000,000 $055,-000,000 for parts, $675,000,000 for replacement re-placement tires, $2,100,000,000 for fuel and lubricants and $910,000,000 for service labor. Add garage storage costs, insurance, registration and gas taxes and other incidentals, and you soon have $10,000,000,000, so that our road cost is only 10 per cent of our total motor bill. "Ten per cent for road and 90 per cent for rolling stock and operation would make a railroad man laugh out loud. The roads reporting to the Minnesota Min-nesota railroad commission spent $48,- 237,147 for road betterments and $125,153,097 for equipment in 1024. In 1923, they spent $00,070,352 for road and $108,178,031 for equipment. In 1922 they .spent $32,009,010 for road and $37,425,S54 for equipment. In other words, 35 rer cent of the money they spent for betterments went into . the roadbed and 65 per cent into rolling stock and other equipment. "Or take the operating expenses. The large railroads spent in Minnesota Minne-sota in 1924, $18,377,261 for maintenance main-tenance of way and structures, $26,-356,965 $26,-356,965 for maintenance of equipment and $52,803,454 for transportation. Here the part spent for maintenance of the road was 1S.8 per cent. "But if you go back to the original investment, the proportion spent' for road is much greater. Ten of the large roads on which tentative valuation valu-ation has been completed by the Interstate In-terstate Commerce commission have an investment of $416,940,063 in road and permanent structures in Minnesota Minne-sota and $125,534,575 in equipment, or 23.14 per cent for equipment and 76.S6 per cent for road. "With a liberal allowance for depreciation, de-preciation, the 565,719 motor vehicles in Minnesota have a present value of at least $300,000,000. If, we had in-' vested $3.33 in 'track' for each dollar invested in 'rolling stock,' as the railroads rail-roads have, we should have a billion invested in Minnesota roads. That would pave every mile of trunk highway high-way and 26,000 miles of other roads. "I am ahead of time, I know. But I am just trying to show that oar road expenditures, which seem large at first glance, are small in proportion to what we spend for vehicles." |