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Show FREAK IDEA ON AUTO01 Vigilance Committee of Auto Industry Keeping Watch on New Legislation The automobile industry has grown to such mammoth proportions and has entered so completely into the road life of the country that the Idea of making automobile owners sore the buren of taxation for road building tho word "automobile" Is almost a synolsm of good roads and legislatures have gone to very great lengths In most every state of the Union in on-acting on-acting laws provldtng for licensing tho use of autos to establish road funds. That this legislation, Jn some instance, has reached an unreasonable point is beyond question, but, in the main, the laws arc reasonable and atito owners do not take excepton to the license because of the interest they have in better road conditions. In a recent publication Motor Life calls attention to proposed legislation in the Maryland legislature which, .in its estimation, entirely uncalled fpr and unfair to molordom. The article is written under the caption of "Loose Motor Legislation" and says: Imagine having to pay five hundred dollars a year for the privilege of driving driv-ing an automobile "with a speed capacity capa-city of more than forty miles ah hour!" A member of the Maryland UrrlDlolitfA oinollv intrnHiioprt n V 1 1 1 with this end in view. Luckily for Maryland, his colleagues sensibly killed kill-ed the measured This legislator proposed pro-posed that the fee, after January 1, 1921. be fifty dollars for a driving license, li-cense, increasing at the rate of fifty dollars a year until in 1930 it would cost the Maryland motorist five hundred hund-red dollars a year to drive a Torty-mile an-hour car. It is just such legislation that Is being fought by the Motor Vehicle Conference Committee, t on which is represented the American Automobile association, the Motor and Accessory Manufacturers' Association, the National Na-tional Automobile Chamber of Commerce, Com-merce, the Rubber Association of America and the Trailers Manufacturers' Manufactur-ers' Association of America. This cqm-mittee cqm-mittee reports sixty-five bills In the various legislatures, most of them having hav-ing to do with Increasing registration fees. It is well that motordom has this vigilance committee, for it is only by keeping constantly on guard that such cases as the Maryland one can be watched and suppressed. The time is not, far distant when a uniform vehicle law, such as drafted by this committee, commit-tee, will he universally adopted. The committee's model bill as "it affects passenger car owners, would charge registration fees at the rate of twenty-five twenty-five cents per horsepower and twenty-five twenty-five cents per hundred pounds gross weight of vehicles. Thi3 weight charge is to be based on the actual weight of. the vehicles plus the sum of the adult seating capacity multiplied multi-plied by one hundred and fifty pounds. nn |