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Show AUTO TRAFFIC i IS ENLARGING i General Motors Head Predicts Pre-dicts Demand Will Increase "Until that time arrives in the progress prog-ress of civilization when man admits that he can do no more, there will be use for every mechanical appliance which annihilates time, space and distance," dis-tance," says John J. Raskob chairman chair-man of the finance committee of Gen- j eral Motors corporation. "There have never been enough I Pullmans so that every traeler could have a "lower." There have never been sufficient freight tars to carry tin- crops to market, nor tho raw ma-fcerlalfl ma-fcerlalfl rfom our mines nor the finish' fin-ish' d prdoucts from our factories. When airplanes blacken tho sky t arrying freight and passengers across I I land and sea and relatively that day; lis not far hence there will be no ap-j ap-j parent dimlnultion In the use of existing exist-ing transportation facilities. 'From the day the first New York subway demonstrated its feasibility, I engineers have been busy building new ones, extending old ones and planning; future ones. There Is no decrease in j the travel upon the old lines ot transit, I yet our citj streets and country roads! are black with motor cars swiftly car- I rying passengers and freight where formerly were only slow moving' horse-drawn vehicles. "The telephone, telegraph and ocean cables have never been able to hcndle the traffic thrust upon them. As new1. facilities are created much business ; handled by mail Is transferred to the Wires. The radio and the wireless I have not lifted the burden from the i 1 cables. "There are, according to the United States Bureau of Public Roads, 10,-j 148,000 passengei and commercial cars In use In this country, For pur-1 I poses of our calculations, let us take an e.i-n ten million. "if each car carries an overage of but two people 1 most of them can ' carry five) and operates but 300 days 18 year ( most of them could operate 3tfi days) the equivalent of six billion passengers are carried each year In addition, according to the National ! Automobile Chamber of Commerce, 1 .200.ooo.nu0 tns of freight are car- i ried by the motor trucks. This is four! 1 to six times the number of passengers I carried by all the team railroads In ' I the United States and about half the 1 .amount of fi eight hauled by the rail-j ! roads. "The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce has made a survey and' I ascertained that the average travel of I the passenger car lu 6.400 miles an-J nually. That would mean approxl-I I rnately sixty billion miles traveled yearly by all the passenger automo- I biles in this countr, which Is about1 1 164 million miles a day. The chamber is authority for the. statement that 90 I per cent of all automobiles are used more or less for business purposes. Further, that 66 per cent of tho total number of automobiles In the United States are owned by people living in communities of 6000 inhabitants 01 less. Also, that one-third of all passenger pas-senger cars and one-sixth of all motor trucks are owned by farmers. Contrary Con-trary to popular opinion; these facts 1 show that the automobile Is more generally gen-erally used In the country and small ' towns than In the city. They further j emphasize the great need or a network of good roads covering all parts of' 'the UnlSed States. 'The automobile was born Into aj ! roadless world. Compared with the 1 , millions of milen of telephone wires i and the thousands of miles of steel I rails which make these other two great Inventions effective, the automo-bile automo-bile Is still In a roadless world The j automobile was the creation of brains 1 1 which dreamt of thousands of miles of boulevards where once existed mud , I holes and ruts. Once more by com- 1 Iparison we have only commenced to! ocver up those mud holes and ruts. I J Yet a good roads movement which promises incalculable benefits to man- ' kind Is well under way. In this move- : ) mont the automobile has been the 1 most powerful mlsnlonary, emphasizing emphasiz-ing as nothing else has done tho universal uni-versal advantages to be derived from j adequate highways." |