Estimated Cost of Bad Roads

Cost per Ton-mile. No details are given as to the method employed in determining the cost per ton-mile of hauling crops from farm to market. The value of the answer depends upon form of the inquiry. The author has frequently asked grain farmers: "What is it worth to haul crops to market?" In a great majority of cases the answer is arrived at by counting the price of a wagon, team, and driver at $3.00 or $3.50 per day (the current price for those whose chief business is to do teaming), and assuming that a team will travel about 3 miles per hour and haul a load of 1 to 1 tons. The result by this method of computing the cost per ton-mile is sub stantially the same as that in Table 2. On changing the form of the question and asking: "What does it really cost you?", the an swer is almost invariably: "Nothing." The average farmer is not conscious that it costs him anything to haul his crop to market. The great bulk of the hauling is done when the farmer has little or nothing to do, or when the delay of other work is a matter of little moment; and in this case the cost is merely nominal. The over looking of this fact is a common and most serious error of writers on good-road economics.

The cost per ton-mile as given in Table 2 indicates that that value was obtained by assuming the wages of a wagon, team, and driver to be about 35 cents per hour; that the team travels about 3 miles per hour; and that the team hauls a load only one way. There are two radical errors in this method.

1. The price per day is too great. In the Bulletin referred to in § 18, the price per day for team and man during the crop season, as given by the farmers themselves, ranged from $1.40 to $2.74, the average for the 76 counties being $2.13. Notice that this is the average cost during the crop season, as returned by 316 farmers in 76 counties in Illinois. Evidently the price per day as returned by the same farmers for the dull season would be considerably less.

2. The mean between the maximum and the minimum load may be one tin; but the great bulk of teaming is done when the roads are at least in fair condition, when the load is considerably more than one ton. In fact, there is very little of the crop hauled to market when the load is one ton or less. The author has examined the records of several grain buyers in central Illinois, where at times the roads are as bad as anywhere, and finds that the average load is nearly a ton and a half. See § 19.

21. Non-resident land owners in central Illinois frequently hire corn delivered for 9 to 11 cents per ton-mile. This price has ob tamed over large areas for 10 or 15 years. The contract is usually taken by the man who does the shelling, he hiring farmers to do the hauling. These prices obtain frequently during the corn planting season, when the farmers are most busy and when the roads are certainly not at their best. During the dull season farm ers frequently haul corn to the farther market for a difference in price equivalent to 6 to 9 cents per ton-mile for the hauling. The

lower of these prices usually obtains when the roads are good in the winter season and there is little or no farm work to do. Notice that the above prices are practically one third of those given in Table 2 for Illinois.

The results in Table 2 for the cost per ton-mile may be approxi mately correct for gardeners, dairymen, etc., who are compelled to keep a team upon the road nearly every day of the year; but these are not representative "farmers," for, according to the Eleventh Census of the United States, there are 5,281,557 farmers and planters, and only 90,470 gardeners, dairymen, florists, nursery men, and vine-growers; or, the latter constitute only one fifty seventh of the agricultural class, and work only one six hundred and sixty-ninth part of the cultivated land.

The conclusion is that in Table 2 for Illinois the distance hauled is twice too great and the price per ton-mile is about three times too great; or the "total cost from farm to market" (see Table 1) is 2 X 3 or 6 times too great. Probably the values for the other states are equally in error.

Cost of Marketing Crops.

Circular No. 19 of the U. S. Road Inquiry Office, previously referred to, determines that in 1895 the farm products amounted to 219,024,277 tons; and assumes that the farm products consumed on the farm are offset by the mine and quarry products, merchandise, etc., hauled over the public roads. It is further assumed that one quarter of the timber cut for fuel and for the mill, and all of that used by the railroad, or a total forest product of 93,525.000 tons, is transported over the public high ways. The conclusion is that in 1895, 313,349.227 tons were hauled over the highways of the United States. The Circular assumes that the average cost of transporting this freight is $3.02 per ton (the average "cost from farm to market," see last line of Tables 1 and 2), and that therefore the cost of wagon transportation in 1895 was $946,314,665.54. "The immensity of this charge," to quote the Director of Road Inquiry, "will be best realized by comparing it with the value of all farm products in the United States for the year 1890—$2,480,170,454. In other words, the annual cost of the transportation upon the public highways of the United States is equal to 38 per cent of the value of the farm crops." Or, since 70 per cent of the freight is assumed to be farm products, according to the above data, the cost of hauling directly and indirectly con nected with marketing the crops is 38 X 70 = 26.6 per cent of the value of these products. The total area of the farms in the United States is 975,000 square miles, and therefore the above cost of wagon transportation is $971 per square mile, or $1.51 per acre; or, if we include only the improved land, the above cost of wagon transportation is $1,700 per square mile, or $2.65 per acre.