(3) Cost.—Quite as important as levelness and shortness is the cost of construction, equipment, maintenance and operation. This depends partly on the expense of tracks, terminals and so on, partly on the cost of the actual means of conveyance, and partly on the size of the units that can be handled by a single crew. In all these respect water has a great advantage. No tracks are needed, and channe must be dug only for short distances at the entrance to harbors; ther are no taxes and no upkeep to pay on the right of way; the terminal cost no more relatively than do those of a railway; the cost of a ship of a given capacity is scarcely more than half that of cars and tives of corresponding capacity; and a given number of men can handle. a far larger load on a ship than on a train. This is illustrated in the following table: Just as the water has an advantage over the land, so plains have advantage over mountains. The first cost of building tracks on t plain is only one-half, one-tenth, or even one-hundredth as much among the mountains; upkeep is correspondingly expensive in moun tains and more trains and more men are needed for a given of work. As for airplanes, they are like steamers in having no expense for their right of way, but so long as the helicopter is not in practical use their terminals are so large in proportion to the traffic that they arc , extremely expensive. Moreover, the units are thus far of insignificani size compared with trains and steamships. The largest airplanes yel built carry only about 20 passengers where a single railway coact carries 60, and only about a ton of mail or baggage against 40 for single freight car.
(4) Trans-shipment.—An important but often neglected reason for the location of trade routes is the amount of trans-shipment. To trans ship an average carload of miscellaneous freight, for example, from one line of transportation to another costs anywhere from one to six dollars. If breakage and delay are added, the loss probably averages four or five dollars, or as much as to transport that same freight hun dreds of miles. To transfer the same freight to a truck, drive to a wharf, transfer to a lighter, take the lighter out to an anchored steamship, and load the boxes into the steamer's hold may cost as much as to carry the boxes two thousand miles after they are once safely on the steamship. Hence, there is a strong tendency not only to avoid lighterage even at the expense of traveling several hundred miler to a deep harbor, but also to use a kind of land transportation that will pick up the goods as close as possible to their point of origin and carry them as close as possible to their destination without change of conveyance. So strong is this tendency that before the Panama Canal was built many ships, especially sailing vessels, found it cheaper to go around Cape Horn than to transfer their freight to the Panama Railway and then to other ships for Hawaii, Japan, and China. In ability to carry goods with little trans-shipment the automobile has an enormous advantage over the railway, and the railway over water transportation. Since
the cost of transportation alone without is -about ten times as much by rail as by water, and perhaps ten times as much by truck as by rail, in spite of the claims of the automobile makers to the contrary, and several times as much by horse as by truck, the prob lem of the business man is to find how much each trans-shipment costs including breakage and delay, how many trans-shipments are neces sary by each mode of conveyance, and how their cost plus the cost of carriage and of delay compares on the various possible routes.
For example, many people have wondered why the Mississippi River is so little used in spite of the fact that from 1S96 to 1920 nearly 600 million dollars were spent in trying to make it navigable. The answer lies partly in the fact that it flows in the wrong direction, for it does not go from the active Middle West toward the active manufactur ing states of the northeast, and in that respect has none of the advan tages which made the Great Lakes so wonderful a waterway. The answer also lies partly in the fact that the railroads have done their best to prevent the river from being used. In addition to this, how ever, and perhaps even inure important, is the fact that the use of the Mississippi involves much trans-shipment. Suppose a farmer lives anywhere in the Mississippi Basin and is shipping wheat to the East by rail. He hauls it to the railroad by truck or wagon. There it is transferred to a grain elevator and then shot into a freight car. The car can go straight to some inland New England city where the wheat is made into flour or breakfast food and sold locally. The freight charges are high, but there are only two trans-shipments between the farmer and the local dealer. Wheat shipped by the Mississippi River is not only much longer on the way and hence more likely to be spoiled than if sent by rail, but it requires three extra trans-shipments and perhaps six. First, after a journey by rail it must be transferred to the Mississippi boat, but if no boat is on hand when the car arrives, the wheat goes to a grain elevator for later trans-shipment to the boat. At New Orleans it is again trans-shipped from the river boat to the ocean steamship either directly or by way of an elevator. Arriving at New York or Boston it must be transferred from the ship to an elevator and then to a freight car to be carried to its inland destination. In shipping grain directly to Europe the use of the great river would undoubtedly save expense. But so much of the food from the West is consumed in the eastern United States that the shippers plan mainly for that. The ? [ equent trans-shipments, the length of the water journey and the latively poor and infrequent service of the river boats prevent people om acquiring the habit of using the great Mississippi water route.