TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION IN THE UNITED STATES The Complexity of the American Transportation System.—A com plete transportation system, as we have seen, consists of three parts: (1) ways, (2) vehicles, and (3) terminals. The ways consist of (a) roads which may range anywhere from mere trails up to the finest concrete or macadam avenues; (b) railways of every type from portable tracks a foot wide up to 6-track roads like part of the New York Central; (c) waterways, which include both the open ocean and inland waters; and (d) the ways of the air, which are not yet defined but are none the less The vehicles range all the way from pushcarts propelled I by men up to the most highly powered automobiles, trains half a mile long, steamships large enough to accommodate a small city, and air planes that can travel 200 miles an hour. The terminals in a broad sense include anything from a place on the side of a street where an automobile can park up to a freight yard with hundreds of tracks and scores of warehouses, or an enormous dock flanked by huge wharves covered with tracks and equipped with all sorts of complicated loading machinery. The United States contains practically every type of way, vehicle, and terminal, for the complexity of the transportation system is probably greater there than in any other country.
The Development of the American Road rural roads of the United States, in distinction from the city streets, have a total length of about million miles. About 300,000 miles are now nomi nally improved, but in many cases they have been treated only with sand and clay, with gravel, or with so-called waterbound macadam, and are proving entirely inadequate for automobile traffic. So impor tant are the roads that in 1919 about 450 million dollars were spent upon rural roads and bridges in the United States, nearly 200 million being provided by local communities,' more than 200 million by the states, and over 50 million by the Federal Government. In later years still larger sums have been spent, the Federal Government having appro priated about 80 million per year in 1920 and 1921. Various states are also providing large bond issues for the building of roads, for example, Minnesota, 75 million; Illinois and Missouri, GO million each; Michigan, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, 50 million each.
In spite of these large expenditures the roads of the United States and likewise of Canada are much less well developed than those of Western Europe. This is partly because the population in America is relatively sparse and partly because Western Europe had completed an admirable road system before railways began to be used. The United States and Canada on the contrary were just beginning to make good roads when the railways checked this improvement. People invested their money in railways and thought that that would solve their trans portation problems. Today, however, the automobile makes people realize the enormous importance of roads. Moreover, since people now travel long distances by automobile, the roads are ceasing to be a local affair and are beginning to have state-wide and even national importance.. A poor township with almost no population may be traversed by a highway over which hundreds or even thousands of auto mobiles travel each day. The building of 6 or 8 miles of good road to stand such traffic may cost three or four hundred thousand dollars, or possibly as much as the entire value of the property in the township. Obviously the town cannot pay for such a road and should not be asked to. Hence the responsibility for the main roads is rapidly passing from the townships and counties to the states. In fact the responsibility for the most important roads is being assumed by the nation as a whole and it is planned to make the Lincoln Highway from coast to coast a national road of the finest type.
The degree to which good roads are developed is shown fairly well in Fig. 33, which indicates the percentage of surfaced roads. It must be remembered, however, that the degree of excellence of so-called surfaced roads varies greatly in different regions. The map shows that the following factors all help in the development of good roads: (a) a population as in New Jersey, (b) long settlement as in Massachusetts,: (c) a high degree of prosperity as in California, and (d) levelness as in Indiana.