Page:Motoring Magazine and Motor Life February 1915.djvu/19

, 1915. An Era of Good Roads.

California has entered fully on a good roads era. The State Highway forms the main artery in one of the best systems of good roads in the West, if not in the Union.

The various counties through which this passes, have enthusiastically joined in the good work, and we have, radiating from it, county roads, many of almost equal excellence, reaching into interior points of such counties.

This great work will be continued, having once been well started, until every remote portion of our State will be within reach, through most excellent roads, available summer and winter.

Two great causes have contributed largely to this improvement in our highways: First, the demands of the automobile; secondly, the great exposition.

The open winters of California and her glorious summers made the automobile more available in California than in other States, and there has been a much larger per centage of these machines purchased here than in any other State in the Union. This gave rise to the urgent demand for better roads and the agitation, once started, grew in intensity until the demands were filled.

The prospective influx of visitors during this exposition year put us on our mettle and spurred us to quicker action. We shall have tens of thousands of visitors here during the year and we do not want them to go away with a bad opinion of California enterprise. So we have made them excellent roads to travel over which they come.

A third, the most important object of all, but which would never have had any effect but for the others, is the opening of our markets to the producers. This, after all, will be the greatest benefit which our good roads will bestow upon the State.

Our farmers are now enabled to reach the markets with their products at any time of the year, at least from such sections as the improved roads reach, and they can take advantage of the demand for products as they never could, where the roads are impassable from mud and storms for several months in the year.

Good roads are advantageous to the automobilist, a pleasure to the visitor, but they will prove of the greatest pecuniary benefit to the farmer after all.

Some framers have got them and appreciate them, all others will have them and it will not be many years before there will be few places so remote that they will not be within easy reach of the traveler the year around, or over which the farmer will not be able to reach his market at any time he may choose to go.&mdash;Stockton Record.

Tulare County and its Roads.

That construction work on the State Highway through Tulare County should begin as soon as is consistent, but that the present routing should be changed to go by way of Mooney Grove, was the sense of the delegates at the meeting of the Tulare County Highway Association held here recently.

The sentiment of the meeting in this regard was opened by a motion by W. P. Boone of Dinuba to the effect that if the supervisors could get together on a routing acceptable to the State Highway Commission that they present that routing, and an agreement to finance the bonds and build the bridges along that route.

The arguments on the highway situation were widely varied from the contention of Senator Larkins, who thought that the roads should be built by direct tax, each supervisorial district spending $150,000 per year on better roads for their sections, to the suggestion of W. B. Nichols of Dinuba that the certain parts of the country wanting good roads and willing to build them get together, formulate a special road district and go to bat with the proposition again. Others favored county unity and said the best thing was to hold the entire county together and get good roads for the whole county.