Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/812

790 It is to be hoped that the complete statistics relating to rapid transit in cities will enable the public to determine, with reasonable accuracy, the relative economy of the different powers used. This is a question which is vital to the interests of city and suburban communities, and which leads to the ethical consideration of the problem of rapid transit. That power must eventually be used by which passengers can be transported from their homes to their places of business and return at the least possible expense, and the greatest possible safety commensurate with high speed.

The necessity of living in sanitary localities, in moral and well-regulated communities, where children can have all the advantages of church and school, of light and air, becomes more and more evident as municipal governments undertake to solve the problems that are pressing upon them. If it be desirable to distribute the population of congested districts through country districts, means must be provided for safe, rapid, and cheap transit to the country districts; or, inversely, if it be desirable to build up the suburban areas, the people must be supplied with cheap and convenient means of reaching the localities within which they earn their living.

The reduction of fares, through improved means of rapid transit, however desirable, is really a minor question. It is probably true that by a slight reduction from a five-cent fare the head of a family engaged in mechanical labor, earning perhaps five or six hundred dollars per annum, might save enough to pay taxes, or to offset church and society assessments, or to furnish his family with boots and shoes, in any event extending his power pro tanto for the elevation of his family; but he does more than this when speed is taken into consideration. By the old methods of transit from suburbs to the heart of a city a working-man going into the city of Boston was practically obliged, while working ten hours at his usual occupation, to spend an hour on the horse-railway, when now, on one line, by the use of the electric car, he can go to and return from his place of work in half that time, thereby actually adding to his own time half an hour each day, practically reducing his working time from eleven hours to ten and a half hours without reduction of wages and without increased expense for transportation. The question of rapid transit, therefore, as seen by this simple illustration, becomes an ethical consideration; for if there is anything to be gained by adding to the time which men have at their disposal for their own purposes, for intercourse with their families, for social improvement, for everything for which leisure is supposed to be used, then the question of rapid transit is one of far greater importance than that of saving money either to the man who uses transportation or to the company that secures dividends upon its stock. I