Anticipations | Page 5

to wait--unless, which is highly probable, one sleeps aboard.[7]...
And thirdly there will be the motor omnibus, attacking or developing out of the horse
omnibus companies and the suburban lines. All this seems fairly safe prophesying.
And these things, which are quite obviously coming even now, will be working out their
many structural problems when the next phase in their development begins. The motor
omnibus companies competing against the suburban railways will find themselves
hampered in the speed of their longer runs by the slower horse traffic on their routes, and
they will attempt to secure, and, it may be, after tough legislative struggles, will secure
the power to form private roads of a new sort, upon which their vehicles will be free to
travel up to the limit of their very highest possible speed. It is along the line of such
private tracks and roads that the forces of change will certainly tend to travel, and along
which I am absolutely convinced they will travel. This segregation of motor traffic is
probably a matter that may begin even in the present decade.
Once this process of segregation from the high road of the horse and pedestrian sets in, it
will probably go on rapidly. It may spread out from short omnibus routes, much as the
London Metropolitan Railway system has spread. The motor carrier companies,
competing in speed of delivery with the quickened railways, will conceivably co-operate
with the long-distance omnibus and the hired carriage companies in the formation of
trunk lines. Almost insensibly, certain highly profitable longer routes will be joined
up--the London to Brighton, for example, in England. And the quiet English citizen will,
no doubt, while these things are still quite exceptional and experimental in his lagging
land, read one day with surprise in the violently illustrated popular magazines of 1910,
that there are now so many thousand miles of these roads already established in America
and Germany and elsewhere. And thereupon, after some patriotic meditations, he may
pull himself together.
We may even hazard some details about these special roads. For example, they will be

very different from macadamized roads; they will be used only by soft-tired conveyances;
the battering horseshoes, the perpetual filth of horse traffic, and the clumsy wheels of
laden carts will never wear them. It may be that they will have a surface like that of some
cycle-racing tracks, though since they will be open to wind and weather, it is perhaps
more probable they will be made of very good asphalt sloped to drain, and still more
probable that they will be of some quite new substance altogether--whether hard or
resilient is beyond my foretelling. They will have to be very wide--they will be just as
wide as the courage of their promoters goes--and if the first made are too narrow there
will be no question of gauge to limit the later ones. Their traffic in opposite directions
will probably be strictly separated, and it will no doubt habitually disregard complicated
and fussy regulations imposed under the initiative of the Railway Interest by such official
bodies as the Board of Trade. The promoters will doubtless take a hint from suburban
railway traffic and from the current difficulty of the Metropolitan police, and where their
ways branch the streams of traffic will not cross at a level but by bridges. It is easily
conceivable that once these tracks are in existence, cyclists and motors other than those
of the constructing companies will be able to make use of them. And, moreover, once
they exist it will be possible to experiment with vehicles of a size and power quite beyond
the dimensions prescribed by our ordinary roads--roads whose width has been entirely
determined by the size of a cart a horse can pull.[8]
Countless modifying influences will, of course, come into operation. For example, it has
been assumed, perhaps rashly, that the railway influence will certainly remain jealous and
hostile to these growths: that what may be called the "Bicycle Ticket Policy" will be
pursued throughout. Assuredly there will be fights of a very complicated sort at first, but
once one of these specialized lines is in operation, it may be that some at least of the
railway companies will hasten to replace their flanged rolling stock by carriages with
rubber tyres, remove their rails, broaden their cuttings and embankments, raise their
bridges, and take to the new ways of traffic. Or they may find it answer to cut fares,
widen their gauges, reduce their gradients, modify their points and curves, and woo the
passenger back with carriages beautifully hung and sumptuously furnished, and all the
convenience and luxury of a club. Few people would mind being an hour or so longer
going to Paris from London, if the railway travelling was neither