. Electric railway journal . ilways exhaustedtheir earning power ? From anational viewpoint this questionmust recur continually to the mind ofevery one sincerely interested in thegreat business of transportation. Theanswer seems today to encompass thehopes and fears of the entire industry,to the perfection of which so muchenergy and capital have been given dur-ing the last three decades. But haveall the possibilities within our graspbeen uncovered? Has developmentwork come to its climax? And if so,what of the future? The history of transportation devel-opment is a romance perhaps only halftold
. Electric railway journal . ilways exhaustedtheir earning power ? From anational viewpoint this questionmust recur continually to the mind ofevery one sincerely interested in thegreat business of transportation. Theanswer seems today to encompass thehopes and fears of the entire industry,to the perfection of which so muchenergy and capital have been given dur-ing the last three decades. But haveall the possibilities within our graspbeen uncovered? Has developmentwork come to its climax? And if so,what of the future? The history of transportation devel-opment is a romance perhaps only halftold, the story largely winding itselfabout strong personalities and to alarge degree illustrating the theory ofthe survival of the fittest. Systemshave come and gone—toll roads, stagecoaches, horse-drawn canal boats, theMississippi River packet, the Americanclipper, railroads of hybrid gages,cable cars, storage battery cars, sur-face contact systems, etc. Each new agency has developed itsown peculiar service possibilities and. (C) Maczene, VhicapoJ. R. BIBBINS ♦Abstract of paper presented at the an-nual convention of the American Elec-tric Railway Association, Atlantic City,N. J., Oct. 3-6, 1921. operating methods. The economic acidtest of all has been the ultimate abilityof the industry to stand squarely onits own feet and perpetuate itself auto-matically through external and inter-nal development. And the wholetendency of this development over thelong period has been better and moreservice per unit of revenue, higherspeed, improved efficiency and equip-ment, more stable employment of capi-tal, greater dependence of the publicupon the service rendered and a higherorder of utilization of the operatingman power. Shall this same acid testbe applied in the future or have we amore refined formula? The strangest aspect of this trans-port development is that the electric railways costing about $3 per dollar ofannual gross revenue have confinedthemselves to passenger business alone,w
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