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40
October, 1943
romantic luck. It is one of the few readymade air raid shelters in the Kansas City area, another being the tram tunnel which runs under it, and still another the buried tunnel running diagonally across the street, northwest to southeast at Eleventh street and Baltimore avenue, from the Continental hotel to a parking lot where the Hotel Baltimore was until a few years ago. (When the florid old Willis Wood
theater occupied the site of the Continental, thirsty theatre-goers used to toddle across to the Baltimore bar between the acts, not getting wet anywhere except inside.)
All the street car engineers wanted to do with their almost forgotten tunnel was to waterproof it once more, to protect the lower boring. So it sometimes goes with the dreams of romantic minds.
SPEED BREEDS TRAVEL
e have been reading predictions as to the future of air travel — not the speculations of imaginative writers but engineers* statistics.
Estimates vary. Right now, commercial air travel in the United States is measured at about 1.9 billion "passenger miles" — higher than any peace-time year. Five years from now, according to one authority, it will total "upwards of ? to 6 billion per annum." Another • — • more precise — submits the figure of 4.115 billion.
Will this cut into railroad . . . bus . . . passenger automobile traffic?
During normal pre-war years United States railroads averaged about 25 billion passenger miles annually. In recent years busses have accounted for 10 billion or thereabouts, and the mileage of passenger vehicles has varied from 185 billion in depression years to 264 billion in 1941. Assuming no new travel, this is the "area of competition."
The rails are the most vulnerable to competition for passenger traffic via air, though busses will suffer, in some degree, for planners of air-transportation after the war are projecting short-haul, feeder lines. However, much of the increased airline mileage, it is predicted, will come from new travel mar\ets. For example, many a
business man will fly from New York to San Francisco — or Mexico City, or Vancouver— and back (overnight each way) who would find the same trip impracticable if he had to make it by train; and who would never think of making the journey at all if he had to do it by stagecoach. Thus speed breeds travel. In the opinion of many of the experts whose compilations of statistics we have cited, increased air travel will actually stimulate all modes of transportation — air, rail, bus and private car — and freight as well as passenger. For, in the wake of people move the goods people buy, the food they eat, the materials for their housing — (even if they are transients) and the raw stuff they may use in manufacturing. In the opposite direction move the products of their farms and factories and swarms of the very people themselves, pleasure-bent or business-bent — but traveling!
There is reassurance, in such opinions as these, that traditional investment values will not succumb hastily to the emotional appeal of a dramatic new industry; that good management, in all fields of transportation, will continue the prosaic business of paying bond interest, debts as they mature and reasonable dividends. — From "Security," the news letter of the First 'Hdtional BanJf.