A Springfield, Mass., contemporary. discussing the advance of the motor-vehicles in the United States, advances the opinion that it will "take the U.S.A. half a century of progressive road building and improved paving before any but the few largest cities in the United States could utilise motor-waggons for the ordinary purposes of traffic."

Our contemporary continues :— "The recent tremendous snow-falls remind us that conditions are likely from time to time to arise in all northern cities under which the motorwaggons would be as helpless as a bicycle on a sandy road. It was more than 24 hours after the recent nine-inch snowfall in New York before even the main avenues of travel in the business section of the metropolis were cleared of snow, and it was several days later before the rest of the city proper was cleared, to say nothing of the other boroughs of Greater New York.

The spectacle must have given Mr. Croker and the other would-be revolutionists of the trucking and passenger carrying business in New York a very bad half hour's reflections. If their plan had been effected and motorcarriages and waggons had entirely supplanted horse-drawn vehicles in this city, there could not have been a pound of freight or a single carriage passenger moved in the city for many hours, and the blockade of traffic and delay of business would have been perfectly intolerable."

Croker was in the newspapers in 1899 after a disagreement with Jay Gould's son, George Gould, president of the Manhattan Elevated Railroad Company, when Gould refused Croker's attempt to attach compressed-air pipes to the Elevated company's structures. Croker owned many shares of the New York Auto-Truck Company, a company which would have benefited from the arrangement. In response to the refusal, Croker used Tammany influence to create new city laws requiring drip pans under structures in Manhattan at every street crossing and the requirement that the railroad run trains every five minutes with a $100 violation for every instance.

Labels: 1901

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