BIG CITY TRAFFIC PROBLEMS

With all the traffic officers and signal systems, the task of handling the ever-flowing stream of motor cars and trucks grows apace. Some 42,000 motor vehicles pass the crossing at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street in New York every twenty-four hours ; 4,500 in a single busy hour is not an unusual occurrence.

The block-signal system on Fifth Avenue, with traffic moving in a series of stops and starts, controlled from a central tower, has accomplished much, but even it is destined to prove inadequate. Boulevard traffic regulation, based on the Fifth Avenue practice, has also helped in many cities, but here again inadequacy is only a few years away.

Propositions are now coming from the foremost authorities for the establishment of express streets, where cars will move at rates of from forty to fifty miles an hour, and where gates will be established at intersections, just as at railway crossings. Commissioner Harriss, of New York, says that New York needs three north-and-south highways of this character, with traffic moving on each of them in three parallel lines in both directions. These streets, he says, will have to be four hundred feet wide and elevated in special instances.

Chicago is installing a synchronized traffic-control system similar to that now in operation in New York. This system of towers will extend south on Michigan Boulevard from Randolph Street, with the master tower at Jackson.

So great is the congestion in the famous Loop District in Chicago that proposals are being made to take all pedestrians off of the street level and to pro-vide second-story sidewalks for them. The streets could then be widened to the building lines, almost doubling their present curb-to-curb width, and the sidewalks would be reached by stairways, ramps, and elevators. Vehicular and pedestrian traffic, each out of the way of the other, could move twice as fast as now and many times more safely.

It is pointed out that such a plan would give two display window stories instead of one, and that the thousands of people who now avoid the Loop District because of its congestion would come back to trade there, their reclaimed business being large enough to more than compensate the property owners for the cost of the change.

The day may not be so far in the distance when the horse-drawn vehicle will be legislated off the crowded city thoroughfares, to lessen congestion, just as heavy traffic has been banished from the boulevards to protect the motoring public. Likewise, the clay will inevitably come when truck traffic will be separated from passenger-car traffic on the busier high-ways through the countryside, just as is now the case on the fine Roosevelt Boulevard out of Philadelphia.

But whenever the point of saturation is reached, and by whatever route, it will not come before all manufacturing facilities available to-day will be kept busy making replacements. The average life of a motor car is six years. If i8,000,000 cars shall prove the limit, replacement requirements will call for three millions a year, which represent the present annual production.

THE AUTOMOBILE AN EFFICIENT MECHANISM

There is little wonder that the auto-mobile has caught the imagination of the American people. A race of individualists, the sense of power to go where they will, in their own way, has a deep appeal. Further than that, a mechanically minded people, they find a thrill in the possession of a mechanism whose purring motor bowls them along the highways at a pace that exhilarates and brings a change of scene every minute. They have a sort of subconscious reverence for its mechanical merit.

And well they may! Consider what a present-day model automobile is. Its engine might be likened to a Gatling gun capable of propelling itself a mile a minute and, if it be a "six," of firing nine thousand shots a minute in doing so, with-out noise, undue heat, or disturbing wear, but rather with a smooth hum or a peaceful purr that is music to the ear of the motorist. A "four," even at twenty miles per hour, fires two thousand shots a minute.

The crankshaft must do three thousand full turns in the average car to carry it a mile, and each piston must make six thousand trips through its cylinder, with a stop between each of them, in making that mile. At sixty miles you ask each valve to open, admit the live, or discharge the dead gas, and close again, in 1/2oo of a second. And they are expected to do it with clockwork regularity.

The car also brings to its owner an individual light-and-power plant with which he may start his car and light his path. It gives him a clutch that lets him make or break the power between his engine and his car at will and in a twinkling; a gearshift that lets him choose between power and speed and makes the change in a moment ; brakes that give him complete control of a ton and a half vehicle with a slight pressure of the foot or a light pull of the hand. It furnishes him with tires made of a rubber composition nearly three times as durable as leather and fully three times as resistant to a sand blast as iron.

Compared with any previous instrument of transportation, the automobile is a wonderful device. A railroad engine, made to run over the smoothest roadbed in the world and with comparatively slow-moving parts, must be overhauled at the end of every run. On the other hand, given gas and oil, grease and water, in proper quantities, the "trusty old bus" will hum along for two hundred miles a day, willing to give you, if it is a "six," more than half a million flywheel revolutions, nearly two million sparks, and more than seven million piston stops and starts, and be ready to repeat the performance on the morrow and many other morrows.

EXPERIMENTAL TRANSPORTATION TWO DECADES AGO

The blacksmith and the owner of a one-hoss shay survey with disdain the new-fangled machine which presumes to travel rubber-shod over rough highways. And for many seasons, before the day of perfected motor and of service station, it was the horse or the mule which pulled the new invention out of mudholes and sand beds when engine balked and tires subsided.

BESIDE A MOUNTAIN OF ICE CAST UPON THE SHORE OF GREEN BAY, NEAR ESCANABA, MICHIGAN

Ninety per cent of the public buy their cars from 20 per cent manufacturers. The other 80 per cent of the manufacturers divide the remaining 10 per cent of the sales among them. But catering to the 10 per cent who want something different means a trade worth more than half a billion dollars a year.

HAULING PULP WOOD IN THE MAINE WOODS

By combining truck, tractor, and bob-sled, the Maine lumbermen have found a practical way to move pulp wood, used in the manufacture of paper, over the ice and snow in winter.

AN AUTOMATIC HIDE-MEASURING MACHINE

This mechanism is able to compute instantly the square footage of a hide with all its irregularities. As the hide passes through, every square inch is automatically noted and the total registered on the dial in front of the operator.

PROBLEMS THAT REMAIN TO BE SOLVED

Yet, far as our automotive engineers have gone in making a dependable, fool-proof, vibration - defying, long - lasting motor car, they realize that much distance remains yet to be traveled before the goal of excellence they are striving for can be reached.

To begin with, our engines to-day de-liver us only ten cents' worth of power for every dollar's worth of gas they burn. Their pistons must travel twenty inches, on the basis of one explosion to every four strokes, to deliver five inches of push to their load.

Likewise, our cars ask us to move from 400 to 5,000 pounds of dead weight per person carried, depending on whether they be loaded "flivvers" or big sedans with only the owner inside. These and other items in the present car's make-up stand as a perpetual challenge to the auto-motive engineer, and he is addressing himself vigorously to the task of correcting then.

RUNNING DOWN THE "KNOCK"

When cars were first made, the builders simply bored holes in blocks, put pistons in them, and had engines. They had only a general idea of what happens when a spark is applied to a compressed charge of gas in an engine cylinder. When the explosion took place under high compression, there came a knock that seriously reduced the engine's efficiency. All sorts of explanations for this knock were offered.

Then Mr. C. F. Kettering and his associates of the General Motors Research Laboratories decided to look into cylinders and see what does actually happen when a spark ignites a charge of gas.

They built a glass engine, and through its walls were able to see what occurred. They found that in an explosion under high compression there is a secondary detonation whose energy waves move seventy times as fast as those of the primary explosion. It is the conflict of these two series of energy waves that makes the power-destroying "knock."

How to overcome this detonation be-came the next problem. The whole list of elements and compounds known to the laboratory was gone over and every one that offered any hope was tested. It was finally found that by adding tetra ethyl lead and a second compound in the pro-portion of about five thimblefuls to the gallon the secondary detonation was entirely avoided, and smooth running, even under the high compression beyond the control of a retarded spark, was made possible.

It has been found that the new combination makes five gallons of gasoline do the work of six, and the engineers assert that by reducing the size of the cylinder and the stroke of the piston it will be possible to produce higher-speed engines that will more than double the present mileage obtained from a gallon of gas.

On the other hand, there are engineers who say that while this will make possible the saving in gas, it will result in a corresponding wear on cylinder walls by the increased distance the pistons must travel to produce a mile of transportation.

The reduction of weight in cars is a very important item in the future plans of automobile design. One noted manufacturer says that unnecessary weight is as useless in a car as a cockade on a coachman's hat, if not more so, since the cockade at least serves the purpose of identification. The reduction of weight means smaller motors, lighter axles, and less cumbersome frames and running gear, all of which promise less expensive tires and decreasing operating costs.

A FLEET OF TRUCKS ON THE COURTHOUSE PLAZA IN BALTIMORE EN ROUTE FROM DETRIOT TO FRANCE

EVEN THE MOUNTAIN COTTAGE FEELS THE TOUCH OF THE AUTOMOBILE

Washington County, Maryland, sends its free library service up into the foothills of the mountains to carry the benediction of books to the poor.

FINISHING THE METAL WORK ON THE BODIES OF A QUALITY MAKE OF CAR

Such bodies as these require about a hundred days from raw material to finished product. The new steel, baked-enameled bodies go through the factory in less than two days. 

MINIATURE "TWIN-LEG" SEDAN

A Boston mechanic built his son a toy automobile with everything orthodox save an engine. The young motorist insisted on finding a "cop" who would "arrest" him.

<< Previous    1  2  3  [4]  5    Next >>