Book Description

Excerpt from Highways and Highway Transportation The following pages on Highways and Highway Trans portation do not pretend to be an exhaustive treatise on the subject, but rather a glimpse of the vast development ofthe humble road and its office as an agency for transportation. Possibly the grandeur of the mountains is best appreciated by one who lives among them, who climbs their acclivitous heights, who daily experiences their power and majesty, and measures their magnitude by grim muscular exertion. But, even so, it would be foolish to contend that he who gets his information from the seat of a Pullman car receives no benefit from the hasty glimpse, or, that his imagination is not quickened and cultured by the experience. In writ ing this book, then, I have had constantly in mind the myriads of people who have not the time, and possibly not the facilities, to search the pages of the literature of the past for the origin and development, or to work out their present importance, of our amplification of roads and of road uses. It is felt that many of these people laudably desire a conversational knowledge of the origin, evolution and present status of highway transportation, even though it be glimpsed by a'very rapid passage through a very large subject. The primary objects have therefore been, to sketch briefly and simply the development of the transportation systems of the United States, to indicate their importance and mutual relations, to present some practical methods used in the operation of highway transport and to make occa sional suggestions for the betterment of the road as a usable machine for the benefit and pleasure of mankind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.