The New York Rapid-transit Subway

Proceedings.] DISCUSSION ON NEW YORK SUBWAY. 87 small nucleus. It might be a complete circle like London or Paris Mr.Nacassoy. or, like Chicago, simply a semi-circle. The growth of a city seemed to depend entirely upon facilities for locomotion. In early days the City of London was small, with business and residential quarters combined. When facilities for locomotion were afforded, the business centre gradually separated from the residential centre, leaving the businesses in the middle, with the residences outside. In modern Manhattan the business district was at the extreme south, the shopping district was farther up the island, the higher-class residential district was as nearly as possible in the centre, and at the other end there were the suburban and middle- class residential portions. That made a vast difference in the mileage of railways which had to be constructed to afford adequate facilities for locomotion, and also in what might be called the liding- capacity of the inhabitants. In a long narrow island like Manhattan, where the main travelling was north and south—where the persons who lived at the nortli end were forced to travel in the morning perhaps 10 miles to the south of the island and back again in the evening—railways could be laid out to secure the maximum traffic per mile of route. In London the lines necessarily radiated from the centre and were widely separated at the periphery of the circle, a condition which made for maximum route- mileage and one likely to afford the least return to the promoters of the railways. So far as the cheapness of construction went, what obtained in New York was absolutely no criterion at all of cost in other places, and no deductions could be drawn from New York as to the returns in London on tube or subway railways. In the latter connection there was another condition rather difficult to explain. Taking elongated cities like San Francisco, the people inside the city appeared to travel about three hundred and fifty times per head per annum. In Philadelphia, a less elongated city, but with a larger population, and therefore normally with a greater riding- capacity, they travelled only about two hundred and seventy times per head per annum. In a circular-shaped city, even where there was a much larger population, the number of times people travelled per head per annum was very much less; in London it was only about one hundred and eighty-nine times. It was very difficult to discover why that curious tendency existed. Several German inquirers had attempted to give an explanation, and one of the explanations was the following:—A population, of say, 100,000, dis- tributed uniformly over a given area, would use the means for locomotion a given number of times per head per annum. If that population was compressed into a smaller area, as was usually the case