developing out
of the horse omnibus companies and the suburban lines. All this seems
fairly safe prophesying.

And these things, which are quite obviously coming even now, will be
working out their many structural problems when the next phase in their
development begins. The motor omnibus companies competing against the
suburban railways will find themselves hampered in the speed of their
longer runs by the slower horse traffic on their routes, and they will
attempt to secure, and, it may be, after tough legislative struggles,
will secure the power to form private roads of a new sort, upon which
their vehicles will be free to travel up to the limit of their very
highest possible speed. It is along the line of such private tracks and
roads that the forces of change will certainly tend to travel, and along
which I am absolutely convinced they will travel. This segregation of
motor traffic is probably a matter that may begin even in the present
decade.

Once this process of segregation from the high road of the horse and
pedestrian sets in, it will probably go on rapidly. It may spread out
from short omnibus routes, much as the London Metropolitan Railway
system has spread. The motor carrier companies, competing in speed of
delivery with the quickened railways, will conceivably co-operate with
the long-distance omnibus and the hired carriage companies in the
formation of trunk lines. Almost insensibly, certain highly profitable
longer routes will be joined up--the London to Brighton, for example, in
England. And the quiet English citizen will, no doubt, while these
things are still quite exceptional and experimental in his lagging land,
read one day with surprise in the violently illustrated popular
magazines of 1910, that there are now so many thousand miles of these
roads already established in America and Germany and elsewhere. And
thereupon, after some patriotic meditations, he may pull himself
together.

We may even hazard some details about these special roads. For example,
they will be very different from macadamized roads; they will be used
only by soft-tired conveyances; the battering horseshoes, the perpetual
filth of horse traffic, and the clumsy wheels of laden carts will never
wear them. It may be that they will have a surface like that of some
cycle-racing tracks, though since they will be open to wind and weather,
it is perhaps more probable they will be made of very good asphalt
sloped to drain, and st