Recent Great 'Advances in the Application of Motor Power to Municipal Work.
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ADEVELOPMENT of considerable magnitude during the past seven years has been the conversion of transport and public-service methods employed by municipalities from horse traction and manual power to the considerably more efficient mechanical power, and, with the acquisition of the facilities that have made for this greater efficiency, there has grown the desire to effect material improvements and to adopt substantially higher stan dards in the service rendered by each department.
This is to be observed, for example, in certain towns which have discarded, wholly or partly, their tramway systems and have adopted buses or trolley-buses in their place. The first benefit asso ciated with such a reform is the removal of tram lines and the relaying of the roadway. In a town this at once effects an extraordinary improvement in the appearance of a street, and, with a smooth roadway, it is found possible and practicable to use mechanical sweepers and collectors and to obtain full value therefrom. The acquisition of a sweeper and collector provides the borough engineer with the means not only to cleanse the surface of the main streets, but to extend the work to others which, when manual labour had been employed, had never been swept. Thus, an improvement in transport leads to an important reform in health services.
. The mechanical gully emptier is another modern appliance that has brought about a betterrnmt of • conditions in cities and towns. The old method of ladling by hand the sludge from a gully, depositing it in the roadway and thence shovelling it into carts, which dripped foul liquid all the way to the tip, was obviously not free from objections, but it was the best that was known. The motor gully • emptier removes the sludge by suction without it seeing the light of day (figuratively speaking), and enables the gullies to be attended to more fre quently and more gullies to be cleared and resealed in each week. Considerable ingenuity has been expended on gully-emptier design and remarkable efficiency has been attained.
Refuse collection in a borough is now more fre quent and more regular, and, if the collecting system operates in association with a destructor plant, a certain amount of the cost of one of the most expensive services rendered by the authorities to the community may be recovered, the heat generated being employed in the production of electrical energy. In this issue we describe some of the competitive systems of refuse collection, all of which are being discussed this week at the annual conference of the Institution of Cleansing Superintendents which is being held in Birmingham.
The greatest of the developments in mechanical road transport during the past two or three years has been in connection with the establishment of municipal bus services and in the conversion of tramway undertakings to trolley-bus systems. At the close of 1918 there were 26 municipal bus services in the country, and it had taken 18 years to reach that stage of municipal enterprise. To-day no fewer than 75 municipalities conduct motorbus services, eight of them solely employing buses in providing the local passenger transport facilities in their districts. The services provided by these 75 authorities carried over 200,000,000 passengers in the financial year ending March 31st last, and they showed (as is set out in an important article in this issue, which gives figures that have never before been worked out) a substantial profit.
Whilst this issue is mainly devoted to the use of the commercial motor and motor appliance in municipal work, the articles appearing in it are but typical of many which are included in the journal in the course of the year. Every interesting and important development is dealt with, and various phases in commercial-vehicle operation in municipal work and in industry discussed in our pages will be found-to be of moment to municipal officials, who, we are pleased to know, are regular students of The Commercial Motor.
The Difficulty of Centralizing Transport Demands.
ACURIOUS fact and one which is apt to create
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surprise is that difficulty is so often experi surprise is that difficulty is so often experi enced in maintaining (in the sense of sustaining) a centralized transport department in a municipality or in a business which is divided into many departments with materially different interests. In theory it would appear that if the various departments of a municipality (and we will keep • to this example in this our Municipal Number) have the need for regular or occasional transport, it would be better to establish a department under which all the transport facilities should be grouped and which should maintain the mechanical efficiency and the readiness of the fleet and should provide vehicles for the jobs of all the departments of the municipality, thus securing the greatest possible fleet economy by the elimination of wasted journeys and by the avoidance of idle hours, 'both on the part of the vehicles and of their drivers.
The scheme has been tried in many a district and has failed in a number of cases. In a few cases it has succeeded and it has been interesting to endeavour to find why success comes or failure ensues. Let us say that we have observed efforts at like co-ordination in the use of staff, material, plant or facilities in other businesses than transport and have noticed that failure is far more likely than success.
Some of the trouble comes from above. The transport department in_ a municipality is purely a spending department, and a finance committee sitting in judgment upon it tends to repress it and c20 to curb its activities and thus, unwittingly, reduce its efficiency by depriving it of the needed margin in personnel and vehicles, in its store of spare parts and facilities for prompt repair. The transport manager, seeing the weakness of the position of his department (and, incidentally, of his own position !), works it as a revenue-earning department by charging each department for every job done and he sees no reason why he should not charge the standard rates for haulage and carrying. But in doing this he places his fleet on a level with the fleets of outside hauliers, all of whom have reserve vehicles and a degree of flexibility of operation which he does not possess. Thus, when he would endeavour to co-ordinate the transport work of all the depaqments by taking a load outwards for, say, the highways department and bringing one back for the water department, the latter refuses to suffer the delay involved and employs an outside contractor in order to save an hour or two. As they are to be charged full haulage rates, the departments will not "give and take" among themselves, many jobs are lost to the transport department at busy times and at slack times it has no other customer to work for, whilst complaints about "never being able to get a lorry when we want one" are rife. The results of all this are continual internal friction and a " loss " on the transport department in the course of the year.
A man of strong personality, a genius of a business man, a man of supreme tact can sometimes make a success of a transport department (and, as we say, it has been done), but with human nature what it is it must be a nerveracking occupation,
The Importance of Keeping Correct Records.
TN the Interests of economy,, efficiency and -I-rapidity in all classes of transport, and particularly in that which concerns municipalities, it is essential that really accurate records be kept of vehicle performance and, if possible, every vehicle In service should be equipped with some form of recording device. Where the conditions warrant it, instruments which provide a complete chart of running often prove most advantageous, as they show where delays, often preventible, are occurring. With these instruments it is not essential to equip each machine. One or more instruments may be used periodically on different units of a fleet. Whether or not these be employed we are strongly of the opinion that some form of mileage rec2rder should be provided on every vehicle, and an efficient type which obviates the need for flexible drives is the odometer, models of which can be supplied by various makers either for the hub cap or the worm tailshaft.
It is, of course, of little use. fitting such instruments if full advantage be not taken of the information they provide, and the resulting figures should be entered up at the conclusion of each day's work, unless they are employed merely for such purposes as the computation of tyre mileage.
It is surprising how many errors are made in mileage estimates based solely upon map reading or the opinions of individuals, and it is hardly to be expected that claims, say, for low tyre mileage, can be met in a satisfactory manner if they are not substantiated by reliable figures. Again, when efforts are made to reduce petrol consumption, correct mileage records should certainly be available.