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A Shilling-a-mile Basis for London Taxicabs.

27th January 1916
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Page 1, 27th January 1916 — A Shilling-a-mile Basis for London Taxicabs.
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

Keywords : Steam Wagon, Taxicab

The more closely we observe the parlous state to which owners of London taxicabs have been reduced. by the war, the more convinced do we become that the 8d. -a-mile basis must go. Sir Edward Henry cannot see his way to sanction war bonuses in the evening hours; he is advised by the Public Carriage Office that practical difficulties are insuperable. Well, and bad. The motorcab industry has gone to the wail; it is not standing at bay, with hack against some support. The fabric of its existence is non est. The present basis has not stood the test of time. It is a delusion and a'Snare. It has snared not only company-mongerers," but owners who have risen from the cab-ranks—the erstwhile driver who, once a robber of extras himself, now, when extras go to the driver, admits that being a master of more • than one cab is a precarious job. There is not, we assert, a living in it for anybody. The actual drivers live on the public. The actual owners_live on capital or credit. The latter is curtailed to the point of cessation.

It is high time, we consider, that the Home Office, or New Scotland Yard, appointed a small committee of investigation. There can be no half-way house between 8d. and is. If there is much delay, the public will have to travel exclusively by omnibuses, trains or tubes. No motorcabs will be left to serve those who really need them.

Adaptation of Control to -Suit Wounded .Soldiers.

. Our sister journal " The Motor," in the course of its active programme, during the past few months, to help wounded soldiers to obtain employment, has advocated the adaptation of control to suit drivers who are minus one or more limbs or portions of a limb or limbs.

• This important suggestion, whilst it has been put forward by " The Motor " primarily in respect of motorcar driving, has:a remarkable measure of application on the commercial side of the industry. We refer to the scope for employment of footless and legless men as drivers of steam wagons. The control of a steam wagon is almost entirely by hand: the exceptions merely prove the rule. We hope :that our steam-wagon manufacturers will remember this potential source of supply to make good deficiencies of men due to enlistment and other causes. Attention will assuredly have to be given to such matters in the ntar future by all manufacturers. We may quite well take this opportunity of pointing out that steam-wagon makers will by DO means enjoy a monopoly of the right to appeal to future buyers on the above-mentioned grounds. Makers of petrol-driven vans and lorries will undoubtedly be alive to the advantage of suitable adaptations and modifications, whereby the existing pedal control shall be effectively transferred, where necessary, for manipulation by hands and arms. The introduction of suitable levers, in order to raise the control of the brake, clutch, and accelerator pedals to elevations and positions such as will enable them to be manipulated, presents no insuperable difficulties.

It will be possible, we feel confident, for many drivers to be secured amongst ex-soldiers who, after the loss of a foot or a leg, have been provided with artificial substitutes. Friends who are versed in anatomical science tell us that artificial feet and legs are more readily used by those who have the misfortune to be obliged to have ree.ourse to them, than: are artificial arms and hands. We are reminded hereanent, however, that a well-known owner of traction-engines in this country has in his employment a driver of a heavy engine who has lost one of his arms, at a point a little below the eltiow, and that the man carries out his duties, satisfactorily with the aid of nothing more elaborate or expensive than a hook at the dismembered extremity.

Let both petrol-vehicle and. steam-vehicle makers be on the qui vim. Many thousands of competent drivers. will one day come back from the various Fronts, but a large proportion of them will go oversew, and work in the Colonies. We do not believe that there will be any unmanageable glut of drivers, and we strongly recommend early and opportune consideration, in each and every drawing-office throughout Great Britain, for adaptations of control to meet the needs which we have indicated. The);,e, may, apart from the claims upon makers to help make room for maimed men back from the wars, prove to be a veritable shortage of motor drivers. Expansions of user will be almost illimitable: not so, without much preparation, the supply of drivers.

We report elsewhere the formation by the R.A.C.

of a Central Committee to deal with problems of after-war employment. The ease is one for urgent attention, as, for a wounded and discharged soldier, the present brings his " after war'' need. If makers who read these lines proceed, as we trust they will, to take a hand in the,scheme of help for men broken in the war, let them send advices of their intentions to the Secretary of the C.M.U.A.

The Price of Petrol.

W3 feel called upon to make reference to a statement which appeared. in " The Times " of the 15th That journal asked the writer, over the tele phone, to accord an interview to a member of its editorial staff, on the 14th inst. The interview when it was published—no proof haying been submitted —was incomplete and " mangled." It made the writer in effect to say that `` all motoring was purely luxury." The writer's statements to the interviewer specifically were that very little motoring was purely a luxury, and he was most careful to point out that only a small proportion of private motoring was in fact " luxury ' motoring. Ile proceeded to explain that the present price of petrol placed undoubted hardships on very large numbers of business and professional men, who must use private motorcars for purposes of locomotion, " The Times " admitted its mistake, and published a correcting paragraph in its issue of the 20th. inst. The matter might • have ended there lint. for the fact that an antoear contemporary chose to suggest that the. Editor of -THE COMMERCIAL MOTOR was apparently one•who.desired to " work up public feeling against the use of any private ears at all." This unjust assertion has called for certain action on our part. We hope everything will end in a friendly way, especially at a time of stress like the present', but it is obviously imfair to any publicist that he should suffer in reputation even by accidental misrepresentation of fact. We hope to have no further occasion to revert to the subject; it is of only indirect interest to commercial users.

The Adoption of the Metric System in Relation to Export Trade.

The war has already brought about changes of great 'magnitude in our social-economic fabric; the political world has been subjected to an upheaval, but not yet to that purification which must come. Many schemes of development, for the fulfilment of which their advocates had expected to labour for many more long years, will coma to a head almost before' We realize that the general sense of the community has endorsed the changes. The adoption of the metric system promises to be one of these revolutionary changes—revolutionary, it must be noted, of nothing but our insular ideas and practices.

British manufacturers and traders have suffered, the world over, in overseas trade and busineSs intercourse, by reason of their continued adherence to a variety of weights and meastires, as well as a nondecimal coinage. . Far be it from us to decry the British systems for purely British use. They impose exercises of some value in mental gymnastics ; they disclose occasional glimpses of interconnection.

The world of trade undoubtedly demands the adoption of the metric system throughout. The practices of the up-to-date branches of the engineering industry in Great Britain, during the past ten years, have disclosed the relative insignificance of the difficulties, when such a change is made, compared with the advantages. The engineering industry of this country is now so well accustomed to the use of metric linear-measurements, that any reversion tothe old British scale is impossible. There can be no return to obsolete methods.. This example of rapid accommodation to the change involved is but one of many, but it is one that will be within the personal knowledge of many readers.

There must be a coming-into-line by Great Britain as a whole, to the end. that the markets of the world shall be more readily open to her, and more surely retained by her manufacturers and traders. Correspondence and dealings must be made as simple as possible, and the adoption of the metric system is an essentially preferable method to the confusion and lack of uniform methods which hamper trade now. The matter is at the moment being prominently brought before Chambers of Commerce throughout the country, and we anticipate that, before long it will be strongly taken up in. the House of Commons.

The L.O.P.K.F. Magneto

and the C.1.M.T., A.S.C.,

At the risk of being accused of riding a hobbyhorse, we are tempted once again to draw attention to the futility of christening proprietary articles, be they road wheels or oil-hardening steels, with inappropriate selections from the alphabet.

,On the occasion of the reading of Mr. Watson's excellent paper on. roar . axles, before the Institute of Automobile Engineers recently, Colonel Crompton.confessed that he did not recognize what was meant by the letters ' C.M.'' as a description for a special class of road wheel. We blush at time mere suggestion that he might even have pleaded the same ignorance had the reference been to a newspaper. Later in the evening the Chairmami. queried the author of the paper as to his meaning. when he drev1i attention to the excellent properties. of a steel known as " K.E.S. 105."

Since we first referred to the inadvisability of. choosing this ready but confusing method of in-. dication, we have been launched into an age of abbreviations, and there are now hundreds of thousands of erstwhile civilians who are more or less.. accustomed to dominate the greater part of their communications by means of initials. Colonel Crompton admitted his familiarity with the magic• letters A.S.C., ML, but in spite,of this confession of familiarity with military terminology, we suspect 1-liat some of the pseudo-algebraic formuloe which masquerade as titles for unobtrusive units would puzzle him to find an interpretation or solution— what of the following, for instance, Bet. A.S.C., M.T. driver, 071593, with D.A.D.O.S., care BEE.? When we last drew attention to this subject,. confusion was even then by no means uncommon between carburetter, magneto, shock absorber, and other specialists, but when the thousands of A.S.C., MT., ex-civilians once again resume any civilian occupations, unless a firm stand he taken, we shall promptly be lost in a confusion of such cryptic symbols. • • We make this further plea for originality in the interests of efficiency, and to save ourselves, to say nothing of our numerous friends, trouble in the future. The commercial-vehicle industry will have much that is military about it for many years to come, but we can quite well do without strings of initials, confusing in their similarity, .purporting to be distinctive names for proprietary articles. May we be saved from theL.O.P.K.F. magneto!' Q.E.D:


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