Electrification! Intensive passenger operation! We have not as yet even scratched the surface of their possibilities. All the way across the country lie development opportunities such as these. There is a rare one in St. Louis--the transformation of the ancient and dirty Eads Bridge over the Mississippi, with the far more dirty tunnel that threads the very heart of the city on the way to the huge Union Station, by changing from the steam locomotive to the electric one, or the multiple-unit train. This done, a rapid transit railroad is established automatically, into two States, from the easternmost part of East St. Louis, across the Eads Bridge, as we have just seen, and through the heart of the town in the tunnel that has threaded it for more than fifty years--what a splendid chance for a big downtown station at Broadway and another under the old post-office!--then out from the tunnel again transversely through the train-shed of the Union Station, out Mill Creek valley along the Wabash right-of-way to the smart West End of St. Louis, through Forest Park and Delmar and branching perhaps off to University City and even far St. Charles. It all is almost as easy and as simple as the nose on your face. While the result on the street traffic of congested downtown St. Louis would be appreciable from the beginning. * * * * * The rapid multiplication of the motor-car in the large American city seemingly has brought no larger problem in its wake than this very one of street traffic. In truth the streets of New Yorks, our St. Louises, our Chicagos, our Philadelphias, and our Bostons were never designed for the operations of fleets of vehicles, each bringing but one or two or three or four persons through them. Two or three years ago I rode through the streets of Detroit with a motor-car manufacturer of international reputation. We were speaking of the grave difficulties, political and economic, with which the local traction company was then laboring. "We won't see these yellow cars in our Detroit streets eighteen or twenty years hence," he proclaimed quite grandly, with a wave of his hand at them. I disagreed with him. "In no city that two decades hence proclaims itself as truly metropolitan," I argued, "can people come to and go from their work in its business heart in their own automobiles--none save the comparative few who can afford the luxury of a chauffeur. Adequate downtown garage facilities for an American city of a million people or more are almost out of the question. For these cities transportation must continue in mass rather than singly. It is not only possible but probable that in many of them the building of subways or the extension of existing ones will yet render possible the cleaning of the surfaces of downtown streets for motor-car traffic exclusively. In which case the trolley merely becomes a sub-surface unit, and continues purely as a civic necessity."