Remarks on the Present System of Road Making: With Observations, Deduced from Practice and Experience, With a View to a Revision of the Existing Laws, and the Introduction of Improvement in the Method of Making, Repairing, and Preserving Roads, and Defending the Road Funds from Misapplication. Seventh Edition, Carefully Revised, With an Appendix, and Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, June 1823, with Extracts from the EvidenceMcAdam, John Loudon
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Remarks on the Present System of Road Making: With Observations, Deduced from Practice and Experience, With a View to a Revision of the Existing Laws, and the Introduction of Improvement in the Method of Making, Repairing, and Preserving Roads, and Defending the Road Funds from Misapplication. Seventh Edition, Carefully Revised, With an Appendix, and Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, June 1823, with Extracts from the Evidence
McAdam, John Loudon
Macadam roads; Roads -- Great Britain
Do you consider that the present regulations in regard to exemptions of
tolls to waggons with broad wheels, are justified by sound policy?—In my
opinion, those exemptions have wholly originated in mistaken principles,
and that no wheels wider than about six inches are now, in fact, used
upon the roads, owing to the general and gross deceptions which the
waggoners practise as to the breadth of surface that their wheels roll
on; and that if by any more efficient regulations, the users of broad
wheels were compelled to roll the breadths of surface, which the laws
contemplate, all such wheels would be immediately disused, from the
great additional force of draught which broad wheels occasion during the
average state of all the roads.
Are you of opinion that any regulation by statute, for substituting
cylindrical for conical wheels, would remedy that evil, or justify an
exemption from toll?—As far as I have observed, there are no conical
wheels in use: all the wheels are rounding or barrelled, and it is
comparatively an immaterial circumstance whether they approach the form
of a cone or a cylinder, while they remain so rounding or barrelled,
because their enormous loads roll on a very small portion of the surface
of all those broad wheels. I think that six-inch cylindrical wheels, or
under, are the most practicable and useful, provided the projecting
nails are most rigidly prohibited, which I believe can never be done but
by a penalty per nail upon the wheelers who put in those nails, and upon
the drivers of the carriages who used such roughly-nailed wheels.
Are you of opinion that the penalties now fixed by law upon over-weights
are regulated upon good principles?—I consider the whole system as to
penalties upon over-weights generally bad; the present regulations seem
to me framed upon mistaken principles, and are the source of very great
impositions.
In what manner might the penalties and tolls upon carts and waggons be
best fixed?—It is not practicable very simply or in this way to state
any one scale that would be generally applicable for each breadth of
wheels: below six inches, there should be a rate fixed, which would
apply to ordinary or gate-tolls, and at the weighing machines additional
tolls, which I will call machine-tolls, should be levied upon all
carriages which exceeded the weight, to be regulated in an increasing
scale for each breadth of wheel, so as very greatly to discourage, but
not ruinously to prohibit the occasional carrying of large weights upon
any wheels.
You are not, then, of opinion that it would be right to do away the
regulations altogether in respect to the weights, and apportion the
tolls only to the number of horses?—By no means.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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