These mechanical servants have been placed in the streets which were first built as roadways for carriages. In the streets, the pipes and wires must be buried beneath the pavement at great expense. Through these streets, frequently full of curves and angles which offer little trouble to the free moving horse-drawn vehicle, the rails must be bent and the cars slow down for curves. From beneath the pavement the pipes and wires must be separately led into the basements of each building and up through successive stories to the apartments above. Within the building, separate vertical car lines called elevators, must be built and city transportation becomes a matter of three dimensions with train service running in from principal outlying points, cross-town trolley lines and vertical elevators, all separate schemes of transportation requiring changes and delays, endless duplication, colossal expense and criminal waste. Now rails, pipes and wires can be most economically laid in continuous straight lines. In the case of railroads, the greater the speed without stops the more the necessity for straight lines. A car running at a speed of forty miles per hour has sixteen times the force for derailment as a car at ten miles, and there is a like increase in the cost in power and time to stop the car. Moreover, to be efficient the railway should be where nothing will obstruct the passage of trains. Pipes must be kept from freezing, live wires from giving shocks and yet all must be available for new installation and repairs. None of these needs are filled by present city conditions; all can be fulfilled if the city is planned to fit the rail, pipe and wire civilization of to-day instead of the pedestrian and equestrian civilization of the past. _Building in One Dimension._ The Roadtown is a scheme to organize production, transportation and consumption into one systematic plan. In an age of pipes and wires, and high speed railways such a plan necessitates the building in one dimension instead of three--the line distribution of population instead of the pyramid style of construction. The rail-pipe-and-wire civilization and the increase in the speed of transportation is certain to result in the line distribution of population because of the almost unbelievable economy in construction, in operation and in time. The people will return to Mother Earth because it is in every way desirable for them to do so and not because some merchant prince, railroad king or social worker says they ought to go.