Now suppose you are a resident on that line and conclude a couple of
months later to install the utility in your home. Again the pavement is
torn up, a gang of laborers spend several days on the job, and you as
consumer will pay the bill either in a lump or as stiff rates on the
utility sold. The result of this clumsy system has been that pipe and
wire utilities in the city are limited to those people who use them to
a sufficient extent to stand this criminal waste and expense.
Moreover, in all large cities the matter of installing pipe or
wire conveyed utilities is also a question of reckoning with
franchise-selling politicians and private monopolists who generally
work “hand in hand.”
Compare these conditions, mechanical and political, with the Roadtown
where all pipes and wires will be bracketed in a runway beneath the
floor of a machine-made house on land at farm prices. To put in a new
pipe conveyed utility will cost the price of the twenty-one feet of
main and a branch pipe leading to the apartment above through suitable
openings made when the building is constructed. The expense will be
about equal to that of maintaining the red lanterns which are now
placed about the torn up city streets.
As a result of these differences there will be added to the Roadtown
home--and I mean to the home of the man of average means--a number of
utilities now available only to the rich, or not available at all.
Beginning with the following paragraph I will enumerate some of the
inventions that will be available in the Roadtown home. I may include
in this list some inventions which, while demonstrated on a small
scale, may for some reason not now discernible, develop an objection
or difficulty in its use. But for every such a one that I may here
include, there will be several others that science has already or will
yet devise and which can be installed in Roadtown as soon as perfected
and demonstrated with no more expense than there would be if it were
put in when the houses were built. This feature alone is a tremendous
argument in favor of the Roadtown, for every previous form of house
construction once finished is set in its equipment and soon gets behind
the age and must be torn down to make room for the new. At this time
considerable humorous comment is being made in the newspapers over the
tearing down of a twenty-two story building in Wall Street to make
room for a forty story one. The old one is only thirteen years old.
The Roadtown will always be “modern,” and increase in efficiency as it
increases in length while the separate building is a complete unit with
its height and utilities stationary.
_Water._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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