A passenger-mile, as we know already, is one of the units in estimating the traffic revenue of a railroad. It is passenger-miles, by the hundreds and the thousands, that the railroads of New England are losing today. When one stands beside one of the well-traveled pathways of the Ideal Tour, the Real Tour, or the Mohawk Trail and sees touring cars loaded to the gunwales with luggage go whizzing by him, ten, twenty to the hour, he begins to realize this.[10] More than 50,000 visiting automobiles were registered in Massachusetts this last summer. There were last year in the United States, 2,445,664 automobiles. With a carrying capacity averaging five persons to a car--12,000,000 persons all told--they can seat three times as many persons as all our railroad cars in the country combined. Not all of these folk would travel by train if there were no motor cars. Some of them are riding for the pure joy of automobile touring. But many of them would go to the mountains or the coast anyway and so make a large addition to railroad passenger revenues. The vast increase in trunks handled over reasonably long distances by the express companies in these last few years is, in itself, something of an index of the volume of this through business, which is today traveling by motor. Now cross the country and take a quick glimpse at the situation in the Northwest. The president of an important steam road at Portland--which in turn controls both city and interurban lines extending out from Portland and Spokane--is peculiarly qualified to speak of the situation there. "Our road has suffered severely from this new form of automobile competition," he says. "We lost last summer quite a proportion of our passenger business moving from Portland to the beaches because of the completion of a hard-surface wagon road between it and them. We were compelled to withdraw several local trains, to lay off a number of trainmen because of this new competitor. With us the question is vital. It is still more vital with our electric interurban properties. Throughout California, Oregon, and Washington this class of railroad has suffered most severely from motor competition, and with the decreased cost and increased effectiveness of the automobile I expect such losses to increase rather than to diminish. In all these states there have been large expenditures for improved highroads during the past five years; many times under the guise of providing easy and inexpensive transportation for farm products to markets. But these highroads instead of being built from the transportation centers out into the producing region, so as to serve the farms, have almost invariably paralleled steam and electric lines. As a result the transportation companies have been heavily taxed to construct and maintain highways for the benefit of competitors who are carrying both passengers and freight in direct competition with them."