Standing Room Only

No car? No tires? Go by air! No, said the Government, putting airplane seats under priority quicker than you could say Donald Nelson.

Henceforth a private citizen who wants an air-travel ticket must stand in line behind Government personnel, the Army, Navy and Marines, businessmen traveling on war business. Other restrictions are still to come. The peripatetic U.S. citizen who, like Chaucer's spring pilgrims, loves to go places, henceforth will have to stay much closer to home.

Railroad passenger cars, long crowded by defense travel,* have been jammed still tighter since Dec. 7. In 16 days after the Pearl Harbor attack, 600,000 troops were moved in the U.S., three-fourths of them in Pullmans, the rest in coaches. (Only one life was lost: a Negro cook killed in a collision.) And many a commuter, to spare his good grey automobile, now goes by train instead.

At Government urging, Pullmans are being converted to coaches, which hold more passengers. On a siding at Washington's Union Station stands an experimental contraption, looking like a cross between boxcar and coach, which the Government may make 1943's standard commuting car.

Also afoot are plans to take busses off scenic runs, give them to cities which have no streetcars, rip out seats to make crowded room for standees.

Increases in passenger traffic, plus the fact that more & more cars ride full instead of half empty, tend to increase railroads' passenger revenues and passenger profits. But because the railroads complain about rising costs, ICC last week granted them a 10% fare increase effective Feb. 10, letting them take a nick out of the public's pocket at a time when the public cannot escape. So citizens will not only travel less, they will be less comfortable when they travel, and they will pay extra for their discomfort.

*On a hurry-call trip from Chicago to Washington, Vice President Wallace N. Barker of the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Co. could get a reservation only to Philadelphia, had to switch trains there. Pullman President David A. Crawford was a little luckier: he got an upper all the way.

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