Page:Motors and motor-driving (1902).djvu/395

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ROADS
355

manor on one side or of a Georgian red-brick house on the other in order to comply with the suggestion just made. It can be applied reasonably and yet adequately. The great thing is to apply it and to prevent our roads being narrowed by the tramway companies, who, as we see by the recent applications in Surrey, are intent upon laying their lines in the rural roads within the thirty miles radius of London. The schemes are excellent in themselves, and under proper conditions deserve all encouragement, as tending to disperse the metropolitan population, but care must be taken that roads with tramway lines along them are made wider, and not in effect narrower than before. I note and admit the objection that I am proposing in some cases to hand over the roadside greensward to be metalled. Of course such a loss of pleasant walking ground must be regretted, but it is, it seems to me, a case in which public utility must be the dominant consideration.