REPORT

The Good Old Days
The Road to Success

By John G. Sayers

A couple of advertisements in the March 20, 1913 issue of The Automobile magazine give us an insight to how the revolution in transportation during the past century has led to better and more affordable homes today.

“A Few Miles of Concrete Highway” described in this 1913 ad were a bold step forward in the evolution of transportation infrastructure.

An advertisement by The Portland Cement Company, for example, promoted the use of cement to build the roads of 100 years ago. Without getting into a detailed analysis of why asphalt is now the preferred road surface, let’s think about how better roads helped to build better communities. Have you ever been stuck in your car on a snowy road? Just imagine that it was mud, up to your axles. The claim that, “Hard roads are a necessity for motor car traffic” is still true today.
And just imagine that you had to drive through that mud—or sand—every day going to work. Would you want to live 20 kilometers from your workplace? Probably not. In an age when a tall building was six-storeys, you remained jammed into a small home, which had been wedged into a downtown area near your place of business.
In 1913, you walked to your work destination, or took a public transit vehicle that fought the universal road conditions, but for a shorter distance. The first concrete road in Ontario—linking Toronto and Hamilton—was not completed until 1915. There were only some 50,000 cars in the entire country in 1913, so there was relatively little motorized vehicle pressure for paved roads.
Then came more cars and the push for better roads. Presto! Homes could be built in the countryside, with room for children to play in the back yard while dad travelled by road to work in no more time than it took to walk the many blocks in the downtown area. And those homes could be built more cheaply because a builder wasn’t competing in price for small plots of land in the city; the 60x200 foot lot (or even a half acre or so) for each home cost much less.
And those same roads that propelled Dad to work each day facilitated the transportation of building materials and equipment from one location to several sites within a radius of several kilometers. More efficient equipment and materials produced centrally in quantity were more available and more affordable. So add cost reductions in construction to cost savings in land, and you have the foundation for a revolution in building more affordable and better homes.

“Adams Trucks Deliver the Goods” boasted this 1913 advertisement. Primitive as it may seem today, it’s a great improvement over having your lumber transported to the job site in a horse-drawn wagon.

But the cost savings don’t stop there. A study of the ad for Adams trucks shows just how important those paved roads were. Look at the load that was aboard the truck. Let’s assume that it carried the equivalent of five loads of lumber transported by a horse and wagon. That represents not only the cost of buying five wagons and five teams of horses instead of the purchase of a single truck, but also the cost of hiring five wagon drivers rather than the solitary truck driver. And don’t forget that those horses had to be fed, looked after and housed. More labour and more cost.
So the next time that a load of lumber pulls up to your job site, just think how much less it cost compared to five wagons and five teams of horses! And how much faster it arrived in contrast to the same quantity brought over rutted, muddy roads.
The term “affordable housing” seems to have become a euphemism for building housing to accommodate the underprivileged. In reality, it describes the broader benefit of transportation over the past hundred years. Without it, very few homes would have been “affordable” to the average home buyer. And without it, home building as we know it today would not have become a vibrant contributor to Canada’s economy.   

John G. Sayers (jasayers@saybuck.com), a retired Chartered Accountant, is in his 8th year on the Board of The Ephemera Society of America, and his 6th year on the Council of the British Ephemera Society. He has been a keen collector for many years. For more information about ephemera, check out www.ephemera society.org