In Paris also, the motor omnibus has been given fair chances, and has proved its worth. It has been employed partly on routes involving narrow roads and stiff gradients where trams would be dangerous, and partly on other routes the natural beauties of which are so pronounced that it was generally felt that the laying of tramway lines, or the creation of any permanent blots such as are occasioned by the erection of standards and wires, would be altogether a desecration.
The motor omnibus, after passing through its novitiate, has proved in the most practicable possible way the advantages of road motor transport to the general public. It has hit the short distance traffic of railways very hard, and has compelled these latter in self-defence to inaugurate motor services of their own, especially in country districts not well fed by the railways themselves. It is impossible to say to what a great extent the development of motor transport is the result of the anomaly under which the road passenger traffic of London is not controlled by the local governing authorities, who possess in other cities licensing powers reserved in London to the Chief Commissioner of Police. Other great British cities, as, for example, Manchester and Birmingham, for many years refused to allow the motor omnibus to prove its worth for fear of competition with tramways owned by the municipality, which, being itself the licensing authority, could refuse to give facilities under which any competition with its own concern could come into existence. It is only lately that the prolonged experience of London has proved to all these authorities the enormous utility of the motor omnibus, and its spread to every great city has either become an accomplished fact, or an inevitable development of the near future. Paris, with its smaller fleet of motor omnibuses, has not exerted a similar influence in anything approaching a similar degree throughout the provincial towns in France; and Berlin, which has very nearly tabooed the motor omnibus altogether, has done practically nothing towards the encouragement of motor transport in Germany. It is rather a curious fact that this policy should have been maintained in Berlin for so long, seeing that for many years past the German Government have been paying huge sums in the shape of subvention, with the sole object of encouraging the national use of trade motors. In all probabilities, the process of ocular demonstration on the streets of the capital would have been more effective than the whole of the expenditure that has been incurred.