7<>: 



REVIEW OF REVIEWS. 



October 1, 19*3. 



The man in blue who holds up traffic in order to allow pedestrians and vehicles to pass causes an 

 unavoidable but incalculable loss of time to passengers. 



HOW WE WASTE TIME. 



Basil H. Watt, in the Royal, gives 

 some extraordinary instances of how we 

 waste time. It is estimated, he says, 

 that every year the passengers on Bri- 

 tish railways waste a period of time 

 equal to two million days, or over five 

 thousand years, in waiting for trains. 

 This is only one of the many ways in 

 which time is wasted every day. Trams, 

 'buses, theatres, and dilatory friends all 

 take their toll of precious minutes 

 which mount up amazingly, and result 

 in a waste of time which is simply stag- 

 gering. Nowhere, perhaps, is this 

 waste more obvious than in the matter 

 of travelling. If we take London as the 

 most elaborate example, we are faced 

 by an appalling amount of time spent, 

 by millions of people in the apparently 

 profitless business of being conveyed 

 from place to place. 



Considering only one means of tran- 

 sit, the underground railways, one learns 

 from statistics that they earn', roughly 

 speaking, some two hundred million 

 passengers per year. If we take the 

 average journey as lasting twenty min- 

 utes, we are confronted with a grand 

 total of four thousand million minutes 

 spent in the year by individuals in the 

 tubes — that is to say about eight thou- 

 sand years of individual life. 



When one adds to this the much 

 greater amount of omnibus and other 



vehicular traffic, and again the still 

 more gigantic total of pedestrian travel- 

 ling, one is faced with figures beyond 

 conception. 



The daily journey to and from the 

 home to the place of business is a waste 

 of time that might be almost removed 

 if, by an ideal arrangement, the model 

 town allowed the worker to live near 

 the scene of his labours. 



Statistics show that something like 

 seven hundred thousand season-ticket 

 holders pay an average of £6 per an- 

 num for their journeys, which means 

 about one hundred and fifty hours 

 spent by each of them in a railway car- 

 riage every year. 



Then again there is the time that might 

 be saved, not in actual travelling, but in 

 the waiting which inevitably accompanies it. 

 I latest records of passengers on Britisb 

 railways give the total as, roughly, one 

 thousand million. If, at a low estimate, 

 one gives th<> average time spent in wait- 

 ing for a train as three minutes in each 

 wo can collect two million lost days, or 

 five thousand years (of an individual 

 life) spent in aimless idling on station plat- 

 forms. 



To this we may add further the simi- 

 lar waiting for trams and omnibuses, 

 and those deeply-begrudged minutes 

 tod waiting behind an argumenta- 

 tive passenger at the booking-office. 



A rain, in spite of the efforts of the 

 authorities to cope with the problem, the 

 waste of public time in the streets is incalcul- 



