[Read before the Texas Academy of Science, November 6 , -Z###.] 
ECONOMY OF GOOD EOADS. 
BY THOMAS U. TAYLOR. 
The advantages to he obtained from a system of good roads are very lit¬ 
tle appreciated. To the farmer, they are directly beneficial. By the 
most accurate experiments of eminent road engineers (MacNeill, Morin, 
etc.), it has been found that on a good broken-stone road a horse can 
draw three to four times as much as he can on a common dirt road. 
This supposes that both roads are in fair condition. In rainy seasons, 
the relative capacity of the horse is greatly increased, for on the metal 
road his pulling or tractive effect remains about the same in wet and dry 
weather, provided the road is in such condition that he can get a good 
foothold; but on the dirt road his effective tractive power varies from 
one-third to nothing. We thus see that under the most favorable cir¬ 
cumstances the amount of team to do a certain amount of work on the 
road can be decreased two-thirds after the road is macadamized. 
Many experiments have been made to find how much tractive force 
(pulling force) in pounds would haul a ton on a level on the various 
kinds of lines of communication, i. e., steel rails, iron rails, stone rails, 
plank roads, macadam, telford, gravel and dirt roads. The results gen¬ 
erally accepted among road engineers are those of Morin, made in 1838. 
His results were as follows: 
On iron rails, 10 pounds would pull a ton of 2240 pounds. 
On Telford road, 46 pounds would pull a ton of 2240 pounds. 
On Macadam road, 65 pounds would pull a ton of 2240 pounds. 
On gravel road, 88 pounds would pull a ton of 2240 pounds. 
On dirt (loose) road, 200 pounds would pull a ton of 2240 pounds. 
On dirt (hard and dry), 89 pounds would pull a ton of 2240 pounds. 
Before proceeding to conclusions, we must say that on the best steel 
rails, in our best railway practice, the co-efficient of traction is about 
eight pounds. The co-efficient of traction of 200 pounds for dirt roads 
is not an estimate for our black land roads in dry weather. When the 
surface is not rough, and when the road is thoroughly hardened by 
travel, the dirt road, for the time being, becomes almost as good as a 
[ 81 ] 
