10. Read and translate the text in writing. Alternatives to the automobile

Established alternatives for some aspects of automobile use include public transit (buses, trolleybuses, trains, subways, monorails, tramways), cycling, walking, rollerblading and skateboarding. Car-share arrangements are also increasingly popular – the U.S. market leader has experienced double-digit growth in revenue and membership growth between 2006 and 2007, offering a service that enables urban residents to "share" a vehicle rather than own a car in already congested neighborhoods. Bike-share systems have been tried in some European cities, including Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Similar programs have been experimented with in a number of U.S. Cities. Additional individual modes of transport, such as personal rapid transit could serve as an alternative to automobiles if they prove to be socially accepted.

Texts for the additional reading.

Early Attempts

In 1472, Roberto Valturio described a machine designed for war purposes which was to be moved by means of large windmills transmitting their motion through cranks and gears. Of course, this was not a practicable project, few of the designs of those days were, all of them being characterised by a complete lack of understanding of the effects of friction. Some of these mechanisms were designed to employ the muscular energy of their passengers, Leonardo da Vinci made studies to this end. Such machines, all moved by energy, neither thermal nor chemical in origin, make up in themselves a chapter of technical history. Another machine of this type was constructed in 1649 by a German, Johannes Hautsch of Nuremberg, in the form of a dragon. A number of men concealed in the interior constituted the engine and it aroused the enthusiasm of the Crown Prince of Sweden, who bought it.

Then, in 1748, another strange vehicle appeared, built by a French mechanic, Jacques de Vaucanson. This utilised a system of steel springs similar to those used in large clocks. A chronicler of the time reports hat the driver could cause the carriage to move or stop without the use of horses and that His Majesty congratulated the constructor and ordered a similar vehicle for his own use. It is also reported however, that many members of the French Academy agreed that suet a mechanism could not work. One could hardly say that the worth: academicians were wrong. The defect, however, was not in the principle of a self-propelled vehicle, as history has shown, but in the means chosen to power it.

The British Pioneers of Motor Industry

The first wholly British four-wheeler was Frederick Lanchester's, which made its trial run in February 1896.

These developments were in anticipation of a change in the traffic laws, the result of an agitation led by two aristocratic motoring enthusi­asts, the Hon. Evelyn Ellis and Sir David Salomons, and their Self-Pro-pelled Traffic Association. In 1896 the 1865 and 1878 Acts were repealed and the speed limit for road locomotives raised from 4 m.p.h. to '14 m.p.h. or less than this as the Local Government Board may decide'. As finally determined by the Board, the maximum speeds for vehicles of varying weights were: under 1 1/2 tons, 12 m.p.h.; 11/2-2 tons, 8 m.p.h.; over 2 tons, 5 m.p.h. With his usual showmanship Harry J. Lawson or­ganized the first London to Brighton run, ostensibly to celebrate the liberation of the motor car but really to advertise his companies' auto­mobiles. Lawson tried to do for the motor car what George Hudson did for the railway, become king of the new transport revolution. Fortu­nately for the British motor industry, he did not succeed. Although the English Daimler Company went on under other management to earn its reputation for quality cars, the Lawson empire, after his patents were defeated in the courts in 1903, declined and broke up.

The collapse of his monopoly, and the further raising of the speed limit to 20 m.p.h. in 1904, brought a flood of British car manufacturers into the field. Many of them were cycle manufacturers, with names which became famous automobile marques: Ariel, Humber, Morgan, Riley, Rover, Sunbeam, Swift, Triumph, and so on.

The further development of British Motor industry is connected with the names of F.H. Royce and William Morris. Both Royce and Morris were self-taught engineers of humble origin who rose in the traditional way by their native ability to great wealth. Frederick Henry Royce was the son of an unsuccessful miller and began life as a newspaper boy and telegraph messenger before his uncompleted apprenticeship at the Great Northern Railway works at Peterborough and jobs at the Electric Light and Power Company in London and Liverpool. Out of work at the age of twenty-one in 1884, he set up a partnership in a back-street workshop in Manchester, making lamp-holders and filaments, an electric bell of his own design and, eventually, high-quality dynamos and electric cranes.

Henry Royce built a two-cylinder car of his own, which made its first trial run in 1904, and then two more for his partners. The new third partner, Henry Edmunds, a motoring enthusiast and member of the Automobile Club committee, showed his car to his London friends, Claude Johnson and the Hon. Charles Rolls, son of Lord Llangattock and winner of the AA Thousand Miles Trial in 1900. They were so im­pressed by its quietness, smoothness and pulling power that they went into partnership with Royce to produce and sell it commercially. Rolls-Royce cars were an immediate success making the fastest non­stop run at the 1905 Manx Touring Trophy race and winning Outright in 1906, and making a record time from Monte Carlo to London in 1905 at over 21 m.p.h. More important, they soon established themselves as the quietest, smoothest and most reliable cars on the market. By 1907 the company had evolved the ultimate car for silence and reliability, the Sil­ver Ghost. The company settled down to produce this one model, which sold substantially unchanged for nineteen years - longer than the Model-T Ford - and claimed it as the best car in the world. Meanwhile, both RollS: and Royce took up the new cult of flying. Rolls was the first man to fly both ways across the Channel, before meeting his death in a com­petition at Bournemouth in 1910 at the age of thirty-three. Royce de­signed aero-engines for the war-planes of the First World War, from which a new Rolls-Royce Company was born.

, The eldest son of a farm bailiff near Oxford, William Morris in 1893 at the age of fifteen was forced by his father's illness to go out to work to help support a family of five. He began to work as an assistant to a bicycle repairer, but set up on his own at the age of sixteen on a capital of £5, repairing and soon making custom-built bicycles. He grad­uated via motor cycles to selling, repairing and hiring out motor cars. In 1910 he began to work on the designs for a car. His aim was to manufacture a cheap, mass-produced, popular, all-British car to com­pete with the Model-T Fords which from 1910 began to be assembled at Ford's subsidiary at Old Trafford, Manchester. As far as possible, he emulated Ford's methods: until the latter revolutionized produc­tion all motor cars had been made as individual machines, one at a time. Ford first of all introduced batch production, the production of cars in groups on a large factory floor, with specialized mechanics moving from one to the next. When Morris began, Ford had not yet invented the assembly line, which was to become the main basis of twentieth-century mass production. Morris's genius was for persuad­ing sub-contractors that they could make a handsome profit by vol­ume production at what seemed impossibly low prices. Thus the en­gine might be halved in price (from £50 to £25) if it could be made in quantities of fifty or more a week. This system became responsible for the subdivision of the motor industry into hundreds of component manufacturers.

His first model the Morris Oxford (8-9 horse-power, weighing 12 II 2 cwts and capable of 55 m.p.h. and petrol consumption of 50 miles to the gallon) appeared at the Motor Show in 1912. Hitherto most cars of this size and performance had cost £250 to £400. The two-seater Oxford retailed at £165. Though not the cheapest car on the market, it was so successful that Morris obtained orders for 400, and immediately teased the old Military Academy at Cowley near Oxford and planned to pro­duce 1,500 cars a year. He did not achieve this, quite, in 1914, mainly because of the war when he switched to the mass production of howitzer bomb-cases, but he had laid the foundations of British mass production of motor cars.

Morris was not the only manufacturer of cars for the mass or, strict­ly, the middle-class market. In 1914 there were no less than seventy dif­ferent light cars on the British market, plus a large number of cyclecars. When registration of cars began in 1904 there were 17,810 vehicles on the road, under half of them cars. By 1914 there were 354,232, including 122,035 cars and 118,045 motor cycles.