Railway Rate Structures and Levels and Some Effects on Motor Competition

The purpose of this study is to determine, in some degree, the effects on the railway rate structure of the country of the competition furnished by highway motor vehicles. The survey does not purport to be exhaustive. It is obviously impossible to take up, and examine in detail every section of the railway rate structure known to have been affected by motor competition. Only the more obvious changes which are assignable to highway motor vehicle competition will be noticed, and it is not at all certain that even many of the more important ones will not escape attention. [when it is remembered that from 125,000 to 140,000 new rate schedules are filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission yearly and that many of these schedules contain hundreds if not thousands of changes in rates, it can readily be seen that to attempt to catalog and analyze all for even a short period of time would be to essay the impossible.Intrastate rates are not required to be filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission and, in a great many instances, are not so filed. Intrastate rates have increasingly tended, during recent years, to approach the level of intrastate rates. This is due in part to the consideration by the Interstate Commerce Commission (which will hereafter be referred to as the Commission) of numerous complaints brought under Section 13 of the interstate commerce act to compel the removal of alleged undue prejudice against interstate commerce caused by intrastate rates made on a different level from that applied in interstate commerce. This tendency the Commission has promoted, also, by a number of general rate investigations covering intrastate as well as Interstate rates. The cheerful cooperation on the part of state commissions, some of whose members have sat with the federal Commission in the hearing of important rate cases, has helped to bring about this desirable end. Therefore, except as they may enter incidentally, Intrastate rates will not be studied. As changes in intrastate rates tend to follow those in interstate rates, even though they may not be on the same level, it is thought that a delineation of the changes in the interstate rates will give an approximately true picture of the entire situation. It should not be forgotten, however, that many of the short haul rates are intrastate rates and that the short haul rates are most affected by motor competition.