MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD N ICOLSON
THE impending restrictions on the use of petrol will create for many millions of people transport-problems of great difficulty. One of the more agreeable features of modern life has been the increasing tendency among sensible men and women to live at considerable distances from their work. They have come to depend, without realising the fact, either upon the small car which brings them to the station or the city, or else upon the bus which swings brightly round the corner. Fortunate indeed are those whose life has been organised around a neigh- bouring train or underground service, or who have but a few hundred yards to walk in order to reach the escalator, and the sure, the heated and the rapid tube. In Paris today the petrol- engine has disappeared from the streets ; the population has gone to earth, and whereas the underground is packed and busy, one can look down the whole length of the Rue de Rivoli, and see only one crawling and dilapidated fiacre (a ghost from some tattered album of Caran d'Ache) creeping slowly among the bicycles which flit like swallows through the empty streets. I do not myself care overmuch for private conveyances. I do not really regret the disappearance of the limousine, nor have I ever either possessed or desired a motor-car in London. The thought of a chauffeur waiting bored and vindictive while I dawdled in delight would in any case have been obnoxious to me, and had I been possessed of many millions of pounds I should still have preferred the nimble and impersonal taxi. In my ordinary working-day life I actually prefer the public conveyance. It is irritating, of course, to be swept past one's destination by the thoughtless arrogance of a bus, and to be deposited several hundred yards away at some distant sign-post. Yet there are great compensations in being able to read the evening newspaper, or to observe at leisure the conduct of one's fellow human beings. For eleven months in the year I should live contented in London were my only means of locomotion the tube or underground. But when my holiday comes, then I like my transport to be private, volatile, and costly.
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