TRANSPORTATION: Blue v. Grey

From the sweeping span across the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden, on the south, to the Frenchtown, N. J. bridge on the north, grey-clad Pennsylvania State troopers were drawn up against a line of blue-clad New Jersey troopers last week. On Oct. 15 a Pennsylvania law had gone into effect requiring Pennsylvania licenses on all commercial buses and trucks owned outside and operating inside the State. New Jersey retaliated by closing its borders to all Pennsylvania trucks and buses, whether operated for hire or privately used. While Governor Gifford Pinchot was maintaining in Harrisburg that “Pennsylvania was losing very extensively because trucks from other States were using up our roads . . . the law is a wise one,” one after another, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New York automatically cancelled their reciprocal license agreements with Pennsylvania and hired Pennsylvania motor transport was banned from their highways. Hundreds of tons of fruit & vegetables had rotted around Pennsylvania’s borders by the time a truce between New Jersey and Pennsylvania was reached. Pennsylvania was to enforce its new law “within reason.” New Jersey would limit its license demand to “common carriers.”

The animosity between the Blue & Grey made news in the East. In the South there has been reciprocal licensing trouble before. The Highway Users Conference, whose membership includes rubber, petroleum and motor interests as well as truck operators, lays the whole license ruction at the doors of railway lobbyists in State Legislatures. Last week, while the Pennsylvania-New Jersey feud went on, a joint committee of railroad presidents under President William Wallace Atterbury of the Pennsylvania met in Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station with motor transport executives under the leadership of Vice President Alfred Harris Swayne of General Motors. The conferees issued an amiable announcement following the meeting which failed to conceal the fact that they had pointedly agreed to disagree: “It would be impractical to ask either the railway group or the highway users group to discontinue their efforts in support of or opposition to proposed legislation.”