Emil Sax · 1920
Emil Sax’s second volume is a systematic monograph in transport economics and public administration. It carries the analysis from roads, road vehicles, waterways, harbours, and shipping into the communications media of post, telegraph, and telephone. Its characteristic method is to treat engineering, tariffs, monopoly, policing, and public responsibility as one problem: transport media become economically intelligible only when their technical form is related to traffic intensity, social organization, and state regulation.
In the road chapters, Sax’s basic claim is that technical form and economic function are inseparable. Road width, gradient, paving, durability, and maintenance are not neutral details; they define the actual cost and possible scale of movement. Motor traffic therefore does not merely add a new vehicle to an inherited road system, but changes the rational design of that system.
Für den Lokalverkehr wären die Omnibusse mit der Konstruktion der Lastwagen geeignet.
English translation: For local traffic, omnibuses built on the construction of the freight wagon would be suitable.
This remark is less a technological curiosity than an economic classification. The omnibus, like the truck, must be judged by load, route density, capital cost, depreciation, road quality, and the regularity of use. Sax’s interest lies in the conditions under which a vehicle type becomes economical, not in speed or novelty alone.
The historical argument gives this technical analysis an institutional history. Sax contrasts fragmented local privileges, compulsory routes, and fiscal exactions with the modern public road as an organ of general circulation. The state is justified not by abstract sovereignty alone, but by its capacity to overcome local monopolies and coordinate infrastructure for the national economy. Maintenance is especially important because it reveals how engineering and fiscal order meet.
Sobald daher diese Voraussetzung nicht mehr zutrifft, d. i. unter entwickelteren Wirtschaftsverhältnissen, werden sie unökonomisch.
English translation: As soon, therefore, as this presupposition no longer holds—that is, under more developed economic conditions—they become uneconomic.
The sentence states a broader rule of the volume: no transport institution is economical in itself. Older obligations such as unpaid local labor may correspond to one social order and become wasteful in another, once labor markets, money costs, vehicle weights, and traffic volumes have changed.
The same reasoning governs Sax’s treatment of fares, road fees, and urban carriage regulation. Local transport may appear competitive, yet at specific places and times it acquires a monopoly character. Municipal tariffs, taximeters, and standard rates are therefore not arbitrary interference but public devices for making unequal bargains calculable.
Es können mithin für die Bemessung der Gebühr keine anderen ökonomischen Gesichtspunkte in Frage kommen als diejenigen, welche überhaupt für die Preisbildung im Verkehr gelten.
English translation: For the setting of the fee, therefore, no other economic considerations can come into question than those which apply generally to price formation in commerce.
Sax thus refuses to separate price theory from public law. Fees and tariffs must be judged by the general economics of transport price formation, but that economics includes fixed capital, indivisible facilities, utilization, congestion, and monopoly.
Waterways, harbours, and maritime shipping extend the same argument beyond the road. Natural channels become transport media only through investment, organization, and connection with wider routes of exchange. Even the relation among branches of seaborne trade is not merely nautical or geographical.
In erster Linie ist das Verhältnis der beiden Zweige der Seeschiffahrt zueinander durch die Gesichtspunkte der Ökonomie bestimmt worden.
English translation: In the first place, the relationship between the two branches of ocean shipping has been determined by considerations of economy.
The final movement to post, telegraph, and telephone broadens Verkehr from the movement of persons and goods to the circulation of messages. These networks likewise require fixed organization, regular service, public trust, and tariffs that cannot be reduced to immediate marginal cost. The volume’s lasting significance is this integration: Sax anticipates later infrastructure economics by joining technical standards, administrative law, monopoly regulation, and historical development into one account of transport as both Volkswirtschaft and Staatswirtschaft.
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