Once more our worthy city fathers are strenuously engaged in the herculean task of creating better transportation facilities which have been their perennial problem, and has often been debated, investigated, negotiated, junked, and experted to the cost of $1,600,000 for a good many more years than most people now living can look back upon. The chairman of the local transportation committee, Alderman McDonough, appears to be a well-meaning champion for the city's interests, and there are others. But what about the ownership radicals, the ancient traction befogger, John Maynard Herlan, and other schemers, with a special ax to grind, not to speak of our leading newspapers, and their followers with ideas and thinking machinery barking back to the days of Yerkes. All of them ready to rush in and wreck the wholething, 2as was done recently when meritorious propositions presented by the traction interests went on the rocks because some members of the House of Representatives in Springfield became weak-kneed, even if the noise from Chicago represented very little of public sentiment. Bills, undoubtedly, would have been overwhelmingly endorsed by popular vote. With those business-like propositions acted upon in a business-like way, we might today have had transfer privileges from the Elevated Lines to Surface transportation, and vice versa. Extensions were started in many directions, and even the digging of the long dreamed of subway. But now when the borough of Brooklyn is just starting work on twenty-five miles of new subways, Chicago must worry along until later without one yard of such transportation, thanks to political buncombe, newspaper hysterics, animosities, and traction thinking, dating back to days when street cars in Chicago were still being moved along by real horsepower.