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Controlling Business Travel Expenses RSMA Soft Cover 1969 85 pages Railway S
Controlling Business Travel Expenses RSMA Soft Cover 1969 85 pages Railway Systems and Management Association
Travel expenses are an unavoidable concomitant of most business activities. While the categories into which these costs fall are largely the same year after year such as lodging, meals, entertainment, automobiles . . . the ways in which these field activities are carried out and their attendant costs are controlled have undergone a whole series of changes in recent years. Many companies have altered their older methods and have been benefited.
Historians tell us that of all man's mechanical inventions, none has changed his way of living so drastically as the wheel. Over 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians of Mesopotania, (in the Middle East) introduced civilization to this remarkable invention. And so in their primitive use of vehicular wheels, they inadvertently gave birth to the first modern system of land transportation. By 2,000 B.C. these carts were being pulled efficiently by horses, an innovation for which we can thank the Celts of Western Europe. Surprisingly, horses remained the "motive" power for wheeled vehicles for the next 3800 years until the Industrial Revolution burst upon our scene in the late 18th century.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the old horse-drawn civilizations were immune to traffic problems. You know, Caesar had his traffic problems in his day, and he took drastic action to remedy it. History doesn't reveal whether Caesar got hung up in a traffic jam and was late for a date with Cleopatra, but it does tell us that he became so concerned about the traffic situation in Rome that he issued an order which prohibited the passage of wagons through the central district of Rome for the 10 daylight hours after sunrise. There are some modern day statutes, much like this one, affecting the passage of trucks through our large metro areas.
With the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century, railroads were an inevitable result. Railroads began their dominance of the transportation picture from that point on.
One century later, horseless carriages began dotting our landscape. By 1900 there were 8,000 of them. This was the beginning of the automobile industry, which would boast 90 million cars in the United States just seven decades later.
As with the first locomotive, the automobiles was a technological break-through of the first magnitude and one which quickly transformed our continent. And the man who furthered this advance the most was certainly Henry Ford. Until his day, the automobile was considered a plaything of the wealthy. He erased this wealth barrier by introducing the assembly line.
In a broad sense, the problem of developing and maintaining business car programs began with Henry Ford's assembly line. It was here that motorized, four wheel transportation became practical ( for an original investment of about $400.00) for the agrarian and fast-growing urban masses, many of whom were salesmen.
It was here that a new and flexible system of land transportation emerged, both competitive and complementary to the giant rail system. The first business cars were principally employee-owned with men on a gross commission basis and therefore no car allowance was given. Gradually an ever-widening segment of men began to receive some form of reimbursement which offset personal business car costs.
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