One-fourth of all workers in southern cotton mills in 1899 were under 16 years of age. Why did so many children work in cotton mills and other factories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Many millworkers believed that “if the employers would give their hands better wages, . . . the help could then support themselves better and be able to school their children” (North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics 1892:172). As it was, “at the present rate of wages paid, large families are compelled to put all their children in the mills in order to support the family” (ibid.: 287). Child labor would be reduced or eliminated if parents could “demand wages sufficient to keep [their children in school] and take care of the family without the help of the little ones” (ibid.: 351). Turn-of-the-century labor reformers agreed that low wages forced many families to send their children to work. Alexander McKelway (1913), for example, southern secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, called low cotton mill wages “our modern feudalism,” while Edith Abbott (1908: 36) suggested that child labor was the result of an “insufficiency of the man’s wages.”
This paper presents a sketch-level feasibility study for a proposed 28-mi commuter rail line connecting downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, to its fast-growing suburbs. Full-scale feasibility studies can be expensive, especially for cash-strapped local government agencies. A sketch analysis, such as the one presented here, is a low-cost means of determining whether a project merits further study. Ridership for the line is conservatively estimated at 2,010 in 2015 and 2,574 in 2035. Higher-speed service and a greater frequency of midday trains are shown to significantly increase these numbers. Cost-effectiveness depends largely on the actual cost per mile, but conservative estimates place the proposed route in the middle of the pack of new-start commuter rail lines: more cost-effective than the routes of Minneapolis, Minnesota, or Austin, Texas, but slightly less cost-effective than those of Albuquerque, New Mexico, or Nashville, Tennessee. In view of these results, a more comprehensive study appears to be merited.
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