"WALK ROUND CORNERS."

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 161, 9 July 1926, Page 13

"WALK ROUND CORNERS."

DANGEROUS ADVICE

COUNCIL TAKES DOWN ITS SIGNS.

(By iiorao.)

Cominjj down to work this morning I saw a couple of men on a lorry wrench--in;r signs ofT a telegraph pole in Queon Street. Being curious, I walked out into the joadway to sec what had ofTendcvd them, thinking it might be some surreptitious advertisement like that cunning one Auckland woke up one morning to find stencilled on the footpath every' few yards. On the board was: "Caution! Walk round corners." Memory refused to convey any message for a time, and then I suddenly remembered that years ago there used to be such things as horses in Queen Street, and 1 i also remembered the once familiar paragraph in the Police Court news: "A driver named John Smith' was fined 5/ on a charge of trotting round a street corner." The charge read "Proceeding at other than a walking pace/ , but trotting round a corner wa3 the reporter's short cut through a legal fog. Good heavens! Could we have been so slow as to lie in danger of a horse at the trot? Were the rude forefathers of the hamlet ever knocked down by such a funerally-paced conveyance? Why, if a man trotted round a corner to-day he would be had up for loitering and impeding <the traffic. Fifteen miles an hour makes you yawn when you are in a motor, and there are some drivers who will tell you that anything less than 20 miles an hour won't give the car steeTage way. Bless mc, and only the other day one used to see horses tethered to posts in Queen Street. You can see a tethering post to this day—in fact, three of them, I think, but not many present-day Aucklanders could tell where to find them if the question were asked in an examination paper. What would happen if a horse were to be hitched up outside a Queen Street shop to-day? Just figure to yourself the avalanche of letters to the editor from indignant motorists. It would cause more stir than a Queen Street promenade of the bigger of the two zoo rhinos. There is a saying that in England it takes a century to get a law passed, and two centuries to get it repealed. We are not quite so deliberate as that in Auck land., but presumably the City Council lias come to the conclusion that "Caution! Walk round corners!" is just a bit superfluous in 1926. Xot one person in 100,000 will ever miss these old-fashioned signs. They used to decorate the telegraph posts or other convenient uprights at the busier corners, such as Fort Street, Customs Street, Victoria Street, Wellesley Street, and similar intersections with Queen Street. One cannot let them be taken to the destructor without paying a tribute to the memory of the poor old horse, now almost a thing of the dim past. A motor car may be quick, convenient, and moneymaking, but can one regard the thing with anything like the affection some of us have had for a favourite horse? I doubt it. If the City Council intends putting up other notice boards in place of those now being dismantled, it will be probably something about "Minimum speed allowed, 15 m.p.h."