The Bus "Menace."

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18682, 4 May 1926, Page 8

The Bus "Menace."

The fact that in New York as in Christchurch "Capital and Labour have ' found a common cause in the bus "menace" has led a writer in the " New York Times " to make some historical enquiries. To-day the trams and railways axe fighting the buses. A

hundred years ago the stage coach was fighting the railroad. In 1830, this writer points out, a leading Englishman declared that "if horses and " drivers were dispensed with the earn"ing power of £100,000,000 a year "would be destroyed." The owners of ( capital invested in turnpikes, canals, bridges, and taverns joined forces with the investors in coach-lines and had no difficulty in getting the support of the farmers who saw that railways would seriously damage the market for hay and corn. Even country gentlemen who could afford to be blind to the market quotations waxed indignant over the intrusion upon their quiet of " this loco- " motive monster carrying SO tons of "goods and navigated by a tail of "smoke and sulphur, coming through " every man's grounds between Man- " Chester and Liverpool." It actually cost Huskisson, who was no fool as n politician, £70,000 to secure a charter from Parliament for the Liverpool and Manchester railroad in the face of the opposition of the land-owners. And the case was even worse with the " road "locomotive," which antedates the railway locomotive by some little time. The fact that within a year or two of Watt's experiments twenty steel coaches were travelling in and about London, and that a dozen or more companies had been organised to build and operate them, 60 annoyed the vested interests that these got a Road Locomotive Act passed which imposed so high a tax that these companies had to cease operations. And what happened in England was of course reproduced in America with variations. Charters were either refused outright or so restricted as to be of very little use. It is pointed but for example that in the case of the Utica and Schenectady railroad, the charter allowed freight to be carried only when the canal was frozen. In other cases such high tonnage taxes and tolls were levied that it was impossible to operate at a profit. It was even suggested that if the railways were allowed to run at their own sweet will they would use up the last pound of coal in the country. It has not yet been said in Christchurch that buses would cause a petrol famine, but it will be said; and when that cry fails someone will discover, as the farmers in America and England did, that the throbbing of the buses is preventing the hens from laying.