REDUCED TRAM FARES

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22345, 8 March 1938, Page 8

REDUCED TRAM FARES

•10 THE KDITOa OV TUE TRESS. Sir—"Half the trouble of this board . L«« /ho failure of Conservative has been the iaiiun- y tvhw hnnrds in the past to experiment. Thus Mr J S Bar? when he succeeded in Cueing Tramway Board to msti♦nto nennv fares at Sumner. The present Labour board has now been in office for nearly five years In view of this long period of office it is simply childish to complain that half its troubles are duo to the previous boards' failure to experiment My impression is that the so-called Conservative boards of the past did some fairly bold experimenting :.Tm instance, the introduction of buses, petrol buses and trolley-buses-sue cessful experiments too, which the Present Labour board has been glad to emulate. Still more nerve was required by the introduction by the "Conservative" boards of one-man trams For election purposes the Labour candidates said they were t "death traps," but they nevertheless [proceeded to build more of them directly they got the chance. , ! The "Conservative" boards also did some new experimenting, bold in character, when they introduced weekly passes." These also the present board continued but with some restriction. The present Labour board s fare experiments seem to have been limited to this restriction, plus reducing the value to the user of concession tickets by reducing the number of rides on them. „ , , , The "Conservative" boards experiments in fares, however, were such as to enable them to make the trams pay their own way. Labour .got into power by promising that they would not fail to make the trams pay, but almost immediately they commenced to levy a rate and have continued to do so ever since. They must have collected thousands of pounds from the ratepayers during the last five years. At the last General Election one of Labour's baits was the statement that taxation had been overdone by the Conservative Governments of the past, yet we know that under Labour control taxation has increased greatly. Labour is, however, shifting its ground, for it now says thai taxation is one of the best methods of distributing the wealth of the community! And the Labour Tramway Board in Christchurch seems to be content to follow this lead.—Yours, etc., NATIONALIST. March 7, 1938.