Land Purchase For Roads

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31595, 5 February 1968, Page 14

Land Purchase For Roads

The Christchurch City Council and the several county councils in the area have been too slow to adopt a positive land-purchase policy for major road road improvements, according to Mr M. Douglass, traffic engineer of the Christchurch Regional Planning Authority.

Mr Douglass, who returned to Christchurch at the weekend after attending an international roads conference in Sydney, is convinced of this after noting delays to roadimprovement projects in Australia, because of such lack of policy. Mr Douglass defined major road improvements as including both motorways and arterial roads.

“Our technical road-plan-ning in New Zealand is advanced, but our programming is being frustrated,” Mr Douglass said.

This was not caused by lack of money for construction, but by lack of money for land purchase. “Unless the land is acquired, you can’t build the road,” Mr Douglass said.

Inherently, New Zealand had a simpler administration of reading than Australia, “where there is a lot of confusion as to whose road is whose,” he said. “There is greater agreement here on planning to avoid future road congestion.” . But land purchase was the one outstanding direction in which road planning could be speeded up and improved in Christchurch, Mr Douglass said. Unless owners of land needed for road improvements were paid in due time, road construction must be delayed. This very thing was happening throughout Australia, apart from Canberra. The National Roads Board in New Zealand had laid down a formula of reimbursement to local authorities for property purchase for motorways and arterial roads, which included repayment to the local authority at the time of a road’s construction, Mr Douglass said. This left the

responsibility for road-im-provement projects with the local authority.

“And when all is said and done, the local authority is the planning authority,” Mr Douglass said. The reading authorities in Christchurch must establish a definite property-purchase policy, and raise the necessary finance to implement it. Asked where the money should come from, Mr Douglass said it was not for him to say—although it was obvious it must come either from rates or by way of loan. To a suggestion that increased rates for this purpose would be far from popular, at present, Mr Douglass said: “To keep Christchurch the pleasant and efficient place it is for traffic, the people must be prepared to meet this responsibility.”