KENT TERRACE

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 17, 15 October 1926, Page 3

KENT TERRACE

TOWN PLANNING PRACTICE FOLLOWED NEED FOR GOOD VISIBILITY EMPHASISED “Anyone who has travelled about the world and whose powers of observation are keen knows perfectly well that there are certain clearly defined methods of treating street reserves, said the Mayor (Mr. C. J. B. Norwood), when speaking of Kent terrace vesterday. “If you go to America, England, or the Continent you will see those methods established in hundreds of cities which have had the advantage of the ideas of skilled town-planners for a quarter of a century past. There are only two basic ideas really—-everything else is an elaboration or variation from these two. One is the fairly wide street with an eight or ten foot strip of grass sward (with or without trees at intervals) between the footpaths and the roadway proper, and the other ■where the width of the road permits—is the street with the central reserve, usually broken qp into detached oval, star, or diamond-shaped flower beds, rockeries, or green sward. If, as is sometimes the case, trees are planted in these central reserves, they are of the slender poplar order, which are, as a rule, clear of foliage for a distance of at least 15 feet from the ground. Only in places that experience a very hot summer, such as the southern States of America and some Italian cities, are shade trees with a greater spread used, but that is done deliberately so that they can, in the heaf of the summer, form a ‘veranda’ across the street, but always allowing a clearance for visibility. “In the case of Kent Terrace, the very reverse conditions exist. The trees planted are mostly those that leaf from the ground, and they have become a tangled undergrowth that utterlv destroys visibility. Tn no part of the world that I know would such a plantation be tolerated, and as soon as we have the area proclaimed a street, as it should be, we must, if only in the interests of public safety, go on with the work.” MOTORIST’S VIEWPOINT PERPLEXING SHADOWS. “I would like all motorists to take notice of this Kent Terrace .argument,” said a well-known motorist to a Dominion reporter yesterday. “My complaint is that in rounding the corners both at Vivian Street and the Basin Reserve you cannot see far enough ahead to give you security. We ask people to cut down their corner hedges to improve visibility, yet have a thick tangle of trees at either end of this reserve. I was going along Cambridge Terrace the other night and had to make a sudden swerve, thinking there was somebody crossing. It proved to be the shadow of a tree. On another occasion what I thought was a shadow proved to be the substance, and I nearlv ran over a man.”