THE TRAMWAYS FOR FREIGHT

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 56, 8 March 1915, Page 6

THE TRAMWAYS FOR FREIGHT

Wellington's tramway freight car is to have at last a fair opportunity to be useful to the public. A motor vehicle is to be a feeder, and the department will undertake to collect luggage or parcels for delivery to points within a certain zone. This course should have been taken years- ago, but successive councils lacked courage to make the venture. Now that a beginning is being vritneteod with * butineu-like

plan, we are confident that the enterprise will soon be extended. The success or failure of the project depends, of course, on the public. The Tramway Department undertakes quick delivery at rates below the present scale of carriers' charges, and thus the municipal service promises a saving. The City Council does not wish to run private carriers out of the field, but it does desire, as it should, to give the public a full use of tramways which have been built and equipped at great cost. Year after year the people have seen the spectacle of rails from the city to distant suburbs, but no freight service worthy of the name. The capital invested was not allowed to have its earning capacity fully employed, and this restriction has been against the public interest. Probably the Tramway Department has long had data enough to warrant the establishment of an adequate freight service, and we do not blame the department for the remarkably long delay with a business move of which fhe need was stressed by The Post years ago. Older countries, in Europe and America, have long been using city rails for freight, and the comparative cheapness of this system was well known here.