ANOTHER TUNNEL

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 81, 6 April 1926, Page 11

ANOTHER TUNNEL

CAN WELLINGTON AFFORD IT?

HATAITAI VIA EOSENEATH,

It is understood that one item which will appear on the City Estimates sheet will be an amount of something like £4000 for the continuation of roadwork to connect Eoseneath and Hataitai and to make much more useful the expensive Carlton Gore road job. If this item gets past the Finance Committee, and there are indications that it will, and if the sum is adequate to improve the bad lengths between the head of Caflton Gore road and Hataitai road, a very fair bus and general motor road will be available. The Tramways Department is contributing largely to the cost ci the Carlton Gore road, but whether it is to be called upon to bear a share of the cost of the proposed, new work also has. not been stated.

Just what effect the completion of a new road, a hill road certainly, between the city and Hataitai will have upon the tunnel question remains to be seen, but from what can be gathered it will be a factor which will have a good deal of weight in some quarters.

Though all references which have recently been made at the council table to the second tunnel through Mount Victoria have been made by speakers who are anxious that the work should be pushed ahead, there are other councillors who so far have not put forward their views, and whose views will not particularly please tunnel advocates when they do express them.

In short, their contentions may be put as follow:— A second tunnel will undoubtedly give better service to Hataitai, Kilbirnie, Lyall Bay, Seatoun, and Mjramar, but with the exception of Eataitai and a part of Kilbirnie the present service, by road as well as tram, is already workable, if not ideal. The completion of the Evans Bay pavement next season will greatly improve road access to areas other than Hataitai and Kilbirnie North. A second tunnel will cost at least £200,000. Can Well'Vg^on at the present time, even admitting the desirability of improved access, afford that expenditure? Secondly, as the citizens' authority,, given in I*2o, was for the raising of a sum of £161,250, and as that sum, together with the additional 10 per cent, which the council may raise without further authority will be inadequate to build the tunnel, will the ratepayers agree to grant the council further authority to borrow?

There is no doubt that Evans Bay road is becoming a busier road every day, and that a great deal of the traffic which formerly ran over Constable street now goes round the bay. The Tramways Department has for some weeks been running, morning and afternoon, motor-buses via Oriental and Evans Bays to Lyall Bay, and recently, after striving, for authority to do so for many weeks, one of the. private bus companies was at last given permission to run a regular service on this route.

So far passengers do not seem, to have taken to the idea, but there should be not much .doubt about the success of the run, for it is not more than two or threo minutes longer than the tram run.through the tunnel, and probably a little faster 'than the Constable street run, and is certainly most pleifcant.