GRAVEL AND BITUMEN

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 117, 13 November 1929, Page 10

GRAVEL AND BITUMEN

ENGINEER ON EELATIVE COSTS

(By Telegraph.)

(Special to "The Evening Post.") PALMERSTON N., This Day. Which is the better proposition for a county, to maintain a gravel or'bitumen road? This question must have vexed ratepayers on more than one occasion now that the tendency is to put down permanent roads. ,

Figures that threw a great deal of light on the subject were placed before the Kairanga Caunty Council yesterday, when the engineer (Mr. J. E. Menzies) reported upon the costs, both capital and maintenance, that the county had faced on that strip of bitumen highway between Palmerston North and Newbury, a. distance of approximately three miles.

The engineer's figures showed that the annual charge per mile in the matter of interest and sinking fund on the loan raised to lay down the road was £64 6s. whereas the cost of maintaining the shingle section of the same I road extending from Newbury to the Oroua Hiver had worked out at £65 1 17s lia per mile. The costs were about the same, it would seem, but on the one hand the county had a good ro.-.d and on the other it had no road at all. Mr. P. J. Small considered the report very satisfactory. There had been the impression that an enormous sum of money had been borrowed on the road, and it was going to stagger creation to keep it paid up. ""We can congratulate ourselves that we have an ex- [ ceptionally good road between Palmers- | ton North and the county boundary, and it was a wise move when we set out as early as we did. I don't know what we would have had to face bad the road been left. It carries very fast and heavy traffic, and would have been like a river-bed. Its neglect would have meant persecuting the people who use it and those living alongside as well." ' The council agreed.