WESTERN ACCESS

Evening Post, Issue 86, 11 April 1936, Page 12

WESTERN ACCESS

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —Your correspondent; Dr. L. G. Austin, quotes the cost of the BowenSydriey Street work at £20,000. That figure is somewhat misleading. The Mayor has quoted £20,000 on a number of occasions, and so it has become accepted as correct in the minds of many people. The City Engineer's estimate of the cost is: engineering

£9000, tramway costs £18,000 —a total of £27,000. That sum represents the bare skeleton of the proposed work.

To anyone inspecting the plans as prepared by the City Engineer it is manifest that the work now proposed to be done merely represents a beginning, because footpaths, narrowed in one portion to four or five feet, cannot be expected to carry the volume of pedestrian traffic using Sydney Street, and once the city is committed to the scheme by the spending of £27,000, then the city is bound to considerable additional expenditure in acquiring frontages for paths and street widening in order to make a bad proposition a little better. It is pertinent for citizens to ask why should not the City Council put all its cards on the table and let the public know the real and ultimate cost of this extravagant and unwanted diversion.

. The position is that the ratepayers turned this proposal down at a poll taken in 1929, and would most assuredly turn it down again if another poll were taken. The City Council is flouting the dictum of the ratepayers. The only method whereby the will of ratepayers can be respected is by the City Council beginning de novo as instruced by the Public Works Department, and not using money belonging to ratepayers and specially set aside for their relief. It would occupy too much space to'discuss the ethics of such procedure.

What is likely to be the net result? The chairman of the roads committee of the Wellington Automobile Club correctly supplied the answer namely, "that increasing road traffic would eventually mean the removal of the tram lines," and this-would mean the prosecution of what the Karori people call "the best route," which is not Bowen Street. Further, Sydney Street is far too. narrow to carry existing vehicular traffic and two tram lines as well. If undertaken it > would be found that the congestion would be a menace to everybody concerned, and for that reason the work should not be undertaken at all. As an illustration of town planning it is utterly absurd. In view of the fact that the City Council has recently appointed an engineer of outstanding ability, why not discard this makeshift proposal and allow the City Engineer, if a fourth route is necessary to Karori, to submit another which would conform to town plan--11 Another relevant point is that there is an encroachment upon the road, up to three feet, of the properties upon the northern side of Sydney Street West, from a point opposite the laboratory to near the cemetery gates. Provision has been made in the plans for incorporating this amount of encroachment in the footpaths. At whose expense? '' It may well be that investigation will show that this alleged encroachment belongs by right to the property owners, in which case the city will have to acquire this portion of land and stand the cost of setting back—no mean expense considering that if means mainly shifting concrete or brick walls, with considerable expense to the unfortunate owner. Is it right that this position has not been disclosed, nor has the question of who stands the expense been settled?

Does not common sense demand that before this first instalment of £27,000 lis sunk the whole question of access 'to Karori, which now consists of a bus service from Te Aro Post Office to Karori, an occasional bus service from Aro Street via Bowen Street to Northland, the Kelburn tram, and thence by bus from the top of Kelburn tram to Karori, and a tram service via Molesworth Street, be fully canvassed by our engineers and then subjected to the scrutiny of ratepayers by a poll? That is the simple, plain course "for the council to pursue.—l am, etc.,

PROGRESS.