CARS AND PEOPLE

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 144, 21 June 1938, Page 10

CARS AND PEOPLE

BRAND-NEW PROBLEM

EXHIBITION CROWDS

RONGOTAIFORETASTE

Every country in the world, excepting Greenland, Tibet, Bermuda, and a few more strange places, has during I the last five or six years carried far j the art of transporting multitudes of [people here and there with extraordinary speed and balloon-tyre smoothiness. More people are moving more quickly than ever they did before, and every day more and more people are running round and about at 30 to 50 miles an hour. As long as they run round and about motor-car transport does its work wonderfully, but when all roads lead towards one point extraordinary complications follow, for private car transport under those circumstances is apt to jam itself into virtual immobility.

There have been several remarkable examples of this new traffic puzzle, arising from the very plenitude of means of transport, and Wellington must have a lively interest in mass traffic troubles if the same thing is to be avoided on big days at the Exhibition at Rongotai. The minor delays which occurred at the Air Force pageant at Rongotai a fortnight ago were merely an indication of what may be ahead, for several factors made the way easy that day.

Two other air pageants brought home to traffic authorities, in England and Australia, the terrific difficulties of handling car traffic which was determined to get -to one point. The famous Hendon R.A.F. display would probably have been abandoned in any event in the near future, but the virtual impossibility of getting tens of thousands of cars to and from Hendon, even with the extraordinarily complete routing and control over every mile of road, was a main reason for calling the spectacle off. Wellington is not London and Rongotai is not Hendon, yet there is a parallel. RICHMOND'S RECORD JAM. As part of the Anzac Day celebrations in New South Wales this year the Australian Air Force staged a display at the Richmond Aerodrome, 30 miles or so from Sydney. It was a spectacular show, but the traffic jam will be longer remembered. Seventy thousand people saw the display, but how many started out to see it but did not get there nobody knows. Thousands of cars either did not get to Richmond or arrived for the last few items, and the same thing happened to special trains.

Between 10 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. (the display was over at 5 p.m.) 30,000 cars passed along the main road; some turned off in despair; others arrived in time' to meet the return traffic.

The train congestion was classic. Special trains left Sydney at divers hours. There were nine altogether, but only three arrived before the programme opened, and four of them arrived after more than half the items were over. The ninth' reached the station near Richmond just eight minutes before the last event. The passengers were not pleased; some were so exasperated by continual stops that they got out and walked across country. Others stuck by the trains, and stayed stuck. On the return to Sydney the rail jamming was still classic, but the last engine and carriage was clocked in at the home station at 11.25 p.m. When the last motor-cars got clear of the clutch-slipping lines is not recorded by Sydney papers, but it must have been far too late for pictures. It was a great day, in retrospect. SAVED BY THE BOMB THAT DID NOT BOMB. The Rongotai air display was, comparatively, a small one beside the Richmond pageant, but there were traffic, possibilities?in it. The crowds that waited about Rongotai and Lyall Bay for the bomb that went wrongno fault of the Air Force, for they had delegated the handling of the 250pound charge to another arm—were vastly disappointed that it did not go off,' but the traffic people were profoundly thankful, for instead of the afternoon's outing ending with a loud bang' and' a rush of motorists to get away, it' petered out while half the crowd believed for forty minutes that the engineers would get the thing to go and others lost faith a few at a time and left for home. Even so, there was still an unbroken press of cars from Bunny Street to.. Kaiwarra at seven o'clock that evening.

There was,t another important factor which reduced traffic pressure - that day: more than half the'cars did not go near the aerodrome at .all,'but'lined the hill roads, and returned to Wellington generally .earlier than those at the, aerodrome itself.

BIG NIGHTS AT THE EXHIBITION.

These saving factors will'not apply on big nights at the Exhibition. Above all, the Exhibition authorities will safeguard themselves against things that don't go off, and it will not be of much avail for thousands of people (about two to a car) to line up on hill roads two or three miles away to enjoy the Exhibition; they will, have to make, not towards, but to Rongotai. Is 50,000 too high a figure for Exhibition visitors on a big night? If the hopes of the directorate for: a total attendance of five millions during the six months are not too rosy there must be many days and nights when the attendances must exceed 50,000, for five million visitors in six months means an average of 20,000 visitors a day. There are now 23,000 cars in the Wellington postal district—the city, the Hutt Valley, out as far as Plimmerton and Carterton—and during the Christ-mas-New Year week long distance cars can surely be expected, if there is anywhere for them to camp. Is it reasonable to assume that when there is a big party night at the Exhibition (say Now Year's Eve) 10,000 cars will want to go to Rongotai?

Few people have any idea how much space cars take up in mass. On an average day between 3000 and 3500 cars stand parked in city streets between Courtenay Place and the Railway Station, and, as every late parker knows, they fill just about every available foot of roadside. The plain mathematics of it is that there is not parking space about Rongotai for anything like the number of cars that will be driven towards the Exhibition on gala nights. The Exhibition officials will require a fair share of reserved car space on the site itself, probably reducing the public parking space there to about 400 cars. The mam public parks will be on the strip of land between Seatoun Road and the sea, at Aberdeen Quay (near Miramar Wharf), and on the new land behind the causeway road, space in the total for perhaps 2000 cars. TRAMS AND BUSES TO THE RESCUE. All the indications are that'trams and buses will come well into their own as a vital means of transport to and from the Exhibition, not only for people who have no cars, but for motorists who drive in to Wellington and decide to leave their cars well

away from Rongotai. But trams and buses will perform their work only so far as their lines are kept free of congested motor traffic, and if the fleets are large enough to handle the rush of passenger traffic that must be handled if the Exhibition is to succeed.

A tentative suggestion has been made that Wellington should step back through thirty years and reinstitute a ferry service from the city to the Miramar Wharf (with a short bus service between the wharf and the Exhibition gates), and though the idea strikes one as strange at first thought it may still have a good deal to support it.