SEVEN MONTHS' TOUR

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 61, 14 March 1939, Page 5

SEVEN MONTHS' TOUR

DUNEDIN ENGINEER

BRITAIN AND AMERICA

Mr. S. G. Scoular, formerly Assistant City Engineer of Duriedin, was last year advised of his pending promotion to the position of City Engineer and of the decision of the City Council that he should make an extended tour abroad before taking up his new work. Mr. Scoular passed through Wellington last week on his return to Dunedin after seven months of travelling. In that time he visited eighty-one cities in Britain, the United States, and Canada, and travelled 48,000 miles— that he knows of, by reckoning up i steamship, rail, and motor milages. The tour was of extraordinary interest and value to him, he told a "Post" reporter. It was also quite a strenuous business and the first day off he had had was when he got on the boat for New Zealand, for there was an unlimited field for first-hand inquiries and he had made it a general rule to complete the day's notes at the end of the day, but still there was the considered report to the City Council ahead. In every city he visited, he said, he had the most friendly assistance of city and public officials, the Institution of Civil Engineers, and the Ministry of Transport as well as district authorities in Britain, and the American Socity of Civil Engineers in the United States, whose arrangements enabled him to see an enormous amount in a comparatively short time, considering that he was taken to civic and public works in twenty-six States. He had been struck by the close association between British and American municipal engineers who maintained an effective exchange of information upon experimental work in both countries. Practically every municipality of any size had a research department for the testing of material, safeguarding of water supply and generally maintaining standards and checking' new methods. Mr. Scoular said that he learned much of value for application to New Zealand conditions from cities of medium size, for in the greater cities so many of the public works were on a scale that would stagger—and bank-

rupt—New Zealand ratepayers. Apart from broad plans of modern civic engineering great advances were being made in detail, in materials and ap* plication, and he listed a score of them, of no particular general interest, but of direct importance to municipal engineers, from pavement mixes and new joints for water pipes to incinerators and motor camp control. Roads, traffic,- and parking control were common problems wherever he travelled, said Mr. Scoular. The divided roadway was becoming stand- ; ard construction wherever new work was going on, and both in England and the United States the principle had been accepted of setting aside a fixed ; percentage of construction cost to ■ roadside improvement or reservation of look-outs at beauty spots—in the United States £ per cent, had first been set aside, and now,it was 1 per cent.; in England there was no fixed percentage, but it was roughly the same. > Hoardings? Not nearly to the extent that they are plastered along New Zealand roads, he replied, and certain of the American States had fixed hoarding-free strips so many chains wide on either side of new highways. Preservation of natural beauty was taken seriously overseas. - Street parking troubled all the world and though every city had tackled it with more or less determination none had found the solution. Chicago had recently reduced shopping parking from twenty minutes to three minutes —the time an elderly lady might take to get out of a car or into it. There had been an uproar from the business people and the rule had been fought in the courts, but the threeminute limit was held good, on a ground that made Chicago laugh, but disheartened those who protested: the old ruling of the time of Charles I that the King's highway might not be turned into a common stable was adapted to the modern need, and the Chicago court used that as the basis of its judgment. Parking meters were in use elsewhere, with local success or failure. Los Angeles had decreed that every new building should provide parking space adequate for the accommodation of car traffic normal to its business. Taxi ranks had no place in many cities: one called them from special booths connected by direct line to their garages. And as for private garages, in many American cities no one was permitted to erect a street-line garage; it had to be set back from the roadway, for the municipality had the right to approve or disapprove street elevations, and it exercised that right.