’BUS AND TRAM

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 May 1934, Page 12

’BUS AND TRAM

VEHICLES AS UNIVERSITY. A new peripatetic philosophy is growing up on our local transport system. Travelling in London is becoming the university of the future.

This opinion was expressed recently by Mr. Frank Pick, the vice-chair-man of the London Passenger Transport Board, to the members of the Authors’'Club who had asked him to speak on traffic problems. “Our railways,” he said, "are already schools of letters. Our street omnibuses and tramways are becoming schools of politics and economics and affairs at large. These are facts of very great significance. “The great aggregation of people carried represents the basis on which we can build a higher type of civilisation, and underlying it will be travel, which is as great a necessity as ever.” He referred to the growth of London and to a corresponding growth in the travel habit. Did not this intensity, he asked, signify the birth of a new civilisation? Chelsea, and Bloomsbury, and Campbell-hill were no longer distinct schools. Was not the transport system joining East and West —as far apart in London as anywhere in the world —and North and South so widely separated by the river? Transport Was creating a unity. Mentioning some statistics relating to the London Passenger Transport Board, he said that omnibuses in the central area carried last yetar 1,910,000,000 passengers, and the country omnibuses carried another 121,000,000. On the tramways, 1,033,000,000 travelled, on the trains 937,000,000, and 22,000,000 used the coaches. “Such a total circulation will make the authors present envious. If you had a royalty of Id on that circulation it would yield 1 you no less than £16,760,000.”

This vast circulation of passengers, he continued, represented a double journey by 6,000,000 people daily, who were all potential readers—mainly of newspapers.

To provide for their reading requirements there are 164 bookstalls, which sold 600 different magazines; 14,608 publications were sold costing over 6d. Most of these were “thrillers.” “This,” he commented, “is no doubt the anaesthetic type of literature, in contrast with the aesthetic type of members of this club.” GROSS INGRATITUDE. Mr Pick emphasized the immensely better lighting of modern transport. So far as street travel was concerned provision of amenities added some 15 per cent, to the cost. All this was done so that the passengers might read in comfort the works of authors. But the authors did not reciprocate. In a newspaper he recently read: Honk, honk, honk, honk! Traffic quickens, Honk, honk, honk, honk, Hear the white man’s chorus rise Harsh unto the evening skies. That showed gross ingratitude. Mr Pick recalled an incident which shows the danger of getting too engrossed in a novel. On one occasion when he was going from Monkseaton to his office in Newcastle, where he then worked, he bought Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter.” He had got well into it when he arrived at Newcastle and decided not to go to the office, but to take the train to Carlisle and then back to Newcastle. Bu,t he had still not finished the book, so took train to Sunderland and back again to Newcastle. By that time he had finished it and went to his office.