Manawatu Daily Times. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 1925. An Evergreen Problem.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2709, 17 June 1925, Page 8

Manawatu Daily Times. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 1925. An Evergreen Problem.

Street traction problems are confined neither to clime nor time. While Wellington is wondering what is going to happen to its tramways through the invasion of a fleet of up-to-date motor buses, New York in the other hemisphere, is becoming decidedly embarrassed over Its problems of transportation. The New York "Times,” which is not a scare-monger, and which takes no pleasure at all in exposing American weaknesses, confessed the other day that the demand for better transportation is the "most angry since the City began to expand in 1840.” Precisely how the people expressed themselves on the subject in ,1840 it does not say, but it quotes an editorial of 18G4 which could hardly be said to breathe contentment: "People are packed into the. cars like sardines in a box. The seats being more than filled, the passengers are placed in rows down the middle, where they hang on by straps like smoked hams in the grocery trade. . . The foul, close air is poisonous, and for these reasons most ladies and gentlemen prefer to ride in the stages, which cannot be crowded so outrageously, and which are pretty decently ventilated.” It will also perhaps mollify bus-users to know that there were bus problems on Broadway before they were born. “Modern martyrdom," one journal declared over fifty years ago, “may be. succinctly defined as riding in a New York omnibus. Prom the beginning to the end of the journey a constant quarrel is progressing. The driver quarrels with the passengers and the passengers with the driver. There are quarrels about getting out and quarrels about getting in. . . There are quarrels about change and quarrels about the ticket swindle. The driver swears, and the passengers swear back, and so the omnibus rolls along, a perfect bedlam on wheels.” But curiously enough, though all these discomforts were most pronounced in the horse era, the horse-car died hardest of all. It is a little astonishing to .read that breathless New York was still using horse-cars in 1913 — and would possibly have been using them yet, in the suburbs if the State Legislature had not passed a law making it a misdemeanour to "operate a horse-car in cities of the first-class.” But it was perhaps the adventure of having to -'‘lose their sense of smell, develop the "capacity to shut themselves up like patent .umbrellas, be

able to hang to a platform by the lids of their eyes, or hold drunken men and unsteady women on their lap” that kept the masses stubbornly attached to the horse-tracks long after cables and overheads and subways had carried transport into its fourth and present era. In New York there was a legendary period of ox-carts, There was a period also when the public rode in stages, ‘‘huge hulking contraptions “like ocergrown private carriages, painted in gaudy colours and each with its own name emblazoned on its sides,” and after the stage, but long before it had disappeared, the horse-car arrived. The. first tram-car in New York—lt was the first also in the 'world—made its revolutionary journey up the Bowery in 1833. though twenty years passed before the new idea was popular. And now, seventy years after the victory oi fixed tracks and iron rails, the public are protesting more fiercely than thej have ever done before that the delays, dangers and discomforts of city transport are beyond endurance.