HINTS TO OPERATORS

Northern Advocate, 25 July 1935, Page 6

HINTS TO OPERATORS

APPLICATIONS FOR TRAFFIC LICENSES. MANIFESTS MUST BE PROVIDED. • A long statement, in which a great deal of helpful information was given to operators, was read by Mr W. Jones, chairman of No. 1 Transport Licensing Authority, at the Haitaia sitting on Wednesday. Mr Jones emphasised the necessity for all applications being in proper order of being lodged within the time prescribed and said it would be necessary in future to produce manifests over a period of two months and afford the authority an opportunity to get at the operator’s returns over any month of the year. The Railway Department and the shipping people were demanding these manifests, and had a right to do so under the new legislation. If operators showed as great an improvement during the coming year in presenting their applications as they had shown up to the present they would reach 100 per cent. Mr Reynolds asked if the idea was to discover whether an operator was working the whole of his area and if not to restrict him to the part he was working. The chairman said he did not think that was the object. He believed a number of operators are running outside their territory and the railway and shipping people are getting apprehensive. It was. probable that adjustments between groups of three or four operations, continued Mr Jones, would bring overhead costs down for the whole of them.

The Railway Department, he said,, was very insistent about the manifests. He did not care which two months were taken, but when applications were made no decision would be given till satisfactory information had been supplied. That, however, did not mean that an operator would be held up in his job. Mr Beard: “What constitutes an empty trip. Formerly we were asked to state the number of empty trips and now we are asked to give the empty mileage. I have not been able to answer the question. We are aho asked to state the total weight of goods and it is impossible to do that. To comply with that we would require a special system of book-keeping. ' I am making provision for that, but, to give some of the information asked for, would mean the employment of an extra man.’’ It was suggested by Mr Reynolds that some information was only desired for statistical purposes and was of no real value.