MOTOR SCORCHERS A Public Nuisance.

Free Lance, Volume VI, Issue 309, 2 June 1906, Page 6

MOTOR SCORCHERS A Public Nuisance.

MOST people like fast travelling If one is aboard a galloping horse, a racing yacht, or a very fast train, one wants to shout "Hooray !" That's why no one ever says "Hooray !" on a New Zealand tram. Motor cars travel fast — on an average half as fast again down Lambton Quay as a New Zealand express train on the railroad. The motorist doesn't wire that he is coming. He doesn't put up a signal. He doesn't make much noise. He doesn't always keep on his right side. And he most frequently conies round a corner as if it was his property and he had paid for it. • • • On his feet, the motorist may be a kind father, a loving brother, a true friend and a decent citizen. On his car, he wants to yell "Hooray I" and run things down. If it is a horse he collides with, well and good; if a man, why didn't the fool look out? Fast travelling is destructive of morals. That is why racing-men are not always as holy as a Presbyterian pastor. The feeling that one has only to work a clutch to speed along at forty miles an hour (or less) is a joy that gets into the motorist's blood. • • • The fact that there have not been many motor-car accidents in Wellington is not because the motorists have been careful. Just luck. But, alongside the average Wellington motor-bike, the car is a benediction. These churning, smellful abominations, with a nerveracked dyspeptic on top, are, bar nothing, the most grievous nuisance m the city. The motor cyclist, when he gets the scorching fever on, wants the whole street to himself. • • • Nobody stops him because he goes too fast. He brushes against people at tram stopping-places, rushes round corners looking like a corpse on wheels, and is a danger to life, limb, health, and happiness. The noise of his machine is disagreeable. The smell ditto. He is an inexcusable product of civilisation. A motoa'-car maniac or a motor-bike fiend consider twenty miles an hour a reasonable pace, even though a few years ago either thought he was doing all right to get from Newtown to the Post Office in forty-five

minutes instead of three. At any rat©, m the interests of public saiety both these classes of scorchers will have to be 'forced to slowdown in the crowded city streets.