TRAMS AND OMNIBUSES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19469, 27 October 1926, Page 12

TRAMS AND OMNIBUSES.

Faced with the position created by the withdrawal of a fleet of pri-vately-owned motor-omnibuses the city tramways department has issued its revised time-table. It will not please everybody. There will be complaints, some legitimate and some not. Tho first appears this morning, dealing with the service to Victoria Avenue via Brighton Road. On the face of it, it calls for confederation. There will doubtless be others dictated by the differed views taken of the new arrangements in detail. On the broad question, however, it is more likely that the department is trying to do too much, not too little. It has evidently set out to do all that the pri vate company was doing, without regard to its obligations in the matter. A service to and from Pan mure, for instance, can be run without the twopenny penal fare being imposed. The Royal Company could have continued it, but withdrew in stead. The inference is that the run is not profitable. If so, is the Auckland City Council required to incur losses, which its own ratepayers must make good, for the sake of a district so far beyond its own boundaries? This does not apply solely, or even specially, to Panmure, which is cited merely as a convenient instance symptomatic of many abandoned services which the depart,-

ment. has apparently taken over wholly, without stopping to consider how far it is under an obligation to do it. That private motor-buses cannot run through services, refraining from taking up passengers on the tramway routes, is disproved by the example of the line which operates to and from St. Heliers Bay. It has always followed this plan, an'd continues on its way unperturbed by the twopenny additional fare over tram routes. The department would be much better employed concentrating on its own territory, making certain that it served that area fully, and establishing its feeder services transversely instead of over a wider radius. It has already cut off one convenience in the special all-night time-table between the city and Onehunga. Private enterprise here catered for the public in a way the department lias never done. A special minimum fare was charged, and still patronage was obtained. The department could do the same and thus avoid leaving those who had come to depend on the late buses without any substitute. Indeed at this turningpoint in the history of Auckland transport the absurdly early hour of general cessation might well be considered with a view to revision. After eleven thirty o'clock, with insignificant exceptions, all vehicles are rushed to depots or garages by the route most convenient to the department, regardless of any citizens who may still be afoot. Auckland has long outgrown the village stage, when this method may have been tolerable.- The withdrawal of private enterprise from catering in elementary fashion for the need, and the neglect by the tramways departs ment to fill the gap thus created, illuminato the hopelessly out of date view taken of night transport. This situation, and that of districts lying outside the legitimate sphere of the city's activities, points again toward a metropolitan transport board, the need for which grows more obvious every day.