THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 1933 THE TRANSPORT PROBLEM

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21562, 5 August 1933, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 1933 THE TRANSPORT PROBLEM

The two marked features of the transport problem in New Zealand are its wide range and its persistence. It is not by any means confined to New Zealand. In almost every country where railways run, mutterings of tho same controversy can be heard. The long supremacy of the railway as the form of land transport which, for speed and tractive power, could not be rivalled, has been seriously challenged. The motor vehicle is definitely in the field, pressing its claim to much, though not all, of the traffic which once went to the railway without question. To a speed and carrying capacity which cannot be despised by its long-entrenched rival, it adds a mobility which the engine and carriage or waggon dependent on its rails cannot hope to equal. Nobody ever expected to step from the railway carriage at his own gate, nor, unless he could command the expensive privilege of a private siding, to have his goods delivered directly into his own warehouse. With the motor vehicle these refinements of transport service are possible, adding an edge to tho competition they offer the railways. In Great Britain, where rail transport is in the hands of private enterprise, it has been said the great joint stock companies which own and operate it do not intend to be swept out of existence by motor competition as they themselves extinguished the abounding prosperity of the canals. They intend to fight back, and are doing so. Though this means a struggle for existence between two forms of private enterprise, though the survival of the fittest has long been accepted as necessarily a feature of business life, the Government there has had to take notice of the situation.

If public authority has been concerned where the railways are privately owned, it is much more vitally interested in a" country, such as New Zealand, where the system is State-owned. The Commissioner of Transport, in a recent address, has emphasised the amount of public money invested in the railways giving the figure as £60,000,000 and the unfortunate consequences if the deficit were allowed to increase to £1,500,000. This is a very real and a very important factor. Impatient people, asserting that the motor vehicle will inevitably provide the transport of the future, say, "Scrap the railways." Do they reflect that interest on the capital cost must still be found, and provision made for its repayment? That introduces a feature of State enterprise financed by borrowing, which was not, perhaps, foreseen very clearly when it was embarked upon enthusiastically in the past. If times are hard, there can be no passing of the dividend. The interest must be found in full every year, or the failure is called default. If the business had to be abandoned, there could be no liquidation of assets with the return to shareholders of as much of the yield as their interest in it justified. Those who provided the capital have never been shareholders in the railways. They are creditors of the State who expect their bonds to be redeemed in full at the due date, or to be renewed. The community simply could not afford to discard this elaborate form of transport and turn to another while still being required to pay for that which had been thrown on the scrap-heap. Fortunately this extreme view of the outlook need not be accepted. It is agreed by those authorities who have investigated the position that there are forms of transport service where the motor vehicle cannot rival the railway, freights which it could not handle efficiently, if at all. There is a role for the railway still to play, and one most important to industry, even if motor transport were to develop far beyond its present dimensions. Tho difficulty is to reconcile or rationalise these rivals.

So far the problem has been discussed Bimply as being that of road versus rail. It is not wholly so, as the proceedings of any of the numerous tribunals set up . under existing New Zealand legislation show. Rival road services are easily established because the highway is equally free to two. or more. There is no absolute franchise as with a railway system. Therefore, competition of motOr services with one another,' as well as with the railway, has had to be considered by the tribunals. Yet the clash between motor and train is the outstanding feature. The railways should have a natural first claim on the patronage of the public simply because of their State ownership and the fact that failure to meet working costs and interest out of revenue must be made good by the taxpayer. It is being proved every day that such considerations weigh very little with the travelling public and those who have goods to transport. Unfortunately, when they held an impregnable position the railways did not establish any reserves of goodwill that would stand to them now. I If that impairs their strength, it is nothing compared with the handicap they suffer by the construction

policy of the past. New Zealand is not peculiar in this. An Australian investigator, comparing the various publicly owned systems of that country with the results that might have followed if private enterprise had operated, as it has done in Argentina, for example, says : —"lt (a company) would probably not have constructed costly 'developmental' railways in the same lighthearted way as our Stato Governments in the past, but even if it had issued this large amount of stock to the public, it would have found means of getting rid -.of it by a reconstruction." That is equally true of New Zealand, and could be copiously illustrated .by reference to branch lines. These circumstances add to the perplexities which have to be faced in the task of finding a middle way between the chaos and certain loss of unrestrained competition, and a control so rigid a 8 to throttle business enterprise and curtail individual liberty. This is the core of the transport situation of the day.