ROAD-MAKING

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21712, 30 January 1934, Page 13

ROAD-MAKING

Sir, —It seems to me that the county councils near Auckland do not know how a Macadam road should be repaired or reinstalled. I recently spent the best part of a year in Great Britain, and motored and cycled over thousands of miles of roads. About nine-tenths of tlieso roads were tarmac, or of other permanent materials, but there are atilj many thousands of miles of water-bound metal roads in the rural districts, and although they carry more. traffic than our Macadam roads, they are in splendid condition. I watched them repairing the roads, and with the small metal they mixed about one-fourth of fine clay or soft earth, and then watered the lot, and the traffic hammered the surface hard and smooth. J. went to a library and looked up the subject in throe books 011 roads written by exports, and they all agreed that to put down metal while repairing a road without soft soil for a binder was simply wasting the ratepayers' money. The fast traffic of to-day immediately throws the metal to each side and the work has to be done over again. A few years ago an ex-Imperial officer had a holding in Manukau County, and after the usual metal had been spread on his frontage ho arrived with a wheelbarrow and for days collected the dry clay from the roadsides, broke it tip and spread it on tho metal. It was a popular road and a few weeks after looked like a dry tflljer bed, but the 50 yards he had worked on was almost perfect and for two years afterwards it was the best piece of metal road in tho district. M.