TRAFFIC PROBLEMS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19529, 11 July 1925, Page 17

TRAFFIC PROBLEMS.

Now, I like policemen aqd I love Marcus Aurelius, but if there is one moment when I cannot abide policemen or get into the mood of Marcus Aurelius it is when X am in a motor bus or in a taxi, and when, just as I am about to cross Oxford street, I see the fat, forbidding, white-gloved hand of a policeman stretched out, announcing that I must stay where I am so long as he pleases. I am not the sold- of person who ready cares twopence about five minutes or so at an ordinary time, writes Robert Lynd ‘in the Sunday Chronicle. If you meet me in the street I will talk with you for five minutes and congratulate myself. If you ask me to have a whisky-and-soda I will spend 10 minutes with you and wish good' health and long life to ns both. But somehow a delay in the traffic seems an outrage, an affront. One would like to lean over the top of the motor ’bus or out of the window of the taxi and explain to the policeman with a white-gloved hand that, though nobody else matters, one has oneself a most important engagement, and that he is causing immense inconvenience by his silly behaviour. The odd thing is that I used to feel exactly the same in the days of the old horse trams, —hich progressed, I suppose, at the rate of two miles an hour. Every compulsory stoppage was an injury. I don’t know whether you, too, felt this, but I was always in such a hurry to reach my destination that, if the horse tram had to stop to let a herd of bullocks cross the road I felt exasperated beyond words, cross or otherwise. If I had lived in the Garden of Eden I am sure that I should have been equally convinced that the world was overcrowded and full of people who were always getting in the way. There never was room enough in the world for everybody. Probably Adam used to feel that Eve—or, at least. Cain and Abel—were always getting in the wav in the precincts of Eden. Thus the problem of modem London and of modern Manchester is the same problem as that of the Garden of Eden.