TRAFFIC REGULATION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22024, 5 August 1933, Page 12

TRAFFIC REGULATION

An official of the New Zealand Road Transport Alliance has commented in bitter terms on recent decisions by the Transport Appeal Board in cases involving consideration of the circumstances in which the competition of motor services with the railways on parallel routes might be licensed. In these cases the Appeal Board has decided that certain trips that were provided by a road transport organisation were not necessary in the public interest. In other words, these trips were redundant in yi&v of the prior existence of a service by rail that melf the needs of the public at or about the period of the day at which the trips were instituted, and, in consequence, the competition of the one service with the other involved an economic waste. It does not follow from this that, as is alleged in the criticism of the Appeal Board’s decisions, services which compete with the railways will not be permitted. The plain meaning is that the timetables of the road transport organisations must be so arranged as to avoid what would virtually be a duplication of services along parallel routes. It is clear that the effect of this is to afford protection to the State-owned railway system against a competition which is expressly aimed at diverting traffic from it. And to the extent that the Appeal Board refuses a license to a road transport organisation to enter into a direct competition of this description with the railway system it is obvious that it is conserving the interests of the taxpayers. But to complain that the Transport Licensing Act, which has set up authorities for the licensing of -road services, is “apparently a very effective legislative bludgeon for the use of the Railways Department on a competitor who is bound and helpless ” is to use most extravagant language. There is a great deal of room in the Dominion for the operation of privately-owned road services. In some parts of the Dominion the public can be served more efficiently by road than by rail, and the signs are not lacking that, where this is demonstrably the case, the railway will sooner or later be superseded by the road vehicle. The August circular of the Bank of New South Wales is devoted in large part to a discussion of the question of road and rail transport, in which the definition of the respective economic spheres of the two forms of transport is justly said to be the problem that has been raised by the expansion of the road transport services. This is, in effect, the problem which the authorities created under the Transport Licensing Act are required to solve. The object of the Act is to control and regulate commercial motor services. To the extent to which these services are co-ordinated with those provided by rail the interest of the public will unquestionably be served most effectively. It is a development of this nature that is recommended by Professor Hytten in the circular to which we have referred. Transport Boards, he says, should make it their aim to achieve as much co-operation as possible between railways and road carriers, closing uneconomical railway lines and eliminating road competition with others, aiming constantly at making road vehicles feeders to the railway lines. The effect of this would he to strike a reasonable balance between the two systems of transport, each of which possesses advantages peculiar to itself. Unrestricted competition would in the long run be economically disastrous.