GUIDE WANTED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26226, 9 August 1946, Page 4

GUIDE WANTED

We publish this morning a letter from a visitor to Dunedin, who makes a suggestion that the Transport Department should, issue time tables, for the benefit of those who use the system. The reply of the Transport Department spokesman, to whom this simple suggestion was submitted, was enigmatic silence. This response is not helpful, and it can be urged that it is not a sufficient reply to a question that must have occurred, not to visitors only, but to any public transportation users who desire to make a visit to parts of the city and suburbs outside the accustomed groove of their tram and bus travel. So far as casual inquiries reveal, there is no up-to-date, comprehensive guide to the time schedules of the city transport system. The diligent can, of course, make their own copies, seriatim, from the not always explicit and sometimes far from legible time tables displayed at termini and elsewhere. The impatient can inquire of the headquarters of the Transport Department, if they have a telephone handy. And visitors, presumably, can spend a part of their sojourn in Dunedin asking passers-by—who may also prove to be visitors —where they can find the tram which leaves for St. Kilda, or the bus for Maori Hill, and at what hours does it go. The replies they receive must often be unsatisfactory, and the time so wasted could no doubt be more pleasantly spent. Yet all that is required is a little clerical work by the Transport Department, a. word with a printer, and a time table could be compiled and published which would answer all questions and resolve most of the problems of getting from one place to another. There need be no financial risks in a publication of this nature. Distributing agencies could surely be found to handle-the time table, and the public of Dunedin would, as surely, be ready to pay f or it —even extravagantly, such is the need for it. Alterations in schedules would, of course, continually out-date the time table, so that it would require to be produced in economical.form, for frequent withdrawal and alteration. The amended sections might, for the benefit of the prudent, be advertised so that they could be clipped from the newspapers and inserted in the obsolescent issue. But these are matters of detail, quite within the genius of the Transport Department to attend to satisfactorily. -The obvious point is that at the present time there is apparently no complete guide to the city transport service of Dunedin, which to the extent that this lack j puzzles and inconveniences its users is failing to. display the efficiency i that .the public has a right to expect.