FOR THE COMMON FUND

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19337, 29 May 1937, Page 14

FOR THE COMMON FUND

FINES ON MOTORISTS , STATE TRAFFIC CONTROL • THE MINISTER'S POLICY \ (Herald Special Reporter) . ' TOLAGA BAY, this day. The control of traffic will be taken completely out of the hands of local bodies, and fines on motorists will go to the common fund, when the Minister of Transport, the Hon. R. Semple, completes his reorganisation of traffic. Mr. Semple made this statement in Tolaga Bay yesterday afternoon to representations made to him by the Uawa County Council. On behalf of the council, the county chairman, Mr. R. McNeil, asked that the council should be permitted to continue issuing drivers' licenses and that the department's traffic inspector should be permitted to act for the' county .on the side roads as well as on the highways. The Minister gave a flat refusal to the request for the continuance of issuing drivers' licenses from the county offices. Licenses were being given without any test at nil, he said, and the department was going to stop that by taking definite control over the issue of licenses, and lines for traffic breaches would go into a common fund to create an organisation to control the traffic of the country.

Three-hundred boroughs in the country, he added,'had made their own by-law's, and no two were alike. Each had a different set of by-laws, and no man could motor from Auckland to Wellington and expect to understand the rule of the road. It was mffcrty rules, that was all. The control of transport would be taken completely out of the hands of the local bodies, and the department would police all the roads itself. Next session he would give power to traffic inspectors to arrest drunken drivers.