TE AWAMUTU COURIER. Printed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. FRIDAY, 16th OCTOBER, 1936. A PUBLIC UTILITY.

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3822, 16 October 1936, Page 6

TE AWAMUTU COURIER. Printed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. FRIDAY, 16th OCTOBER, 1936. A PUBLIC UTILITY.

BY interesting itself in transport services the Chamber of Commerce is forging another link between town and country. The immediate aim is a strengthening of existing facilities and services, thereby directing the flow of traffic and developing ah extended usefulness which shall be shared alike in town and country. What is proposed is no innovation, though maybe it has novelty in this locality, for actually in many lands to-day transportation is already developed along the lines of a public utility. The key point is a bus or road transport station from which both organisation and services radiate. It is an applied principle of collective effort to properly gauge the public need and measure the service to discharge its proper function in the community. It may be that individual interests will stand in the way of orderly development, since it seems inevitable that all advanced organisation conflicts with vested interests somewhere; but, as frequently happens, fears in this respect which arise in inauguration vanish when proposals take actual shape. Beyond any doubt there is to-day a tremendous wastage of transport in and around Te Awamutu consequent on the independent operation of vehicles. Delivery services are made a theoretic agency for trade, but if the costs were X-rayed it would be found that they actpally drain and impoverish the trade of the stores which strive to operate them. The vehicle mileage and the operating costs are not in keeping with the volume of trade transport, and very certainly the vehicle mileage could be made to yield a higher return if the traffic were pooled. In this only the public carrier offers adequate advantages. It requires little technical knowledge to imagine how overlapping services could be pooled to the advantage of everyone, giving district time-tables regularly, increasing their frequency, and extending their scope into the more remote localities. Few enterprises lend themselves so largely to organised direction for assured rewards, and few suffer the same degree of wastefulness by unorganised effort. Throughout New Zealand the Transport Licensing Act is ah evidence of the Government’s desire to produce order out of chaos, and at the present moment the authorities are encouraging voluntary organisation. It is no idle anticipation to predict the time when local transport stations will be found in every well-appointed town, and Te Awamutu is only moving with the times in its effort to create for so vital a public utility a modernised system. Merely a principle has been enunciated so far, and around this principle practical proposals must shape themselves so as to adapt the idea to each varying need. In this town and country can unite, and there is every assurance that they will do so. Te Awamutu pioneered the way for successful application of the principles laid down in the Electric Power Boards Act, and it can also now evolve a system which can and will more speedily attain the objective which was the prompting of those in authority who, in the Transport Act, sought a maximum of efficiency for internal transportation in New Zealand.