ROAD AND RAIL TRANSPORT

Taranaki Daily News, 26 February 1931, Page 15

ROAD AND RAIL TRANSPORT

NEED OF CO-ORDINATION. ENGLISH EXPERT’S OPINIONS. A world-renowned authority on roads and transport, Mr. W. Rees Jeffreys, at one time secretary to the British Road Board, arrived at Auckland by the Niagara recently to make a private investigation into the transport problems of New Zealand. He has taken an active part in the road improvemc t movement in England during the last 40 years, is chairman of the Roads Improvement Association and a member of the Advisory Committee attached to the Ministry of Transport. He is now returning from a visit to the United States, where ho acted as chairman of the British delegation to the International Road Congress, at which New Zealand was represented. He also represented Great Britain at the Canadian Good Roads Convention,. hold in Quebec in September, since when he has made a careful study of the transport problems of the Unit d States . and Canada.

Mr. Jeffreys proposes to pay particular attention to the desirability of coordinating road and railway transport in the Dominion. During the last two years he has made a special study of this problem in Africa, travelling from the Cape to Cairo. He believes that,. broadly speaking, South Africa has spent too much on railways and not sufficient on roa' , with the result that transport charges in the Union are unnecessarily high. His comments on South Africa conditions have significant application to New Zealand. “South Africa’s high transport charges are brought about,” he said yesterday, “by the fact that if a. railway administration, especially a /Government administration, builds railways, particularly

branch lines, which do not pay, it has, in effect, to charge the overhead expenses of the branch line over the whole of the system, so putting up the cost of rail transport. “Under a proper system of co-ordina-tion a country would not have a branch railway line that would not pay and a bad road. It would choose which would suit the conditions best and would then close the branch railway line and spend money on the improvement and development of the road, acting on the principle that it is better to cut capital losses than go on losing hundreds of thousands of pounds on the railways. Thus, in South Africa they are beginning to find that, although the road system there is poor, it is necessary to close the nonpaying branch railway lines and develop road transport instead. “All over the world I find this problem of co-ordinating road aiid rail traffic a very live and vital one. In the British Dominions, in particular, it is most important that the costs of transport should .be reduced to a minimum so as to reduce the costs of production, both of raw materials and the manufactured goods, into which transport charges enter very largely. The problem is more difficult in countries like New Zealand and South Africa, where the nation owns the railways, than in Great Britain and the United States, where the railways arc owned by private capital.” . , The British Dominions, in Mr. Jeffreys opinion, are not spending sufficient money on road research, including experimental bureaux and road chemists. They are not making the best use, he says, of local material and resources. In the United States, on the other hand, large sums were being spent on what was called scientific road investigation.