THOSE QUAINT TORIES.

Observer, Volume XXXIV, Issue 23, 14 February 1914, Page 2

THOSE QUAINT TORIES.

Pen and Ink Cure

THE Government will in future impose a fine not exceeding .£lO on any person who insists on being killed at a railway level crossing. It has stopped up the leak in the national life with a handful of words,

it has cured the level crossing disease with a regulation and has comfortedt the widow and the fatherless with a Gazette 'regulation. It iis suggested' here that should smallpox break out again in Auckland it should be suppressed with circulars and any epidemic of plague be at once squashed by notice boards. It is refreshing toobserve that the Government did not keep the level crossing death " steadily in view " for too long. They attacked the problem with a pen, chased it to its lair, poured ink on it, .breathed a sigh of relief and went electioneering. The new regulations, which simply tell the vehicle driver to " look out !" in a heap of involved words ; suggest that a motorist or a. driver of a horse drawn vehicle is wilfully blind, deaf, and careless. They suggest that the passenger on level' crossings is always trying to get run over by a train to annoy the Railway Department. It is not the business of the Railway Department to make its level crossings fool-proof but the business of the passenger to have eye* that see through hedgeu, and round coiners.

It is also the business of the passenger across level crossings to carry the railway schedule of trains in his (head. The regulations that are toprevent the further filling of the cemetery plot required for level crossing victims demand that the motorist shall slacken his speed to ten miles an hour one hundred yards from a level crossing. As the enginemen on a brain about to proceed over the crossing will be possibly the only witnesses and as they as a rule cannot see a vehicle until it is close to the permanent way, when the State demands a ,£lO fine from the corpse the expert evidence should be interesting. These regulations are presumably the result of the Government having " carefully gone into the matter " and are probably with the object of placing all liability on the corpse and removing it from the Department, which possesses dozens of dangerous crossings. The new regulations are as useful in stoppins the leak in human life as a mustard plaster would be on a burst steam-pipe. If you pasted a doctor's prescription on a wooden leg and expected it to grow toes you would beless foolish than in expecting a newregulation to cure dangerous crossings..

The only point worth considering is--to make level crossings safe to the deaf, blind and idiotic. No system that do-= not close a level crossing absolutely while a train is passing is of the least utility. The command to observe the injunction : " Stop, loot out for the engine '!" i* always obeyed would have necessitated a standing camp for travellers for anything up to 20 years. There were lengths of line in New Zealand that had anything but steam traffic on them, including the warning, for a score of years. The new regulations will interest the relatives of deceased persons who by them are accused of failing to keep that vigilant outlook which is "Reform's panacea for a violent death per engine. If a vehicle under the new regulations is to slow down one hundred yards from the metals which of course it should do when the driver knows the line is ahead) it is the duty of theDepartment to place conspicuous notices (short, sharp and pointed) onehundred yards away from the line crossed by the road and both sides of it. Hundreds of drivers of motor cars use crossings they have never driven over before, so that to fine such a person for being unaware of something not in sight would behighly "Reformative." The Railway Department by its new regulation places the onus on the passenger and not on itself. If the railways of New Zealand were owned by private corporations, level crossings' would bemade fool proof by order of the Government. The latest device to get out of making the very necessary improvements is exceedingly typical of bureaucracy.