The Waipawa Mail. Published Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays Thursday, September 20, 1906. THE MOTOR.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXVI, Issue 5013, 20 September 1906, Page 2

The Waipawa Mail. Published Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays Thursday, September 20, 1906. THE MOTOR.

The presence of so many motors on our roads is an indication that petrol-driven machines have come to stay. Every year sees developments which promise to lift this form of locomotion into the front rank as a friend-of humanity. This does not forget, however, that just at present its enemies are very numerous, and their remarks, like those of the immortal oritio of Ah Bin, are frequent and painful and free. In England and America the fight against public prejudice is still a desperate one. Everywhere there is the tendency to magnify the drawbacks of a method of locomotion which raises unending clouds of dust, depreciates tho value of property, ruins the country side, causes evil odours to hang about the public thoroughfares, and adds a new terror to life. Bo far has the crusade against it gone that a Royal Commission on Motor Oars had to be appointed by the British Government, and its report has recently been commented upon by the home papers in many different sharps and flats. But it is recognised, nevertheless, that the motor has come to stay. Some idea of the popularity of tho motor may bo gained when it is stated that at the end of the year 1904 there were 31 motor omnibuses running in the London streets and that on the Ist of May this year the number had increased to 404. That is pretty well. But it is nothing to what is coming. The London General Omnibus Company alone has in making 800 motor ’buses. The Road Car Company, when its orders are completed, will bring the numbers up to 1200. If to all this he added the vast number of persons who are ordering motors—abandoning the cry of tho critic for the cult of the chauffeur—it will be realised how far the new development in machinery is taking the mother country; and if to this again be added tho extension of motor manufacture and ownership on the Continent and in America the future begins to take new shape, and to figure with horseflesh reduced almost to vanishing point.

In America, it may be noted, the problem of adapting the motor to the needs and nerves of modern civilisation is being very olosely studied. Inventors are now bonding all their energies upon the production of machines to be run with spirit, and quite a revolution is forecast in the making of motors. The evil smell which comes with the use of petrol will vanish as spirit takes its placo, and advantages seem likely to accrue in other directions. But the Americana are beginning to tackle the difficulty of perpetual dust, which, after all, seems to he the crown of crime from the point of view of a longsuffering public in the Old and New Worlds. They are ordering their roads so as to make them dustproof as far as possible, and re-arranging them so that.speed may not be a menace to publio safety. Motor car manufacturers everywhere arc studying the effect of tho present Bhepo of car body to the same end, and each nuisance and defect is being steadily attacked and reduced. It can only bo a matter of time when the problems will be solved, and automobiles will rule the road, to tho benefit of everybody l concerned. What wo can see from the Australasian standpoint is an overincreasing asset. The accumulated

experience) of the northern hemisphere will become the fortune of the southern, and our roads will not long prevent us from taking full advantage of thß new birth of machinery. This will bring our spaces under better control, and solve many problems which are at present hopeless if we must depend upon the railway.