H.—4o.

account certain factors set out in the regulations. As disagreement on the part of one local authority could thus involve the whole of the other local authorities in the heavy-traffic district in expensive litigation, it was considered desirable that some other less-costly method should be adopted. The basis of allocation should undoubtedly be the use of the roads by the heavy motor-vehicles, and truest measure of this use would be obtained from a comprehensive traffic census. This method would be almost as costly as the Magisterial inquiry, and after carefully investigating the matter it was finally decided that the relative cost of surface-maintenance incurred by each local authority would represent a reasonably close measure of use by the heavy motor-vehicles. The regulations were accordingly amended, and the Eight Hon. the Minister has already made one allocation on this basis, while, in addition, there are at present three separate applications from different heavy-traffic districts being dealt with. 6. TRANSPORT LICENSING ACT, 1931. The administration of the Transport Licensing Act has involved the Department in a heavy volume of work during the year. There were many inquiries regarding the legislation and regulations and their application, and every effort has been made to make the Act generally understood with a view to minimizing any difficulties. Broadly speaking, the system of licensing of passenger-services is now proceeding smoothly, while the licensing of goods-services is at present being carried out. A. PASSENGER SERVICES, (a) Continuous Passenger-service Licenses. At the first licensing period the expiry date of all licenses was made 28th February, 1933, with the exception of the " automatic " licenses in the South Island, in which cases the expiry date was for the sake of convenience, made 31st August. Applications were received during the year under review for the granting of a number of new passenger-service licenses and for the renewal of those licenses which expired at 28th February, 1933. Altogether 548 applications were considered, and of these. 457 were granted, 47 were refused, 16 were withdrawn, and 28 were deferred. (6) Seasonal Passenger-service Licenses. The seasonal passenger-service license has not been utilized to any great extent so far. During the year 20 applications for this class of license were received, and of these, 16 were granted, 2 were withdrawn, and 2 deferred. (c) Temporary Passenger-service Licenses. Under section 29 of the Act a temporary passenger-service license is defined as a license for a service to be carried on for a specified period of not more than seven days, or a license for any specified special occasion or occasions. In order to give sufficient flexibility to the licensing machinery in dealing with temporary licenses, section 14, subsection (5), provides that the Chairman may in any cases of urgency grant such licenses on behalf of the Licensing Authority and shall report such grants to the next meeting of the Authority. The temporary license has been made use of mainly in connection with race-meetings, shows, and other special occasions which involve a considerable movement of passenger traffic, which is beyond the capacity of the existing passenger-services, if any. The supply of transport facilities for these special occasions comes from two main sources —viz., the reserve fleets of passenger-service operators whose services are licensed under the Transport Licensing Act, and " taxis," which require to take out " plying for hire " licenses under local-body by-laws in respect of their usual operations as taxis, but which do not come within the scope of the Transport Licensing Act unless they charge separate fares. Broadly speaking, the operators who were already licensed under the Act were acquainted with the provisions relating to temporary licenses, and the machinery for temporary licenses worked smoothly in the bulk of these cases. The taxis, however, presented more difficulties. In the first place it took some time for the provision of the Act to become known, and, in the second place, many taxi-proprietors who were refused temporary licenses took advantage of the difficulties in proving that separate fares were charged, and continued to operate illegally in competition with properly licensed services. Steps were taken to deal with cases of this nature, and a number of successful prosecutions have largely discouraged these unlicensed services. Altogether seventy-seven prosecutions were conducted against taxi-operators running without securing temporary passenger-service licenses or running after an application for such a license has been refused. Of these proceedings 53 resulted in convictions, 16 were withdrawn, and 8 were dismissed. Up till the 20th May, 1933, a total of 2,014 temporary passenger-service licenses had been granted to 455 separate concerns, the average number of temporary licenses per operator affected being just under four. An examination of Table No. 20, which gives an analysis of the temporary licenses granted during the above-mentioned period, discloses some points of interest. Some 244 operators were granted one license during the period in question, 92 were granted two licenses, 69 were granted three licenses, 40 were granted four licenses, and so on in proportionate diminution until the " nine license " group, which comprised 20 operators. Twelve operators were granted more than twenty licenses and 1 operator was granted seventy licenses, or an average of more than one per week. These figures direct attention to the necessity for considering alterations to the existing machinery, whereby operators regularly providing services for the race meetings, shows, &c, in a given locality might be granted one license to enure for the whole year, thus obviating the necessity for procuring a separate license for each event, The Department is looking into this matter with a view to improving the existing machinery. The question of simplifying the forms for use in connection with the temporary passenger-service licenses is also receiving attention.

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