Municipal Tramways versus Motor 0mnibuses.

Progress, Volume I, Issue 6, 2 April 1906, Page 149

Municipal Tramways versus Motor Omnibuses.

If municipal enterprise is to succeed at all it cannot, of course, brook any opposition. In certain cases, it is true, it cannot prevent the private mdivi dual or a private corporation competing against its enterprises, as, for example, in the case of the London County Council's electric tramways, and the rapidly-developing motor omnibus services in South London. The L.C.C. has, states the Financier ani Bulhonist, spent tens of thousands of pounds in converting the old horss-car system into one worked by electricity, and it professes to be conducting this service at a handsome profit. This is probably correct, but can anyone imagine that such will be the case in a few years' time, when the public as a body have found out that the motor omnibus is quicker and can be run much cheaper than the electric cars, and, further, that this opposition has been more than merely powerful before the cost of creating the car service has been met out of the funds now being set aside for that purpose ? The L.C.C. cannot prevent the omnibus companies running their motor vehicles in opposition to their cars, but should a railway company embark upon such an enterprise, they would be the first to seek an injunction against these disturbers of their — well, monopoly !

The Hon. A. Stanley, M.P., presided at the eighth annual dinner of the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland, held recently. The chairman said that at the last dinner he had calculated that the motor cars to be sold in Great Britain during the ensuing season would amount in value to but he could now say, from information obtained at the Olympia Show, that the sales would come to more than in England alone m the ne^t year.