Traffic Problems.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18232, 17 November 1924, Page 8

Traffic Problems.

An increasingly serious problem each Carnival season is the control of the multitude of motor-cars travelling to and from the racecourse and the Show j Grounds. Christchurch has not yet reached the stage at which it must think about "double-decked" roadways, or viaducts or sub-ways or tubes, but it is in trouble already with congestion in the Square, and may be compelled very soon to consider the diversion of much of its wheeled traffic to less packed thoroughfares. No one could stand at the Hospital corner any morning or afternoon last week without realising that the city is moving very rapidly into a new traffic era. The question is not merely whether people shall be carried by train or tram or 'bus, but whether trains and trams and 'buses shall have the free range of our roadways and other open spaces when they wish to cater for any particular locality. It is an interesting fact—we think we could say an arresting fact—that in all reeent newspapers from other lands city transport is an increasingly prominent topic. We have no space to go into detail, and it is obvious also that many of the anxieties of cities containing two or three mil-lion-people will not concern Christchurch for another century at least; but it is i at least suggestive that in the overseas ' newspapers to hand last week one of the most prominent features —prominent in spite of the feverish concentration of the public on national elections—was the amount of space devoted to the traffic problems of London, Paris, and New York. It is- unfortunately the case that in each of these'three great cities no one realised a hundred years ago, or even half a hundred, how rapidly these problems would grow and complicate themselves! Even in New York, *hi*t is wholly a recent growth, the difucult/ of finding free space for the increasing

volume of transport of all kinds is complicated to an almost hopeless extent hv the presence of buildings which a far-sighted policy would never havo allowed to come into existence. in London and Paris we expect such complications, though it is the eas-J also in both cities that more than halt the trouble is of comparatively recent growth. The "Daily Telegraph," commenting on a discussion at the Institute of Transport, said that "anyone "who returns to Central London after "an absence long enough for his mind "to be cleared temporarily of old impressions, and so become susceptible "to new, must be struck by the intolerable street noises and the intolerable "traffic blocks. It seems, after such an "absence, more difficult to cross the "road with safety;' the strings of "vehicles seem longer; the pace of "the traffic, when once a block has been "unfrozen, seems fiercer, as if all the "drivers were frantically bent on re- '' covering the lost minutes.'' Of thoso returned travellers none were more impressed and terrified than tho exiled Londoners who visited Wembley this year from the Dominions. And there is precisely the same story to tell of Paris. The weekly correspondent of "Truth" wrote from Paris at the beginning of October that the city was very little excited over her new express motor-'buses. "The fact is that an express motor- " 'bus is not one instant quicker than a "slow one, while it is being held up by "a policeman in a block, and blocks "are so much the order of the day in "Paris streets just now that one has to "allow ten minutes extra to every half"hour it used to take to get from one "place to another. It is quicker for "a lame man to limp from the Opera "to the Place de la Republique than for "him to take a taxi or an omnibus. ". . . Traffic has superseded all such dc- " tails as the League of Nations, the "weather, or the length of skirts, as a "topic meriting attention." And of New York it is sufficient to say that the "Times" devotos a whole page in two succeeding Sunday editions—with maps, and drawings, and photographs—to a discussion by experts of the city's now baffling problem of keeping its millions on the move. We are so far from such conditions in Christehurch that many may think their discussion a little absurd; but everybody thought traffic alarms absurd in New York fifty years ago, and no one who has really begun to think of the situation in Christehurch can suppose that it is too soon to look ahead.