The Press Friday, November 21, 1924. Trams and Buses.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18236, 21 November 1924, Page 8

The Press Friday, November 21, 1924. Trams and Buses.

Except for the timely, tactful, and well-! earned tribute to the staff, the report submitted to the Tramway Board on Wednesday on the operations of Carnival Week was the reverse of comforting. For the first time the trams met the competition of • buses at something like its real force, and were beaten. It is clear, too, that what has happened in this special case will happen more and more frequently now in general practice, and we should like to be able to feel certain that the Board knows how to meet the situation. In the Chairman's last annual report (dated March 24th, 1924) the suggestion is made that the Board "might consider "tho advisability of obtaining a fleet "of, say, half a dozen buses which "could be used to test new joutes," but it is plain that the problem is a verymuch bigger one than the Board was then thinking about. It is not merely on new routes that the battle will have to be fought, but on the routes now served by trams. Last -week, for example, the Board was robbed of a very large number of passengers on one of the oldest and safest routes in the city, and it cannot be supposed that there is any route —or at least any area —secure against the attack of the bus in future. And unfortunately, the tendency of such bodies as a Tramway Board is to look for legislative protection instead of trusting to the armour of better methods. We have pointed out before how this tendency has operated in America, and there has been evidence since in our news columns of Australian .attempts to choke off competition by 'taxing buses off tho roads—a double evil, since it involves an entirely improper use of the State's power to tax as well as a disregard for. the convenience of tho public. The key to the whole situation is that tram's were made for the public and not the public for the trams. If buses can carry people more successfully than trams can—more cheaply, more rapidly, more comfortably, more adaptably—buses and not trams should and will carry them. There can be no hope of legislation that does not make the comfort and convenience of the public the first consideration. Even when the bus is genuinely a "pirate"—when it swoops in and carries off the tram's waiting customersrthe remedy is not to call in tho policeman but to cast out the offending timetable or system. Men are not born with a passion for 'buses and a repugnance for trams. They are born with a love of comfort and a dislike of inconvenience whenever and nowever caused—and with a right also to the most economical use of their time and capital. If it is found that trams cannot compete with buses on even terms, the remedy possibly is to make the struggle between buses and buses—as Auckland, for example, intends to make it; but there can be no prohibition of buses, direct or indirect, unless the strongest proof is given that this would be in the public interest. The, situation is very difficult, very disturbing, very perplexing. It is not the Board's fault that plans which aeemed secure enough once for another generation have been shaken in tho fifth of a generation, and that there is no body of evidence from other countries conclusive enough to be a guide for the future. It is not yet clear how far motor-bus competition can go, or how long it will endure, nor are the limits to which it is safe to trust the roads to heavy, rapid and continuous bus traffic known to anybody. One of the strongest reasons urged in support of the Motor Omnibus Bill now before the Legislative Assembly in Victoria is —or was, since the change of Government has probably ended the discussion —that the only place for heavy loads is on steel rails. It is certainly the case that if motor-buses increase in number and size the burden of Toad maintenance will have to be redistributed. But those are aspects of a problem and not tho problem itself. The problem before the Tramway Board is how to keep the trams running on their own revenue, and the worst way to attack it is through the Legislature.