GENERALITIES WILL NOT DO

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 100, 30 April 1930, Page 10

GENERALITIES WILL NOT DO

Every .day events in New; Zealand, and the reports of such expert bodies, as the Royal Commissions of Britain and of South Africa, prove that it is time that public opinion faced the obvious need of transport legislation. This necessity is not to be brushed aside by the remark attributed to the Mayor (Mr. Troup) at the recent Municipal Association conference that "the Government was bringing down legislation almost every year which was sapping the authority of local bodies." If.the Government's Transport Bill is unduly sapping the authority of local bodies, this objection should be proved in a concrete way; mere assertion is not sufficient. The vesting in special licensing authorities (instead of in local bodies) of powers to license and control public service vehicles is a clearcut and outstanding principle. It is either right or wrong. If it is wrong, the onus rests on Mr. Troup and the Municipal Conference to state a reasoned case against it, whereas (if the report before us does justice to the discussion) it was dismissed by the conference in a few lines. The onus is more particularly on the objectors, in that the British Royal Commission, after an investigation much more searching than anything that could be conducted in this country, has reported emphatically in favour of the same principle—that is, of removing the licensing and control of public service vehicles* from many hundreds of local bodies to fourteen special licensing authorities. In a similar way, the Transport Bill introduced by the New Zealand Minister of Transport, Mr. Veitch, creates eighteen special licensing authorities, their areas co-terminous with the areas of the district highways boards, thus tending to link road-making and traffic control. If the special licensing authority principle is bad in New Zealand, how can it be good in the Old Country? If our local bodies are being'despoiled, how are hers surviving? As the principal objectors before the Parliamentary Committee last session, the local bodies must see that they cannot rest on their oars. Because matters became deadlocked then, that is no reason why the deadlock should continue indefinitely. The traffic complex is increasing, and even in the last few months the situation has developed, both in New Zealand 'and abroad. Nothing can be more striking than the two Royal Commission . reports, British and South African, that have appeared in the interim. As these have been, summarised in various articles, they need not be analysed here, but it may be said that they both lean away from purely local control of public service vehicles. They recognise that the rise of through traffic has left local control lacking. "Obsolete" and "archaic" are among the terms that the specially constituted Royal Commission in Britain applied to it. What measure of local control should be retained, how the special licensing authorities should be constituted, and what safeguards should be made, are legitimate questions for constructive criticism of the Bill by local authorities, but the time has gone by when Mr. Troup, or anybody else, can shelve the whole principle of reform in licensing and in control by declaring that "the principal objections to the Bill were with regard to running rights over the streets." Such a generalisation, in itself, means nothing. The Wellington City Council cannot, without permission, run a tramway over its streets, and in modern times never could. The existing law contains much more of centralisation than is implied by the creation of special licensing authorities. That measare is recommended

in Britain as a protection against excessive decentralisation. There, as here, there are local bodies who are themselves competitors in vehicular traffic. The objectors would do well to analyse, the British reports of the last six months and the resultant Bill introduced into the House of Commons.