TRAM OR BUS?

Evening Star, Issue 23378, 22 September 1939, Page 8

TRAM OR BUS?

AUSTRALIAN EXPERT'S VIEW FORMER’S PREDOMINANT ROLE IN SYDNEY An interesting statement on the bustram controversy was made at Wellington this week by Mr G. R. Steere, former general manager of the Brisbane tramways enterprise. Discussing inodes o£ transport, Mr Steere said every city had to solve its own problem. No general plan of transport could be laid down to suit all cities. London had never had large fleets of surface trams for obvious reasons, but it had a wonderful underground system which carried 500,000,000 people a year, and that was only a quarter of the number the buses carried. Then the tramways feeding tho outer suburbs carried 1,000,000,000 passengers a year. London had done away with some of the surface tramways, but that really proved nothing. It had simply been found that tho people concerned could be served more efficiently in some other way. “ I still hold that for the conveyance of large numbers of people to and from a given destination electric trams are the safest, quickest, and most efficient,” said Mr Steere. “ Take the case of Sydney. On race days at Randwick 30,000 people can be moved from the racecourse to the city in half an hour. Can you realise what confusion there would be in the assembling of a sufficient number of buses to move such a crowd? “ Of course, it had to be organised. There are six platforms into which the. trams run, and they are approached by an overhead bridge, with ramps leading down to the platforms. As soon as one lot of cars is filled at one platform the gates are closed and the people naturally walk on to the gates that are not closed, and so to the trams that are not filled. Sydney has between 1,000 and 1,700 tramcars, but every form of transport has its place in the scheme —the trolley bus, the Diesel engine bus, and tho ordinary motor bus.”