New Zealand Truth THE NATIONAL PAPER THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1928. Stepping On It

NZ Truth, Issue 1193, 11 October 1928, Page 6

New Zealand Truth THE NATIONAL PAPER THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1928. Stepping On It

TT is a queer freak of human myopia that the smaller the body, whether it be individual or corporate, the greater is the tendency towards undue inflation of the chest area. This is particularly noticeable among those small, insular pecksniffs who flap their sails m borough and county council chambers, where those paper-weight observations of theirs are manufactured, subsequently to choke the avenues of communication nightly opened by the Press Association. v The most palpable . illustration of this comes from a page of the many dreary accounts of local body procedure, m respect of speed limits through villages and provincial by-pass communities. * Bach believes itself to be the swivelling point for. almost everything, particularly those towns within hailing distance of main rail tracks, arrogating the shortsighted right to construct a wall of restrictive "Thou must nots" and • " Keep off the grasses. " ; The maximum speeds scheduled by the various borough councils throughout New Zealand are not one cubit short of bewildering to the drivers of automobiles with far-distant ' objectives from the starting point. It would require addingmachine minds to hold all the restrictions, by-laws, sub-sections and maximum speed regulations quoted and, . quite often, not. advertised by virtue of sign-posts— some towns favoring fifteen, others twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, stated m malevolent terms on wind-and-rain-cracked notice-boards. If councillors would spend as much time m trying their parochial best to co-ordinate with the more generous outlook , of other civic bodies; if they occupied their time m attempting , to establish a national speed limit throughput the .provincial townships of "the Dominion, instead of plastering • the country roadsides with a plethora of silly, unpractical signboards, there [ would be fewer of those maddening traffic "jams" one observes m the larger towns and a happier condition of mind among motorists. By all means, have speed restrictions, but for everyone's sake, let them be determined by men who are capable of holding the balance fairly between speed madmen and those automobile tortoises who have, as yet, failed .to apprehend the distance, but \ are overwhelmed by the apparent enormity of small; matters near at hand. . Those who still cherish the memory . of buggy days are entitled to continue their dreaming so long as pleasant recollection does not clog the swiftly-moving wheels of national advancement. One-cylinder minds are but a drag m the six-cylinder problems of to-day.