WAVY ROADS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 404, 13 December 1932, Page 2

WAVY ROADS

UNSAT1SFACT0RY PAYING. It is a poor conerete or bitumen road which maltes a motorist glad to get on to a gravel road, yet with all our modern road-building machinery, money, and high-priced experience there is such a stretch of highway through St. Andrews and Mahikia, in South Canterbury, and the conerete from Hornby .southward is ahnost as had. The South Oanterbury road surface is supposed to be permanent paving; it is, in fact, permanent waving. Acceleration will overcome corrugations on a road surface, but the waves. on this road are so regular and uniform as to make one think i that they had been set down on purj pose. Speed will not counteract the undulations. One bounces along or in the vicinity of this paved highway form end to end. The only worthwhile feature of the surface is that it is dustless, but the money that it cost to make the road is too great a price to pay for dustlessness. The conerete road south of Hornby j is criss-crossed by hundreds of bitu- ; men-plugged cracks, and it would he I interesting to know what the Rougho mAter reading would be over this | surface. Thousands of pounds have j been spent on this road. With the South Canterbury road mentioned it gives food for thought on our modern highways buildipg advancement. The conerete stretch with its irregujar bitumen design covers the mile length of surface which the Canterbury Automobile Association once maintained as (a splendid isection of gravel road. The association then proved how good a road could he made by the constant attention of a patrolman equipped with little more than a barrow of metal and a long-handled shovel. But like the old Roman roads of quality in Great Britain this perfect mile has long since been buried. Its perfection will be remembered by many drivers though it is buried under conerete plugged with bitumen.