BETTER ROADS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 855, 26 December 1929, Page 8

BETTER ROADS

THE pi ocesses of tribulation are not without their benefits, even if these may sometimes seem to he obscure. An instance is the amazing development and improvement of New Zealand roads through the engagement on relief works o£ men otherwise unemployed. The extent of unemployment has in almost every possible respect been a most unfortunate thing, hut it brings at least this consolation that, although so many men are not engaged in directly productive work, they are improving the whole highway system of the country, with results that, indirectly, must confer the greatest advantages. It is not too much to say that the present unemployment relief work has had the effect of accelerating road improvement to an extent that normal processes would hardly have reached in the course of the next five or six years.

Holiday tourists will have numberless opportunities this season to examine the evidence of this advancement. One instance is the Urewera Road, now practically completed from Ruatahuna to Waikaremoana, so that the once impenetrable fastnesses of the Urewera country are open to the questing city motorist by a top-gear road. In the Coromandel Peninsula an all-round improvement has been effected. This holiday paradise is now brought within easy distance of a week-end trip from Auckland. More than that, the lot of its formerly isolated settlers has been ameliorated. The volume of work accomplished between Auckland and Hamilton, and Hamilton and Rotorua, has worked great changes along important roads that within the past five years, at Rangiriri and the Mamaku Hills, were liable to hold up practically all road traffic in wet weather. Two years ago there was only one all-weather road between Auckland and Wellington, that by Way of Te Kuiti, the Awakino Valley, and New Plymouth. Now there are two already open, and a third, the interesting central route through the heart of the North Island by way of Te Kuiti, Taumarunui and Taihape, so far completed that only in one or two short sections, which are now being improved and metalled, does wet weather present any embarrassments.