More Rural Services Wanted.
Page 36
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TAESPITE the great development of road pas-1--Fsenger services throughout the country, there is still room for more and better services in many rural districts. Before the passing of the new Traffic Act country routes were prospected in a variety of ways. Usually a service would be started merely to discover whether it was likely to pay. If the results were promising the route would have to be served adequately or competition would soon arise.
Enterprise and competition constituted the means by which new routes were discovered and worked up. Undue and unwise competition, however, was a great drawback, and the Traffic Act is exercising a beneficial influence in reducing this, but the curbing of unwise competition ought not to have the result of discouraging enteFprise. When operators have settled down to the working of the Act and have become fully acquainted with its restrictions, it ought to be possible to recognize the opportunities which it provides.
In some areas the Commissioners appear to assume that all localities, urban and rural, are adequately served with bus services, Consequently, alterations to services are often in the nature of reductions. Little yet has been done to encourage the provision of new services in areas where they are needed, or in the case of services that are inadequate. It is to be hoped that in the future the Commissioners will give more consideration to the details of the needs of each district as a whole, and to the nature of the services provided by different operators before granting licences.
Barely paying or unprofitable routes should be balanced by profitable ones by the firms operating them. This should enable the covering of some routes that, considered individually, would not pay. A good many operators—often the smaller ones—have found themselves, under the Act, saddled with ill-paying routes and with no opportunity for attaching them to a portion of profitable mileage. It is the difficulty of linking up isolated villages with paying routes that accounts for so many places still being without adequate services.
There is a remedy, of course, in compelling firms that have the main-road running to connect up with the villages. The course of enterprise in the future will be to link up all small communities, so far as possible, with main-road running, and the Commissioners will understand that any village that wants a service is entitled to it.