The Bus-service Aspirations of Belfast Corporation.
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IN the settlement of policy, where public convenience is concerned—as, for example, in connection with the provision of travelling facilities—the Constitution of Northern Ireland offers a distinct advantage in the employment of the plebiscite. One has just been taken upon the General Purposes Bill, which the Belfast Corporation wished to promote in the Ulster Parliament. and it resulted in a defeat for the Corporation, 30,901 votes being cast for the Bill and 64,859 against it.
If is generally agreed that this unexpected result was very largely due to the Corporation's persistence in its opposition to private enterprise in bus operation. The Corporation's first proposal was to the effect that no private enterprise bus should be allowed to cross the city boundary from the outside. But this attempt to stop all bus passengers at the boundary met with ridicule.
The Corporation's second proposal—that municipal motorbuses should be allowed to run over an area of 20 miles outside the city boundary —was quashed at a statutory meeting of citizens, who saw that the proposal was in reality an effort to drive the private enterprise bus off the roads of Northern Ireland, and who felt that if the Corporation cannot make its tramway , monopoly a financial suct‘ess, it is not likely to succeed in the running of buses outside the radius of that monopoly. And now the Corporation's third proposal—that municipal buses should be allowed to run for merely two miles outside the city boundary—has been blocked by the result of the plebiscite, which private enterprise in the sphere of road transport regards as a signal triumph.