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"Convenience Not Main Factor"

6th November 1936
Page 67
Page 67, 6th November 1936 — "Convenience Not Main Factor"
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

Keywords :

" WHILST the public's convenience VV must have some weight, it cannot be the ruling consideration." This submission of Mr. R. R. Smylie, for the L.M.S. Railway Co., at an appeal hearing by Sir Henry Wynne, in Manchester, last week, summarized the claims of the railways under the Road Traffic Act, 1930.

Mr. J. Lustgarten and Mr. Leslie Walsh, for some 70 respondents, urged somewhat different views. The findings of the Minister of Transport are likely to bring to a head one of the most critical issues between road and rail passenger interests yet fought to a finish.

The main issue of the appeal concerned fare reductions which the North-Western Traffic Commissioners have authorized to Chester and North Wales resorts from the Manchester. Rochdale and Oldham areas for the North-Western Road Car Co., Ltd., which has an express service, and for all the excursion and tours operators.

Mr. Smylie submitted that there was no real evidence for the reductions, as rates were originally fixed in 1932 at an economic level, with due regard to the public interest. The public would suffer, he said, no deprivation if the fares remained as then fixed. The long view had to be taken. In the face of cut-throat competition the travelling public must eventually suffer.

ft was clear, he contended, that the excursion and tours operators would not have moved for reduced fares had these not been conceded to the express service.

Dealing with the observations of the Commissioners, line by line, Mr. Smylie read :—" The evidence tendered showed that the road fares had not been altered for some time." He asked: Are we to understand that it is one of the settled principles that the road operators can come forward periodically, or at suitable times, for the alteration of fares? " He could not understand why that had been intro duced. Parts of the observations, he said, were misleading, and other parts inaccurate.

" Willingness of the public to pay by road a higher fare than would be charged by rail," he said, "is, to a large extent, due to greater con

venience as regards time of departure, or physical point of departure. Whilst it is admitted that the public's convenience must have some weight, this consideration cannot be the riding consideration. Otherwise, the railways would be reduced to carrying only traffic attracted by a conjunction of low fares and a convenient time and place of departure, or where speed in transit is a primary consideration, The rail revival, so far, is relatively slight, and it is in the national interest that the increase in road use should he arrested, except for the natural increase.

Another phase of Mr. Smylie's speech dealt with Order No. 9, which limits the number of vehicular journeys run by excursion and tours operators, and he suggested that some Order such as No. 9, applied here, might overcome the difficulty.

" How can the railway company be flourishing? " asked Mr. J. Lustgarten, for the " North-Western," " or how can it be worth even preservation when one finds that what it is appealing against is that the Commissioners have left it with advantages only on a comparison of fares, taking it at its worst against myself, of anything from 16 per cent. to 33 per cent,"

Mr. Lustgarten accepted as a provision of the Act that the railways were to be preserved as to their main lines, but the road services under appeal were not in competition with the main railway lines.

Stressing the regulation under which the Commissioners are to see that road fares are not unreasonable, Mr. Lustgarten said that counsel for the railways had only one aspect of public interest. Fairness and justice to the road operator, as well as to the general public, were ingredients of the " public interest."

Rail fares changed; were road fares to outrun eternity? There was nothing to prevent the railways from running their half-day excursion at 10.30 a.m. to Llandudno at 4s. 6d. against the road rate of Sc. 6d., and yet they were still complaining. The railWays would, perhaps, some time realize that there was traffic which the road operators had created and which the railways could not claim or create.


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