Apr. 18.
Tae Ratepayers' Meeting does not lack promise of interest. We shall be curious to see what the advocates of cutting the municipal orchestra's estimates have to say and how many of them there are. Hitherto, except for. publishing their amendment, they preserve an exciting silence. We should not be surprised if a good deal were heard of the Volunteer Corps's just dissatisfaction with the music provided on parade: if so, it may have escaped the speakers' attention that reform in this respect is promised by the conductor in this year's report. It remains to be seen whether the correspondence on the scale of municipal salaries blossoms into an amendment. The question is so full of difficulty that at this eleventh hour one hesitates to discuss it. But there is no harm in saying that the Council has in view a definite scale of. maxima for all grades, for future guidance. The. trouble hitherto has lain in fixing minimum rates while leaving the other end open.. The Waterworks purchase is discussed in another article.
There remains Mr. A. J. Hughes's proposal for a trafic commission, of which his admire able letters have said so much as to leave anyone else little to say. Tt is possible to differ from him in details. For instance, Kiukiang Road might have proved a valuable artery if we had begun on it thirty years ago. Now the expense of widening it sufficiently to be deemed adequate for all time is simply prohibitive.: The same consideration applies to many other roads. Generally speaking, traffic requirements are always ahead of the new facilities obtained and, as the latter can only be got piecemeal, the cost of them is out of all proportion to the expected relief. We have in Shanghai the same problem as has the City of London. The majority of the streets will remain as they are simply-because it is too expensive to widen them and the only practicable solution seems to lie in the direction of greater accuracy of movement and better use of the -broadest existing thoroughfares. It ought not to be forgotten that the trams, while relieving traffic inone way have encumbered it in another. by attracting to. the streets they follow a mass of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.