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F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS 143 
Sir Felix Pole in his Report of July 21, 1934, to the government of Northern 
Ireland, who had requested him to submit recommendations for co- 
ordinating road and rail transport in that country. He advises the 
formation of a Road Transport Board to include all road transport services, 
both passenger and goods. Further, he recommends that the Board 
should be compelled to pool its revenues with the railway companies. 
He was deterred from recommending a single Transport Board, com- 
bining both rail and road transport, only because this would involve 
special difficulties due to the fact that six of the railway companies operate 
both in Northern Ireland and in the Irish Free State. Sir Dawson Bates, 
the Minister for Home Affairs, has since anounced that the Government 
have decided to adopt the main principles of Sir Felix Pole’s report. 
‘ The Government,’ he said, ‘ have come to the conclusion that the only 
practicable method of achieving the object we have in view is to bring 
the two systems of transport into partnership with a common financial 
interest, and to get them to work together instead of against one another, 
so that the best features of both may be used in one system.’ It is under- 
stood that the necessary legislation will be introduced in the spring session 
of Parliament. The formation of the London Passenger ‘Transport 
Board was also a step in the same direction, though, as its name implies, 
it is limited for the most part to the carriage of passengers only. 
If the scheme proposed as a solution, namely, the formation of ‘ Trans- 
port Companies,’ were adopted, it might also be necessary to include air 
transport operating on internal routes. But this should not be difficult 
since the railways, as we have seen, already have an interest in some of 
these services. 
In this way all the means of land transport would come under unified 
management, leaving competition only between land transport and canal 
or coastwise traffic. ‘This is capable of being distributed on a more 
economic basis under competition than in the case of road and rail, and 
it could therefore be left to the forces of competition. It would thus be 
left to the transport company to decide whether a given piece of trans- 
port should be effected by rail or by road, or by a combination of the 
two, but with due regard to the service required by the community. 
Obviously it would be to its own interests to effect it by the most economic 
method. Its own net revenue will be diminished by mistaken methods. 
And though, as we have seen, it will still be impossible for it to work out 
exact costs of operation, either for rail or road, it should be able to do so 
approximately on certain general assumptions based on experience, and 
in this it will be appreciably helped by the fact that both methods of 
operation are within its own control. 
This solution involves, of course, a considerable degree of monopoly. 
The fact has to be recognised. But it should be remembered that in this 
matter transport would only be adopting in its own special way the 
method of rationalisation that has had to be applied in different ways and 
in different degrees to other industries. 
The interests of the community could be safeguarded. The principle 
of limitation of profits could be applied to the new transport companies 
as it was applied to the railways in the Railways Act, 1921, and as it is 
