So many questions about buses to answer

WE are promised a bus route along Great King St to a new stop at Dunedin Hospital. But the map accompanying the announcement clearly showed that section of Great King St to be carrying only southbound buses.

We are promised electronic displays and apps to provide bus times. Let’s hope they will be easier to read and more accurate than present street timetables. Certainly any problems must be corrected more quickly.

Current street timetables have shown a nonexistent bus service from the city to Mosgiel at 20.12 for months, although the Otago Regional Council was notified at least twice.

Pedestrian safety has been promised. However, the picture of councillors leaping for joy at the exact spot where pedestrian safety should be paramount is not reassuring.

The intersection of Great King St with Moray Pl needs traffic lights in place before the hub comes into operation.

Such lights have not been mentioned by the city council when other alterations to the Moray Pl traffic flow were released.

Will the pavement edges be at the correct height for easy access to all buses? They should be, but this too has not been mentioned.

If all bus users are to have confidence in the bus hub concept, then these questions need to be answered as soon as possible.

Lynne Hill

Mosgiel [The ORC refers the correspondent and readers to the ‘‘Bus Talk’’ column in this week’s Star.]

Justice in the past

THE ‘‘100 Years Ago’’ item about the horseplay by High School boys on trams (ODT, 21.7.18), brings to mind a similar incident on the Port Chalmers train in 1948.

An Otago Boys’ High School pupil had offended a female railway employee and the school was informed of his misbehaviour.

Rector E.J. (Ted) Aim paraded the boy in front of the whole school, informing pupils of the dishonour he had brought on it.

A year or two earlier, rector H.P. (Percy) Kidson told the school assembly that a Form 6 boy had stolen books from the desk of a fellow pupil and sold them to a secondhand bookstore. That boy was not paraded in front of the whole school but Kidson did announce his name.

Justice as dispensed those distant days within juvenile academia. I was present on both occasions.

Clarke Isaacs

Sunshine

Meaning of ‘milking’

ALL mothers produce milk for one reason only and that is to feed their newborn babies.

The milk of each species is specifically designed to meet the needs of the individual mother’s baby. Noone else needs it and noone else has a right to it.

Unfortunately for cows, and now sheep, (‘‘Sheep milk trial to start’’, ODT, 9.7.18) greedy humans discovered they could make money by mechanically extracting the mother’s milk and selling it. The fact that the mother’s babies were the only ones who needed the milk was irrelevant.

The farmers didn’t care one iota about the babies. They were simply a means to an end — a useless ‘‘byproduct’’ to be disposed of.

Almost two million sweet and fragile dairy calves are ruthlessly and mercilessly slaughtered each year in New Zealand.

The verb ‘‘milk’’ actually means ‘‘to exploit’’ or ‘‘take advantage of’’, so it’s no secret that this is what dairy farming is all about.

Jenny Moxham Victoria, Australia

‘ODT’ delivery

What a delight to have a folded ODT in the letterbox. It ist ecologically friendly and no longer a challenge to arthritic hands to free the paper from its wrapping. Val Laing

Vauxhall