topic
Page 54
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
Taking the offensive
by janus
ORGANIZATIONS representing road transport operators have apparently passed over what seemed an excellent opportunity to take an offensive role for a change. The Economic Development Committee for the Movement of Exports had put to the Department for the Environment a plan to discourage private motorists from using the main roads to the docks and airports during the summer.
The intention is to prevent delays from holiday traffic to lorries carrying goods for export. The Committee is recommending persuasion rather than "coercion or outright designation". The Department would advise on the badly congested routes and would recommend their avoidance. The motoring organizations would help by suggesting alternative routes to their members.
WHAT a welcome change thiS is! Somebody is actually recommending restrictions on the motorist rather than the commercial user. Moreover, the idea comes from a body with a name which sounds at least as respectable as the railway-oriented National Council for Inland Transport if not quite so
ecclesiastical as the Civic Trust. •
Surely the proposal is an effective opening shot in a counter-attack against the illogical decision not to allow an increase in the permitted maximum vehicle weights. Any such impression must be a mistake. As far as can be seen, the Committee has attracted no support, and unless the situation changes the De.partment need take no action.
The response from interested quarters has been unenthusiastic, The duty of the Government, it is pointed out, is to provide the road system that users need. If motorists are barred from the main commercial routes there may be no satisfactory alternative. Transport operators would not dream of supporting restrictions, voluntary or otherwise, on other road users. Without compulsion, the proudly independent motorist would take no notice of advice and exhortation. And so on and so on.
ONCE there may have been a time--although even this is doubtful—when an ingratiating reaction of this kind was applauded and appreciated. Pressure groups nowadays have learned better. They have no room in their propaganda for even considering the other side of the case. They have no tender feelings for the opposition, from whatever source it may come.
The usual technique is one of more or less violent protest concentrated on a particular point. A campaign against the deportation of people the Government considers dangerous takes up an individual case. Dislike of the political system in another country expresses itself somewhat obliquely in demonstrations and threats against a series of cricket matches with a team from that country. A politician whose views on one issue are detested is shouted down even when he is talking about something else.
In these issues there are ideals at stake. It is obvious that people will be at least as militant when they are personally concerned. If an airfield is proposed near their home, they will make as much nuisance of themselves as they can in the hope that it will be built somewhere else. The line of a new road is as grimly contested as the Western front in the First World War.
Another characteristic of protest is its manipulation and distortion of facts and statistics. The opponents of road transport are no exception to the rule. They accuse the lorry of causing more accidents, more congestion and more damage than other road users, although the available facts point to the opposite conclusion. Vague • assertions that the traffic ought to go by rail or even by canal do duty for any reasoned assessment of the possibilities.
vvHAT is unfortunate for the lorry is the apparent visual corroboration of its menace. The motorist who pulls' up alongside a lorry feels dwarfed. and insignificant; and the impression is magnified by the perspective of pictures in the Press and on television, apparently taken at ground level. Because it may block the road, a broken-down lorry makes news, whereas a car can usually be pushed to the side.
The image of the tructilent bully or the murderous ogre makes the lorry a gift for the cartoonist. The journalist with a taste for the cliche has a wide selection, from the prehistoric mammoth or dinosaur to the more recent juggernaut. Attacks on the heavy lorry are especially welcome to the large body of readers who look to the Press for the comforting confirmation of their own prejudices.
Until recently, all this may have seemed unimportant to the operator. He had supposed that prejudice played no part in the ultimate decisions of Governments. He failed to realize that the techniques of protest had developed—one hesitates to say that they had improved—to the point where they are actually exerting an influence at the highest level.
THERE is only one possible lesson front this comfortless conclusion. The operator must join the ranks of the protesters. He must have less tenderness than before for the feelings of other road users. If he wants holiday drivers to be kept off the export routes, he should not hesitate to say so.
For a long time there is likely to be no effect. Although most people are motorists they are also prepared to talk' about the motorist as if he were the other fellow. They regard him as dangerous, selfish and a vandal. They acknowledge that there is no hope of persuading him to take a coutItry route if there is a wide main road in the direction he wishes to go. They know it is useless to attempt to wring his heart with pleas for the lorry and for exports which he maintains could just as easily go by rail.
If the motorist really has such an unpleasant character, the fault may lie in his training, in his lack of correction. There have been criticisms of his standards of driving and of his behaviour, but not of his right to be on the road at all. He is not banned from certain roads nor told continually that he ought to use the railways.
AT least, that has been the situation to date. There are signs of a change. For example, the case now being made for the GLC development proposals leans heavily on the encouragement that will be given to public transport. The NED Committee is following the same trend, although on a different issue, but its reminder that the main purpose in building a motorway is to help industrial transport and that the availability of the route is a bonus for which the motorist should be suitably, even humbly grateful.
In fact, he feels nothing of the sort. He will not be moved by what he regards as an attack on his rights. This should not deter road operators from continuing to press the point. Export prices and the cost of imports, as of all other commodities, depends to a large extent on the speed upon the cost of transport, which in turn depends to a large exgent on the speed with which a vehicle can carry out its task and return to base.
IF a case on these lines is presented continuously, with the help of whatever persuasion techniques seem appropriite, the motorist will in the end realize that perhaps he also is involved. Inevitably, he will be on the defensive, a posture which operators have found to their cost is unrewarding. In the end the Government may be forced to take notice. They may even come to the conclusion that the time has arrived for the necessary increase in gross vehicle weights.