A fresh look at an old problem...
Page 54
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
THE MESSAGE from the Chancellor to road transport operators has taken some time to penetrate. When they have understood it fully, they may find it justifies a considerable change in their policy.
As was to be expected, they have expressed their disappointment and even anger at the substantial increase in their tax burden with no corresponding benefits. It is difficult to sustain a high level of indignation on this kind of issue.
In due course, the increases will be absorbed into general transport costs. Operators will get used to them, as the Chancellor is aware.
He can count on the normal process of forgetting among motorists. With commercial vehicle operators the effect may be different. They keep a closer eye on political developments.
A year or so ago, after one or two false starts, the Government set down its policy on transport and invited wide consultation. One of the suggestions in the document was an increase in the rate of taxation of heavy lorries. Operators expressed strong disagreement.
For next month a White Paper is promised. It will show what effect consultation has had on official policy. There will be further discussion before legislation is introduced in the 1978 session.
It is hardly in the spirit of consultation that the Chancellor has decided to give effect to one of the most controversial items in the original document. He offered no apology and apparently saw no reason for one.
The road transport industry was bracketed with the smokers of cigarettes. Both are undesirable. If they persist, they should be made to pay for it. Operators should consider themselves lucky that they are not compelled to carry a health warning on every vehicle.
Operators may not easily forget their humiliation. They can see more clearly than before that the traditional method of putting their case, in correspondence and through deputations, no longer has significance, if it ever did. They will be looking for a new approach.
Other disaffected interests make use of demonstrations, noisy processions, interruptions at meetings and public inquiries, banners and chanted slogans, and so on. The immediate aim of getting publicity is often successful. An increase in public sympathy does not always follow. It depends upon the cause that is being advocated.
There are other ways of expressing discontent. Operators may find their solution in advocating more revolutionary policies than they have permitted themselves in the past.
They have not diverged too sharply from the official line. It has seemed proper, even statesmanlike, to maintain that there is a function for each form of transport. As a talisman against any injurious consequences of such a statement, it is easy to add the rider that there must also be fair competition.
Following a similar strategy, operators concede that there may have to be some restrictions on the use of roads by lorries. The neutralising proviso is that vehicles must have freedom of access and should not be diverted unreasonably.
If moderate statements of this kind are to be taken as a sign of weakness, operators may find themselves testing more radical arguments. They can begin by calling some of their previous assumptions into question. When Dr Beech ing was put in charge of the railways, one of his first conclusions was that many services could be discontinued as a means towards the solvency of what remained. It would not be revolutionary if operators suggested other services for similar treatment.
The carefully nurtured public dislike of the heavy lorry usually has to be linked with the admission that the vehicle must be , allowed to carry out what is an essential task. Operators could reasonably say that their vehicles ought therefore to be provided with routes of their own.
After all, the railways have this privilege, although they carry only a small proportion of the country's traffic and are apparently more highly esteemed than the road haulage industry. If the first suggestion were adopted, and some of the railways' services no longer used, the tracks thus made available might be adapted for the exclusive use of commercial road vehicles.
This idea also is not original. It has been advocated for over 20 years by the Railway Conversion League; which is continually finding new pegs on which to hang its contention.
Not long ago the League submitted evidence to the Department of Transport's advisory committee on trunk road assessment. It drew attention to the wide differences in the incidence of injury accidents on different types of road, ranging from between five and eight accidents per million vehicle-km in shopping centres tc 0.4 on motorways.
This does not mean that motorways are safest of all, said the League. The injury accident rate for the Heads of the Valleys road is 0.29, and for the Wellington relief road only 025. With a width of 6.5m, and built to what the League calls —moderate geometric standards," the relief road carries up to 18,000 vehicles in a 16-hour day: and 9 per cent of the vehicles are heavy lorries.
No frontage access
The secret, according to the League, lies not so much in the road itself as in the fact that it gives no frontage access and is not frequented by pedestrians. It is one of the few highways, apart from the motorways, that shares these characteristics with the railways_ Their conversion would provide a network of 50,000km of similarly segregated roads. In contrast, the present motorway length is 2,000km, and the total will be little more than 3,000km even if the present programme is completed.
With few resources, the League can claim to have made progress, from a certain amount of derision when it was formed to the respectability of an official inquiry into railway conversion as a preliminary to the Government's consultative document. The adoption of some of its ideas by more powerful interests could have considerable political repercussions.