TA isolated over ttonne campaign
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E FREIGHT Transport ociation's long promised npaign for a 40-tonne [gilt limit has run into timer opposition even before as been started.
Within the past week, ,ends of the Earth has nched a £3111 I,000 campaign inst lorries in cities and the ad Haulage Association's :rnational group — whose mbers have least to lose in a two-tonne increase — :ed last week to postpone r support For the FTA until :r the next general election. The Friends of the Earth :ics For People campaign, ided by the Greater Lonn Council and timed to ncide with the GLC's aboon, aims to extend the use public inquiries for all road ilding projects in London. It also seeks assurances im all London borough ancils that they will contie with the GLC lorry ban future, and proposes riot's measures to persuade ople to use public transrt.
A spokesman for the FTA scribed the campaign as oositively offensive". He d the campaign advertisemt, featuring a cartoon piere of a snarling, bare othed lorry, is clearly a nsense: "Lorries are there in cities to sustain employment and to deliver vital supplies to industry and shops," he said.
"This crackpot campaign seems to be promoting sonic sort of idealised situation where society can function without lorries."
The RI IA said: "The problem with this sort of advertisement is that it doesn't present the facts. It is highly emotive, and we are not going to sink to this level."
The MA's international group decided last week that it does not want the 40-tonne vehicle so soon after 1983's increase to 38 tonnes — it also believes it would be a waste of time to pursue a campaign for a larger vehicle before the next general election. The political climate is not right as Transport Secretary Nicholas Ridley has ruled out 411 tonnes.
The FIA's impending campaign — promised since die beginning of the year — was labelled as extraordinary, misdirected and politically naive when former Department of Transport head of freight, Reg Dawson. addressed the international group last week.
"The general public does not want to read the objective arguments; and Transport Secretary Nicholas Ridley knows them quite as well as anyone else,he said.
"The last thing he wants is to be seen to be acting under pressure from the hated roads lobby. Yet that is what an PTA campaign will achieve," he said.
1)erek Cookson from P&O-owned Robert Armstrong said only own-account operators, customers and tractive unit and trailer manufacturers had benefited from the increase to 38 tonnes. Customers have squeezed rates down to the pre-38-tonne rates, he said.
The ETA says that the hauliers are right to be cautious about even more investment, but that it will continue to push the Government and EEC for its case.