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Janus comments
Page 82
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Battles long ago
ALTHOUGH the attacks continue on road goods transport and the heavy lorry, they betray at times a certain desperation. The stage is past when the interests concerned can persuade themselves that their activity is having any effect. Plans for heavier vehicles and even for larger vehicles are going ahead with little consideration for the inveterate protesters.
An initial error on their part has caught up with them. Several years ago when there was more chance of a respectful hearing for the opponents of road transport they chose to disguise themselves as altruistic members of the public concerned only for amenity, for road safety and the promotion of transport as a whole rather than a section of the industry.
There was a quick gain. The public and the Press were perhaps too ready to accept at face value on the strength of' a plausible name a body called the Road and Rail Association and its successor the National Council for Inland Transport. It was scarcely noticed that an organization of this kind with no representatives or road transport could hardly be impartial.
Pressure group That the association was a pressure group was revealed when Lord Beeching, while he was chairman of British Railways, decided to discontinue the subsidy that the railways were paying. Public memory is short and most people have forgotten this episode. But where opinion carries weight there is complete awareness that the pronouncements of the impressive sounding national council can be discounted.
The campaign continues with weapons now somewhat antiquated. The basic strategy is to begin by complaining that the heavy lorry is dangerous, noisy and dirty. These faults are attributed to the low moral standards of the operators who fail to maintain their vehicles properly, over-work their drivers and show a general disregard for the rest of humanity.
When this attack shows signs of flagging the second wave is launched. Even if the vehicles were immaculate and the operators and drivers paladins they are still an unjustified nuisance. They cause congestion, the vehicles block the streets when they are parked and they cause a disproportionate amount of damage to the roads.
From these accusations the conclusions are easy to draw. Operators should be harried and prosecuted relentlessly until they mend their ways. At the same time they should be restricted in every possible way and forced to pay in taxation the whole of their proper cost to the community.
Disturbing In the first part of the indictment there was substance. A disturbing proportion of vehicles were badly maintained. The facts spoke for themselves without the help of an anti-road transport lobby. Every roadside check brought its melancholy tally of immediate prohibitions and other less serious defects.
Too much was read into the statistics.
The road safety record of the heavy lorry—and this is what counts in the last. analysis—was and has remained conspicuously better than that of any other category of vehicle. Vehicles may be well below standard and have many faults and still not constitute a danger. Because this is not true of all vehicles the standard has to be set and observed.
Many operators have urged that this should be done and most operators approve in principle of the testing scheme in spite of the expense. The external critics of road transport had little influence on the decision to adopt the scheme and in fact have lost what in the past were useful arguments.
When every lorry has to pass an acceptable test once a year and many have to undergo an occasional inspection in between there should be little seriously wrong with it at any time. If it develops too many serious faults between tests the operator is in danger of losing his licence. Any vehicle so bad as to be dangerous will almost certainly belong to a pirate with no testing certificate, no excise licence and probably no operator's licence either.
Denounced He will be denounced much more loudly from within than from without the industry. The criticism on both sides will be not of road goods transport but of the Ministry of Transport for failing to catch the culprit.
Occasional references continue to the killer lorry, the cowboy driver and the criminal operator. But the main attack has switched to the destruction of amenity by the lorry and the allegation that the operator is not paying his way. Here also the national council is a little short of evidence especially since the Ministry disobligingly published its analysis of track costs and demonstrated that the owners of heavy lorries contributed almost twice as much as they received.
It is an indication that the bottom of the barrel has been reached when the national council has to resurrect the almost forgotten —and perhaps best forgotten—report of the American Association of State Highway Officials. This report is said to have proved that doubling the axle load on a lorry could increase by 16 times the damage to the road surface.
Quadrupling the load on this calculation
would multiply the damage by 256. On the same mathematical principle it was confidently asserted several years ago that a 10-ton lorry broke up the road 160,000 times more quickly than a private car. When in spite of this appalling destruction the roads resolutely refused to dissolve into powder the critics became more cautious and confined themselves to less astronomical figures which at least sounded plausible.
As with the Ministry tests, the critics are using for their own devices facts and figures assembled to meet a different purpose. The AASHO tests were of road surfaces rather than of vehicles. The intention was to find a satisfactory road surface which would withstand any reasonable weight likely to be imposed on it.
Self-evident
. That a heavy lorry will cause more wear and tear than a car is self-evident and hardly needs to be proved. The. actual ratio may be interesting but is not related to the cost of a road. Otherwise endlessly paradoxical situations would arise. A bridge which could safely carry two tons might have to be rebuilt if it were required to take even twice that load. On the assumption that four tons would have demolished the bridge it could be argued that the increased damage caused merely by doubling the load was not just 16 times as much but in the ratio of the whole cost of the bridge to no cost at all.
It has never been entirely certain whether AASHO accepted the interpretation put upon its findings. Some years later a committee of the International Road Transport Union showed beyond doubt that the interpretation was wrong. The IRU proof has been generally accepted. No responsible authorities now pay attention to the rattling of the AASHO dice by the national council or anybody else.
An occasional reminder of the existence of the national council may be salutary. Those people who do not happen to like road transport cannot have listened with much pleasure to the statement by the Minister of Transport, Mr. Richard Marsh —reinforcing previous Government pronouncements to the same effect—that the predominance and the increasing predominance of road transport was no longer in doubt.
Last attempt There may still be a last attempt to turn the tide. The opportunity could come as the time gets nearer for either the introduction or the abandonment of quantity licensing. It may seem not to matter greatly on which side of the fence the Government of the day comes down. Traffic lost to the railways cannot come back.
The effort may be made not so much to win public sympathy for the railways as to alienate it from the lorry owner and driver. A campaign on these lines must be guarded against and answered. It is unlikely to have the least effect in those quarters towards which it is ultimately directed. Other considerations will make up the Government's mind.