Problems posed by new vehicle standards
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by Tony Wilding On Wednesday, Davies and Robson, transport consultants, held a one-day business course in London with the general title of "The effects of the new vehicle standards". The speakers were, J. A .C. Williams, principal of the College of Aeronautical and Automobile Engineering, T. W. Reed, lecturer in econom• ics at Reading University, and J. M. Dickson-Simpson, technical writer and consultant.
Mr. Williams's lecture had the title of "The engineering background" and he dealt thoroughly with .the considerable changes that have taken place in road transport since 1945. He discussed the problems posed for transport management through regulation changes, such as vehicle testing, and covered their implications in respect of maintenance, staff and so on.
"The effect on costs" was the title of the lecture given by Mr. Reed and he said that the criteria to be employed by Licensing Authori
ties in the issue of quantity licences (special authorizations) would be economic which emphasized the need for careful analysis of costs and would probably mean that own-account operators will be called upon to produce costings if applications are disputed. Radical changes in union bargaining can be expected, he said, and the type of agreement that may become common will require a detailed knowledge of costs. To prepare themselves, Mr. Reed said that operators would need to know the costs of specific services and so on with some precision and referred to the many points that affected costs.
But it was not enough to know only the costs, said Mr. Reed, there must be control and significant deviations from a budget must be investigated to find what action may be necessary. In such an uncertain and dynamic industry as road haulage, mistakes in budgets were never difficult but the speaker said that these mistakes could be as informative as the successes. Questions that must be answered over and over again, said Mr. Reed, are: is the available cost data good enough? Is the budgetary control system required? Does management understand the system? And is management capable of using the system to ensure the most economic results?
Speaking of the effects of new vehicle standards on costing, Mr. Reed suggested that there may be a case for a fundamental reconsideration with the introduction of lightweight specialized vehicles and he said that most operators will reach the conclusion that planned maintenance is more economic than repeated test failures.
Mr. Dickson-Simpson had "New trends in vehicle design" as his lecture theme and he said that two broad effects of the Transport Act would force more operation to shortdistance work and make those operators on long-distance work seek ways of lowering the unit cost of load movement. Long-distance economies will be helped by uprating gross weight limits to 36, 38 or maybe even 42 tons, he said, and he illustrated the relative economics of different types of vehicle at various weights. The author said that turnround times would be increasingly significant in both types of operation and referred to methods of improving this aspect, Unladen weight will play an important part in vehicle design in both the heaviest and lightest vehicles, said Mr. Dickson-Simpson, and he explained the problems of axle overloading with plated vehicles. He said that the Construction and Use Regulations were still based on old-fashioned concepts in some respects, such as the need for a second man to be carried on tractor-trailer combinations and that the outer-axle spreads which defined vehicle maximum weights were unduly restricted.