Tons of Money
Page 55
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AGOOD example of the futility of any attempt to equate road and rail track costs was given by Lord
Stonham in the House of Lords last week. Road transport he complained, unlike the railways, was provided free of charge with 200,000 miles of highway. The main roads represented just over one-tenth of the total and would require nearly £13,000 m. to replace at a rate of £600,000 a mile. If the cost of the other less important roads Was added, the total could not be less than £40,000 m. If this were charged out at the rate of 5 per cent per annum, road users ought to pay £2,000 m. each year for the use of their track alone.
Lord Stonham was not satisfied to stop here. To be added to the annual reckoning there was still the figure of £200 m. for new construction and maintenance, £230 m. to meet the cost of accidents, .£300 m. for economic losses from road congestion, and other unspecified sums for the services of the police, signals, damage to buildings, vibration, noise, fumes and so on. On the strength of these calculations, Lord Stonham came to the conclusion that the "cost to the nation" of the roads was about 20 times the "present railway subsidy ", by which apparently he meant the amount the Government were having to pay the railways to keep them solvent.
THE total he had in mind, therefore, was approximately £3,500 m. per annum, or about half the national revenue. This ought to be sufficient in itself to show that the whole argument must be unsound, a reductio ad absurdum of the attempt to lay down principles by which the cost of the roads can be balanced exactly with the cost of the permanent way. Lord Stonham, however, was not in the least perturbed by the monstrous conclusion to which his line of inquiry led him. Everybody else would think like him, he maintained, were it not for the efforts of the Government, aided by "one of the most persistent, powerful and successful lobbies this country has ever known ", that of the British Road Federation.
Coming from the chairman of the Road and Rail Association, this statement is not without its touch of humour. Lord Stonham went on to give an assurance that he was not asking that road users should pay the, entire cost of the roads, and quoted with approval from the paper by Mr. D. L. Munby to which I referred last week. Obligingly, he thus prOvides a further example of the same confusion of mind. What is the point of having convictions if one is not prepared to carry them into effect?
In case it has not yet become clear, I should add that the debate in the House of Lords was on the subject of road accidents. On this, Lord Stonham had a number of sensible things to say, even if not everybody would agree with him. He wanted the emphasis to be on relieving urban congestion and improving danger spots rather than on the construction of motorways. He paid a tribute to the skill and courtesy of the drivers of goods vehicles. A and B licence holders, he said, were "an essential part of a co-ordinated transport system and " as much the victims of the present policy as are the railways ".
' As long as Lord Stonham kept away from statistics, it was at least possible to follow his arguments. The fascination of figures seemed invariably to lead him astray. He quoted the up-to-date returns of road casualties, showing that, according to the Ministry of Transport, the largest percentage increase in casualties between January and September, 1962, was among goods vehicle drivers and passengers, of whom the number killed and seriously injured was 11 per cent more than those reported in the same period of 1961.
These regrettable results Lord Stonham appeared to link with what he described as the "tremendous increase in goods vehicles on the road ". He quoted statistics in support of the statement. What he failed to mention was that, while goods vehicle deaths and injuries went up by 11 per cent, the amount of goods vehicle traffic, again according to an estimate by the Ministry of Transport, increased by one per cent.
The growth in casualties was not explained by a corresponding growth in traffic. To understand what happened, it will probably be necessary to wait until a much more detailed picture is available.
IN quoting statistics, Lord Stoneham may have been taking a lead from Lord Lucas, who opened the debate. By way of contrast, it might have been better for Lord Lucas if he had been a little less sparing with his figures. He used them to build up the general picture, but not to illustrate his examples. He was, therefore, tempted into one or two gross exaggerations, notably when he said that "one of the greatest contributory factors to road accidents at the present time is the overloading of commercial vehicles ". As the Road Haulage Association subsequently pointed out, this could hardly be true in view of the fact that the vehicles Lord Lucas was talking about were involved in less than 7 per cent of all road accidents, so that the proportion in which the vehicles were overloaded must be considerably less than this.
In spite of the somewhat odd statistical digressions, and apart from the valuable statement on Government policy elicited from Lord Chesham, the debate performed a useful service in drawing public attention to the anomalies in the present weight restrictions and to the gross overloading that one must admit takes place from time to time. As a matter of principle, vehicles ought not to carry a burden that exceeds their reasonable capabilities.
THERE are difficulties in the way of arriving at a suitable formula. Lord Chesham reported that nothing that had so far been investigated had proved practicable, and that at the moment the plating of vehicles had the field to itself, although even here a satisfactory scheme had yet to be devised. In the meantime, the psychological research unit proposed by the Ministry of Transport might investigate the pressures that lead operators to abuse their own vehicles, probably in the end to their own detriment. As Lord Lucas suggested, there might be a clue in the prevalence of overloading among tippers used on civil engineering projects. In some cases, he said, the tippers were unlicensed and the operators had less to lose from disregarding the law. Low rates for tipping work on some sites may also add to the temptation of operators to accept as large a tonnage as possible, in order even to make a decent living.
Nevertheless, it is not irrelevant to keep in mind Lord Chesham's statement that figures provided by the police on request "did not show that overloading, unsuitable loading or insecure loading was a serious factor in causing the accidents that happened to commercial vehicles ".