Better Roads or Strangled Towns
Page 43
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A LARGER part of the yield from r-IL vehicle taxation should be devoted to modernizing the roads. If a large investment is not quickly made, it will be impossible in a few years to enter and leave the main urban . centres.
This warning is contained in a report by eight European transport authorities. Among them is Mr. A. G. Marsden, chairman of the commission of transport users of the International Chamber of Commerce and transport adviser to the board of Unilever, Ltd. The panel met at the invitation of Mr. Camille Gutt, president of the I.C.C, to "rethink European transport in the spirit of 1954."
Governments should concern themselves not only with their own road problems. but participate in the international financing of a network of Continental road arteries—as provided for at Geneva in the 1950 convention —which could be facilitated by the establishment of a European road investment fund, says the report.
Reasons for the growth of ancillary transport arc given. A better adaptation of professional carriers' facilities to the needs of the user might relieve him of the necessity of running his own vehicles; but so long as carriers felt that they knew the user's requirements without discussing them with him, the consignor had no other course, when a particular form of transport did not suit his goods, than to reject it and carry the goods hitnself.
No artificial burden, on the pretext of co-ordination, should be allowed to hamper the natural development of ancillary transport,