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The industry's grinding to a halt and every minute has its price
Page 10
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As we see this week, congestion costs. Indeed, according to the Freight Transport Association's analysis it costs the UK economy 220bn a year, which is a very BIG figure. Break that down a bit and it equates to £54.8m a day or £2.3m an hour or £38,000 a minute or 2634 a second. By the time most of us have read this we've timed that to take 1 minute 22 seconds £51,988 will have been wasted due to congestion on the UK roads. So while companies go about their business shedding every last bit of cost, shifting paper clip suppliers to save a few pence, or the government raises taxes to bring in more revenue, the roads in this country of ours ensure that all such effort is vain. Just think how many new hospitals could be built 72 by our calculations nurses recruited, or new bobbies put on the beat, if the money tied up in road congestion could be released to the economy.
"By the time you have read
this, €51,988 will have been
wasted due to congestion"
But road transport operators moaning about the roads is as predictable as farmers moaning about the weather, and if we're going to move the job along at all there have to be some solutions offered. So here's our two-pen north to government: Relax the restrictions on night-time lorry bans throughout the country to liberate road space; consider the use of B-double road trains on selected routes, at selected times the Dutch are giving it a try. so why can't we? and, as FTA president John Allan suggested at the association's dinner last week, charge cars for every journey.
Traffic jams continue to strangle the UK economy every day of the week. Without radical steps to improve it, the situation is only going to get worse.
• As for laws on consignor liability (see page 38), we can say only one thing: Why is it taking so long? The Irish recognised a long time ago that the culpability for contrabanc or overweight product could rarely be pinned with any justice to the driver or owner of a truck, but rather to the person who owned the goods and signed a form testifying to their legal nature and weight. The fact is that our legal system, like many others, advocates nabbing the person who didn't step back. This avoids the cost and difficulty of pursuing the organised gangs, who make serious money from smuggling, and the bic businesses who save money by overloading trucks. That's pragmatism, not justice.