Road freight volumes look brighter by 2010
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by Brian Weatherley • hard-pressed British hauliers battling for fewer and fewer profitable loads may draw some comfort from the latest predictions on
European freight 87 traffic growth.
Securities house Salomon Brothers predicts a 50% increase in roadfreight tonne/km by 2010.
Speaking in London last week, Salomon director John Lawson also forecast a 40% increase in the distance goods vehicles will travel as higher gross vehicle weights, bigger payloads and increased productivity take effect.
However, he says that while the road transport industry will gain "substantially in efficiency, it has to respond to tougher environmental demands".
According to Lawson the truck pare is set to increase by a further 25% but he warns vehicle manufacturers that there will be "a plateau of demand in 1997/98. In my opinion, the recovery in the truck industry is essentially done...if demand hasn't peaked, then production certainly has."
That slow-down will cause further volatility in the manufacturers' market shares, says Lawson. Despite the growing political pressure to switch more goods from roads to rail, Volvo Trucks president Karl-Erling Trogen has dismissed any major boost to rail freight traffic.
"I don't see railways taking a significant part of freight," he says, "but in some areas we do not see them as a competitor but as complementary."