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The great unknown
Page 3
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With the creation of a £7.75m UK Transport Research Centre IUKTRCI, we wonder if the Department for Transport ID11 might not be suffering from its own Donald Rumsfeld moment. By that we mean the DfT appears to want to find out "...things we don't know we don't know". According to transport minister Lord Adonis, for the government to deliver, quote: "a first-class sustainable transport system in this country" it needs "a first-class evidence base-. Or, to put it simply the UKTRC will hopefully find answers to what the DfT sees as "some of the key big questions likely to face transport over the next decade and beyond, including economic competitiveness; the environment; society; mobility and accessibility; and technology." Whether an extra £7.75m will reveal anything we didn't know or knew we didn't know, or didn't know we didn't know... we didn't know. Illikof i° 1
What we do know is that £7.75m would provide decent tax breaks to encourage UK operators to adopt Enhanced Environmentally Friendly Vehicles — compared with the $30m IC21.6m1available to US operators under the •Smartway' scheme from a total of $200m 1£144.5m1 in grants and loans offered by the US Environmental Protection Agency to reduce emissions from diesel-engined vehicles. It would also fund further free SAFED driver training to help general hauliers improve fleet efficiency.
Meanwhile, when the UKTRC has answered all those "key big questions", if there's any money left, it might like to look at whether natural free-market forces will ever get rid of the long standing over-capacity in the industry. Or if a return to some form of quantitative licensing system might not mean we finally end up with a finite number of operators which can each sustain a profitable business. Perhaps it can also come up with the answer as to why it has taken 12 years for this government to work out what it doesn't know about sustainable road transport...
Brian Weatherley