Vital Statistics
Page 73
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LACK of statistics about the road haulage industry is a regular cause for complaint. There are no published figures on tonnages carried; fuel consumption, mileages, types of traffic, and so on. Any account of the industry must, therefore, make use of a number of assumptions which it is usually not possible
to prove or disprove. .
When a little information does become available, the temptation is to make the most of it. Statistics are worked over until they become useless and even misleading. This particularly applies to some parts of the sample inquiry into road goods transport made by the Ministry of Transport in a week during September, 1952, and published in April, 1954.
The results of the inquiry are not available in book form. This is a little surprising, in that many far less useful documents achieve Stationery Office status although they are monuments only to the industry of the civil servants who compiled them. In spite of the apparent lack of any effort to make it known, the inquiry has made a remarkable impact.
Unknown Quantifies Its purpose was clear. Nationally, hardly anything is known about hauliers and ancillary users, apart from the numberof licences they hold and the number of vehicles they operate. The information needed to build up the picture can be obtained only from the operators themselves. They are unlikely to give it voluntarily and one sympathizes with their reluctance to fill in more questionnaires than are necessary.
The Government alone can compel members of the public to make returns. Using the legal powers conferred by the Statistics of Trade Act, 1947, the Ministry of Transport sent a form to the owners of 8,000 goods vehicles. Slightly over 90 per cent. of the forms came back, and some of the remainder went to operators who had sold the vehicles on which they were being questioned. As the choice of vehicles was carefully designed to give a complete and accurate cross-section, the margin of error of the survey was small.
The survey made interesting reading at the time, because it was the first ever made on such a scale, and it is still interesting because it has not been repeated. The centre of the stage is naturally held by the conclusions, which consist in the main of estimates of the total amount of work done by all goods road vehicles, including those operated by the British Transport Commission. Estimates for the year were 11,000m. vehicle-miles, 900m. tons of traffic and 19,000m. ton-miles.
For the first time these figures made possible a comparison between road and other forms of transport —rail, inland waterways and coastal shipping. It was seen that road carriers had 72 per cent, and the railways only 24 per cent, of the tonnage, although the railways had 43 per cent. of the ton-mileage as compared with the road proportion of 37 per cent.
These figures are fast becoming hackneyed. They are quoted and re-quoted almost mechanically whenever a paper is read that takes the whole of transport as its field. This is as'it should be, but there is more doubtful validity in the use occasionally made of some of the other figures in the inquiry. The position has changed since the inquiry was made. At the end of 1952—as near as one can get to the date of the inquiry—there were 950,000 goods vehicles. In the ensuing four years the total has risen by nearly 20 per cent, and the greater part of the increase has occurred in the number of C-licence vehicles. At the time of the survey, British Road Services had a fleet of nearly 40,000. It has now been reduced by more than half, with a corresponding increase in the number of vehicles owned by independent hauliers. During the survey most of those vehicles were limited to a radius of 25 miles.
The annual estimate of 900m. tons of traffic carried by road may safely be increased by 20 per cent. When speakers quote this statistic, it should not be difficult for them to make the appropriate adjustment, although it is not a grave matter if they stick to the 1952 estimate. When quoting other sections of the inquiry, lack of historical perspective may lead to more serious error.
There are, for example, detailed tables showing the average lengths of journeys taken by certain types of vehicle. Of the A-licence and C-licence vehicles with an unladen weight of over 5 tons, about half did not, on the average, haul traffic beyond a distance of 40 miles. The proportion of B.R.S. vehicles was 90 per cent. It can hardly be doubted that the ratio between the independent haulier and B.R.S. would, now be very different.
Empty Running
The proportion of empty running is not necessarily a guide to efficiency. Many vehicles, by reason of the nature of the work on which they are engaged, inevitably run empty for half the time. For what it is worth, the survey gives a table showing vehicle mileage loaded and empty. The apparent superiority of B.R.S. over A, B and C licence holders becomes more Konounced as the unladen weight of the vehicles increases. Where it was over 5 tons, B.R.S. were loaded over 50 per cent. for three-quarters of the mileage, whereas Aand Clicence holders were similarly fortunate for only 56 and 57 per cent. respectively of-the mileage. The correct inference from this is that B.R.S. had reason to make strenuous objections to the abolition of the 25-mile limit, but the figures have more than once been quoted to prove that nationalization cuts out empty running.
In the survey the major importance of C-licence work is stressed. It points out that those types of work generally regarded as most characteristic of C-licence operation, such as local delivery of food, milk, clothing and so on, may account for the large proportion• of total vehicle mileage, but do not make up a big volume of traffic in terms of tons and ton-miles. In 1952, Clicence vehicles were responsible for 54 per. cent, of the ton-miles and nearly 60 per cent, of the tonnages carried by road goods transport. Today, the proportions would certainly be substantially higher.
Road haulage is never obliging enough to reach a state of equilibrium in which it would be possible to make the survey to end all surveys. So much useful information was gathered in 1952 that the Ministry of Transport would be justified in making another survey perhaps next year, and further surveys once every five years,