ndustry's new pals
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EADING environmental p has surprised the trans industry by joining the iaign for a more extensive ass programme. The Civic I says over £7,000m should ;pent by-passing affected ks.
rmer National Coal Board .man Lord Ezra last week iled the Trust's report, Byes and the juggernaut: Fact fiction, which shows that ing road programmes will ) hundreds of communities, ding a large proportion of oric towns, without by
es for the foreseeable e.
iile the Civic Trust has been :ified in the past as an oppoof the heavy lorry, the latest rt recognises its existence, accepts that it is here to
restructuring of industry aken place and it now relies ,asingly on this form of ;port. The challenge for the e is how best to prevent er deterioration in environtal standards as a result of mpact of the heavy lorry, 3s far as possible to improve ing conditions."
the absence of any Govern survey, it conducted its study of 1,200 towns and )es in England and Wales, populations of between 500 150,000, a quarter of them g listed by the Historic lings Council for England as g of historic interest.
these, 891 in the shire :ties either had no by-pass fere only partly by-passed, only 405 of these are duled to have by-passes by 2. And of the by-pass emes which are proIdled, only 182 are firm.
to thirds of the historic is are in need of by-passes, ?..ven if all existing proposals mplemented, more than a third will still require them after 1992.
The Civic Trust 'says that the greatest problem lies in the main urban areas, where 39 of 48 settlements have no by-passes, and only another 17 will be dealt with by 1992.
It says a budget of 0,128m — at the very least — will be needed to by-pass all the communities in the survey, and this is more than five times the annual budget of central and local government for all road construction, improvement and maintenance.
The report acknowledges that by-passes will not necessarily solve every community's problem, and it wants by-passes to be considered along with environmental protection, traffic restraint and lorry bans in each case.
It has called on the Government to state why so many towns are omitted from the bypass programme, what alternative measures are proposed where a by-pass is not planned, and how long some shcemes will take to be implemented.
Hertfordshire County Council's county surveyor, Michael Hardy, helped compile the report, and said last week that it was essential for future plans to be based on the use of the lorry.
He accepted that some schemes can never be justified on economic grounds, and urged the Department of Transport to adopt purely environmental criteria when it starts to assess the possible benefits to be derived from by-passes in these areas.
Both the Freight Transport Association and the Road Haulage Association have welcomed the report as a realistic assessment of the problem. The FTA added that road improvements must be accompanied by the provision of roadside facilities for drivers, or they will continue to use towns.
The Association of District Councils said the by-pass programme must be stepped up to offset the progressively damaging effect of heavier lorries, and Association of Metropolitan Authorities transport committee chairman Jack Graham called for more Government support for road schemes to alleviate the effects of heavy lorries.
"We opposed the increase in the weight limit on lorries allowed in Britain. Having lost that battle we will not duck out of the fight for adequate resources necessary to cope with the consequences," he said.
He said the lorry problem could not be by-passed in conurbations, and the cost of coping with it should be borne by the Government,