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EVENTS TELL THEIR OWN STORY
Page 79
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(-AVER the past year or so the public have paid more attention %,—/than ever before to the maintenance standards of lorries. Roadside checks have shown an unexpectedly large proportion of vehicles to be in need of attention. The inference has been that the defective vehicles are a danger on the road and must be responsible for an increasing number of accidents.
Now at last we have the official statistics issued by the Ministry of Transport for road accidents during 1964. making possible a comparison with the results for previous years. The figures for 1964 were the worst ever known in Great Britain in peacetime. There were 385,499 casualties, of which 7,820 were fatal. As the Ministry points out, the melancholy record adds a new urgency to the efforts being made by all those who are concerned with road safety to reduce or eliminate risks and to encourage safer conduct by road users.
ANOTHER SIDE TO THE PICTURE
Like other road users, commercial vehicle operators and drivers will have taken note of this. At the same time it would be a mistake to adopt a fatalistic view and assume that the deterioration is inevitable. There is another side to the picture. The annual total of road accidents has almost exactly doubled between 1949 and 1964. During the same period, apart from the slow but steady growth in population, the number of road motor vehicles has increased threefold and the index of vehicle mileage, taking the figure for 1949 as 100, has risen to 316.
Another way of putting it is that in the six years between 1959 and 1964 the number of motor vehicles involved in injury accidents per 100m. vehicle miles fell from 554 to 472. an improvement of about 13 per cent.
Of direct interest to commercial operators is that, on this method of assessment, the goods vehicle with an unladen weight of I+ tons and over has not only • produced consistently the best result of all vehicle categories but has also shown the most rapid rate of improvement. For the heavier lorries the figure in 1959 was 360 injury accidents per 100m, vehicle miles. For 1964 the comparative figure was 264, the rate of improvement being twice as great as that for motor vehicles in general.
While accident figures can never be entirely satisfactory, these are at least encouraging. They were achieved in the main before the much publicized series of roadside checks which have played some part in bringing the road transport industry into disrepute. On the strength of these figures the improvement has been spread over the years and is not confined to 1964 when the checks began. It may be the case, as representatives of the industry have suggested, that statistical exercises based on the special checks are useless and misleading.
No explanation has been offered by the Ministry for the delay in producing its survey of road accidents in 1964. It is to be hoped that the publication for 1965 will be available a little nearer to the period covered. Some of the abuse endured by operators last year might have been avoided if they had had the infoi mation to counteract it.
The flow of events can often turn dramatic attitudes and forceful comments into meaningless words and empty gestures. The history of the liner train provides another instance where rhetoric is in danger of being outpaced by events. Time and again Lord Beeching, when the railways were his responsibility, expressed the opinion that liner trains would be successful only if the terminals were open to all comers, including independent hauliers.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED SO FAR?
The same point has been made with equal frequency by his successor, Mr. S. E. Raymond. The most recent occasion was only last week in an address to the National Liberal Forum. In addition, the last Minister of Transport, Mr. Tom Fraser, in his announcement that he had given permission for the liner-train scheme to go ahead, emphasized that there was to be no bar on access to the collection and delivery points.
What has happened so far? An experimental liner-train service has started on the London-Glasgow route. According to reports, traffic is slowly building up from various sources. Independent hauliers have not been invited to send traffic, nor apparent
ly would it be welcome. More goods would have been brought in by the railways themselves but for the delay in getting new heavy road vehicles.
Further progress waits upon the whim of the executive committee of the National Union of Railwaymen. Its last decision against allowing access to hauliers was taken with a small majority and the membership of the committee has now changed so that there is reasonable hope that the decision will be reversed.
In the meantime the policy is one of drift. Without seeming to do so the unions have gained a point. The liner trains are running, even if only at half cock, and the hauliers are as far away as ever from being allowed to participate. If in the course of time the traffic on the trains grew to such an extent that they were making a profit, the temptation would be strong for railway management to take appeasement a stage further and conveniently forget the claims of hauliers.
STRAND OF THE BEECHING POLICY In his address Mr. Raymond developed another strand of the Beeching policy. He proposed the appointment of a Transport Highway Authority which would have the responsibility of allocating capital for the provision of permanent way, bridges, tunnels, signalling and policing for all forms of transport, road, rail, canals and air. Superficially this might seem a logical extension of the demand for a Roads Board which would remove the financing of roads from constant political interference.
During the Beeching era the Geddes Committee had the benefit of the railways' opinion on comparative road and rail track costs. Perhaps wisely in this case, the Committee chose to avoid the subject. Remarkably few other people were convinced by what the railways had to say. The same fate is likely to meet Mr. Raymond's proposal. The problems of each form of transport vary too greatly for the Government or the Ministry of Transport to be able to hand over responsibility for tracks and highways to a single authority.
Janus