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Some people are never satisfied
by janus
ALTHOUGH hauliers will sometimes go halfway to meet public criticism, there will always be plenty of people who abate nothing in their demands. A reasonable approach to a controversial aspect of the road problem will win a certain amount of commendation. It can never satisfy everybody. The man who really wants to attack the road transport industry has no difficulty in finding another pretext.
With little or no persuasion hauliers were prepared to accept a 60 mph limit for heavy goods vehicles on motorways and their total exclusion from the third lane where one was available. There is often ready agreement to parking bans and to specific routes which leave certain streets clear of the heavy traffic. To obviate the annoyance caused to residents when lorries are parked at the kerbside overnight, operators will willingly ask their drivers to use a compound, always assuming that the local authority is prepared to make one available within a reasonable distance.
0 N matters such as these, hauliers might sometimes seem to be acting against their own interests, if only by inviting additions to the already compendious local and national legislation which weighs their industry down. Suggestions are seldom lacking for new restrictions. Not so long ago there was an outcry at the discovery that the law did not prescribe a maximum height for vehicles and their loads, and did not specify, in the comfortable legal language that nobody can understand, exactly how a load should be secured.
It is easy to follow the reasoning. If there are limits on length, width and every permutation of weight, why not also on height? Because a vehicle will sometimes shed its load, there ought to be standards for the thickness of ropes, chains and sheets, for the knots, shackles, nuts, bolts, rods, poles and perches used to secure them, and so on.
Even the Ministry draughtsmen must have blenched at the prospect. They are having trouble enough with their plans to regulate the carriage of the wide and growing variety of liquids, solids and gases classified as dangerous and transported in an almost equally wide variety of containers.
NOBODY disputes that on this point strict legislation is necessary. Unaware of the difficulties, the public may be pardoned for getting impatient that so much remains to be Gone. Other precautions can best be dealt with outside the law, perhaps by inclusion of a reference in the Highway Code. Hauliers have recently suggested the use of this medium to exhort lorry drivers not to travel along main roads in a bunch, but to leave adequate space for faster vehicles to overtake.
Not everybody sees the Highway Code as a safety valve against too great a head of steam of legislation. The demands continue for more and more road transport law. Whatever concessions operators are willing to make, there is always somebody demanding to go one better or worse. One magnificent example for the connoisseur in such things will come before the House of Lords next month. Lord Killearn is asking the Government "whether they will consider making it an offence for commercial vehicles of over a certain size to break down on any main road". It is a request worth reading through more than once in order to get the complete savour.
There is an implicit and even winning faith in the power of the law to do all things. Make it an offence to break down, and which of us would dare to do so? The one possible criticism is that Lord Killearn does not go far enough.
LORRY drivers are not the only people to let the community down in inconvenient places. It should be against the law for anybody weighing over 16 stones to die anywhere except in his own bed and the cost of transporting him there should be borne out of his estate. There would be even more support for a prohibition of the use of public transport in the rush hour by persons exceeding a certain size and thereby cramping other citizens unfortunate enough to be seated next to them.
Reflected in the Parliamentary question is the unreasoning dislike of the lorry, an aversion that operators must learn to live with. The inference is that the commercial goods vehicle uses the roads only on sufferance. If it can behave itself properly and above all keep to the routes nobody else particularly wants to use, then it will be tolerated. It is not sufficient that it should merely be seen but not heard; it should be neither seen nor heard. As soon as it makes its presence felt, the law should step in.
It is not always appreciated how widespread is the assumption that other road users would be safe and happy and cause no trouble if the lorries were taken away. A clear warning came in the public's reception of a recent report from the Road Research Laboratory which analysed the circumstances of a number of collisions resulting in death.
LORRIES were involved in a larger proportion of cases than might have been expected. This was particularly noticeable when the collisions were nose-to-tail and the following vehicle was a car. The report made suggestions for more clearly marking the rear of lorries and for reducing the number of incidents in which the car runs under the lorry rear.
No attempt was made to apportion blame. Subsequent comments make it plain, however, that most readers took for granted the greater responsibility of the lorry driver even when his vehicle was stationary. Hardly anybody seemed to notice, moreover, that the report was concerned with only one type of accident. The statistics were taken to apply over the whole field.
IT is safe to assert that the same almost incredibly careless mistake would not have been made had the effect of the figures been reversed. Time and again arguments on the subject of road accidents are built on the erroneous basis that the lorry is the worst offender. The blind spot eliminates what people would rather not know. The latest RRL report, Road Accident and Casualty Rates in 1968, reiterates beyond doubt that the vehicle most likely to be involved in accidents causing death or injury is the motorcycle. In urban areas it is involved in 1,879 such accidents for every IOOm km travelled.. The comparable figures are: for the car or taxi 227; for light goods vehicles (up to 1,500kg) 294; for heavier lorries 213; and for passenger vehicles 753.
IT would be wrong to suppose that the Ministry of Transport and other authorities are not gravely concerned at these figures. What can be said is that the public are not reminded of them frequently enough through the usual information media. One can imagine what an outcry there would be if the figures could be made to present a different picture; if they showed, for example, that the lorry was nearly nine times as dangerous as the motorcycle instead of the other way round.
The report itself does not come to an entirely gloomy conclusion. It points out that for a number of years there has been a downward trend in the overall rates—that is to say in the rates per vehicle kilometre. For this, and for the substantial improvement in 1968, it gives a number of reasons. They do not include improvements in the roads themselves. The omission may be due to the knowledge that, as the British Road Federation pointed out the other week, the road programme is not keeping pace with the increase in the number of vehicles.