Road Transport Topics
Page 34
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In Parliament
By Our Special Parliamentary Correspondent
RAILWAY-L.P.T.B. AGREEMENT ONE-SIDED
THE Ministry of Transport circulated I a White Paper last week containing the agreement with the four main-line railway companies and London Transport. This is fully dealt with elsewhere in this issue.
Captain Wallace's statement on the matter provoked a brief discussion, in which several Members seemed to think that the railway interests were advantageously treated.
Mr. Attlee, for instance, said that the Minister had indicated that it was Vthin the power of the Government to say what traffic should be on the railways and to control alternative forms of traffic. Therefore it could, if it chose, enable the railways to get a much higher rate of profit than they had been able to earn under pre-war conditions.
Captain Wallace replied that all the transport available was wanted during the war.
CONTROL OF ALL TRANSPORT PROPOSED
HE following motion was proposed 1 by Mr. H. Morrison: That the interests of the country would be better served and the problems created by the present lack of unification solved by the establishment of a permanent national transport authority to own and control all forms of inland and coastwise transport.
In the year 1938, which had been left out of the computation of the railway revenue, the net revenue was £7,300,000 less than the £40,000,000, plus an additional £1,000,000. The less-profitable year had been deliberately omitted, Although guaranteeing this £40,000,000, the Government would actually pay for Government traffic that went on the railways and would no doubt argue that it was entitled to special terms.
The Government contemplated that
the railway companies were to be put into a better position than they were at the outbreak of hostilities. If the railways were not to be liable for excess profits tax, why was the Government permitting them to increase the profits arising out of an emergency, in which their competitors were being knocked out? If the physical possibilities of transport were upset by aerial bombardment, some authority over all forms should be in a position to decide which form was to take the place of that damaged.
In reply, Capt. Wallace said the Government must be in a position to direct the railway system, as a whole, irrespective of private interests of various undertakings. The. pooling of finance was obviously essential, and the L.P.T.B. was necessarily included. The foundation of the present plan was that the railway system should be operated on an economic basis under the railway Executive Committee. The year 1938 was a year in which railway revenues were abnormally depressed. The figure of £3,500,000 was some recognition of the extra work falling on the railways in war time. The L.P.T.B. was likely to be more of a liability than an asset. The agreement gave the railway companies and the L.P.T.B. no exemption from excess profits tax.
It was wrong to suggest that the Government intended to use its control to extract monopoly profits. it was intended that the controlled undertaking should operate on an economic basis. It was not possible to retain the jurisdiction of the Railway Rates Tribunal, but it was not intended that these safeguards should be abandoned. Negotiations were afoot already for fixing charges for Government traffic. There was no intention of increasing charges, simply to increase profits.
Ile could find no justification for the view that the railways were taking advantage of the present situation to buy up road-transport concerns, in order to have a strangle-hold. The proposed motion suggested that, in the middle of a war, a very radical change in transport organization should be made as a permanent measure.
Road transport presented a very different problem from that of the rail ways and the L.P.T.B. Here the Government was concerned with 500,000 vehicles, controlled by 200,000 separate individuals. Even if the Government could bay out the whole of the A and B licensees, he questioned whether the method of road transport
could be substantially altered. .
If everybody on the Government side, said Mr, B. Smith, thought the scheme good, it was a warrantable assumption that it was a bad one for the country. The motion was negatived by 186 to 119 votes.
EXTENSION OF "LANCASHIRE ' SYSTEM " URGED
TO reduce road accidents, Sir W. Brass suggested that the Metropolitan Police should experiment with the method, practised so successfully in Lancashire recently, of showing police cars clearly as a warning to careless drivers, instead of secret trapping, which aimed more at prosecutions and convictions than at prevention.
Sir John Anderson replied that the Commissioner had consistently taken the view that the police should encourage a high standard of behaviour on the part of road users, and accordingly the traffic patrol cars in the Metropolitan District normally showed a prominent "Police " sign and their crews wore amikirm. Experience had
shown, however, that it was necessary to supplement this by other methods, including fixed controls for detecting and dealing with drivers who did not observe the law, more especially on roads with a bad accident retoord.
Sir W. Brass remarked that in Lancashire the fatal accidents were reduced by 44 per cent, as a result of the method adopted in that county, and that in London prosecutions were 513 a week for parking offences and 460 a week for speed offences. Did not the Minister think teat the police spent their time in court rather than on the roads.
The Member might be surprised to learn, said Sir John, that the Lancashire method, to which he had referred with approval, was initiated in London three years ago.
NEW BLACK-OUT LIMIT DIFFICULT TO OBSERVE
IN view of the difficulty of estimating I speed without illuminating the speedometer, said Sir W. Brass, would the Minister issue instructions as to how the new 20 m.p.h. limit could be observed.
Captain Wallace answered that the new speed limit during the black-out applied only in localities where a 30 m.p.h. limit had previously been in force, and he did not think drivers were finding any additional difficulty in observing it.
Sir W. Brass asked whether the Ministry's experts said that the dashboard light ought to be alight or not, and received the answer that if the light showed outside the car it was an offence, but if the driver really did not know whether the car was going at 20 or 80 m.p.h. he could not think that, if he switched it on for a moment to look at the speedometer, he would be run in.
LIGHT SIGNALS FOR PEDESTRIANS
REGRET was expressed by Capt. Wallace that, owing to the diversion of his staff to other urgent war duties, • the circular he promised last July to issue to highway authorities, urging the provision of additional light signals for pedestrians, had been delayed, but the matter was now in hand and it would be issued in the near future.
LORRY DRIVING CRITICIZED IT was suggested by Colonel Sir M. Manningham-Buller that statistics giving the number of accidents in which lorries and cars, respectively, were involved would be worth collecting, in view of the number of occasions on which he saw lorries driven in an unsatisfactory way and no action taken. Capt. Wallace said that there were going to be sample investigations in certain selected areas and he thought that would give valuable data on the subject.