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Transport Decisions May Affect British Life

18th December 1959
Page 66
Page 66, 18th December 1959 — Transport Decisions May Affect British Life
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

Henry Spurrier Memorial Lecturer says Transport Must be Nourished by All Possible Means

„TRANSPORT is now such an important part of our economy and our society that the decisions which we take about it may well affect

our whole pattern of living in the decades ahead."

This was stated by Mr. L. I. Dunnett, Permanent Secretary to the Ministry cf Transport, when presenting the Henry Spurrier Memorial Lecture to the Institute of Transport on Monday.

In the interests of economic expansion, he said, transport must be nourished by all possible means, because it was one

of the principal" sinews of trade. To make life tolerable in this small island, the transport system must be so shaped that, while meeting the primary economic requirements, it created a social environment which would be acceptable, and, if possible, even desirable. Essential to any reasonable solution of the social problem was that a desirable balance should be maintained between public and private transport.

Whilst this country had not seen the full rigours of an automobile society subject to no restraint, the pressure of an ever-increasing rate of traffic on a road system inadequate to meet it was apparent. This led to arterial congestion and possible eventual strangulation.

Care must be taken, however, to avoid devastating cities. In other countries the provision of roads to facilitate the movement of private cars had failed to cure the problem of congestion, but had gone far to destroying the pleasures of urban life. Mr. Dunnett considered that it was possible both to preserve cities and to provide adequate facilities for the movement of people, goods and vehicles.

Combined Operation -Toachieve this would be more than an engineering exercise. It would have to be a combined operation of planners, architects and engineers. The pattern of roads could well determine the pattern of cities, and the availability of transport could control the prosperity or decay of localities.

So-called "transport policy" dealt with questions which involved economic, social and moral problems where value judgments were unavoidable. It had been said that if one wanted to set up an advisory body on economic problems the answer could be more or less determined by the choice of economists. There was the same risk, Mr. Dunnett suggested, in seeking to treat transport as a narrowly technical subject.

This might explain, the repeated demands that transport politics should give way to transport policy, or to a " policy, for transport." Such statements could merely indicate that a particular commentator chose to describe as no c28 policy a policy in which he took no pleasure. Those Who disliked the waste caused by competition might claim that a policy of uncontrolled, or even controlled, competition was bad, They were not, however, entitled to suggest that it was not a policy.

Transport was an important element in the selling cost of any manufactured article and particularly in food. Before measures were advocated to interfere with the user's choice, there must be clear reasons why such a course was desirable.Moreover, the growth of regulations must mean more civil servants.

The policy which, at present, applied in the field of transport had at least the merit that the cost to the country was known. Once measures were introduced to provide that certain types of traffic must go by specified means of transport, there was no obvious way of judging to what extent costs were being increased.

Delicate Problems

There were many suggestions for overruling purely economic tests in the provision of transport facilities. One argument was that transport should be provided primarily as a service, whether or not the users were prepared to pay enough to cover the costs. But if services were not paid for by the actual users, somebody else would have to do so. This at once raised delicate problems.

If the money was obtained from other transport users it was not easy to ensure that those who paid could best afford to do so, and the level of charges which the transport undertaking must fix might place it at a competitive disadvantage. If the money was secured from a source outside the transport undertaking, problems would arise of the proper relationship between the undertaking and the source of the funds.

Whilst Mr. Dunnett was not suggesting there were not many good cases where unprofitable services ought to be provided, the matter was not one that could be side-stepped by ingenious devices. Much was heard about the doctrine ofpooling track costs, but he did not know how much better off one was likely to be at the end of the exercise.

Some of the arguments in favour of pooling track costs seemed to rest on premises that were certainly arguable. For example, it was claimed it was in some ways unfair that the railways should have to bear the whole of their track costs, whereas road haulage vehicles carried only a proportion of the cost of the road. It was doubtful, Mr. Dunnett said. how far this state of affairs existed, because goods vehicles probably paid annually in taxation a sum in excess of the total expenditure on the roads. He asked whether it would be a selfevident proposition that a situation •in which goods vehicles bore only part of their track cost was unfair. It could be argued that, because the road catered for the private motorist as well as for the bus and goods vehicle, it was a more complex instrument of transport than the railways, which did not provide these additional benefits.

It was impossible to ignore track costs entirely and to use operating costs as the sole criterion of the cheapness of the service. In any transport ..system, the problem of renewing and laying new tracks must be faced and this necessitated decisions about investment and maintenance.

Relative to the users expenditure on road and rail transport in 1958, £472m. was spent on rail transport and £2,500m.

on road. The latter figure was subdivided as follows: Goods transport, £1,110m., cars and motorcycles. £1,050m., and buses and coaches, £340m. Comparing consumers' expenditure on transport and travel, the amount spent on motoring in 1948 was £105m., which by

1958 had risen to £726m.

Referring to total fixed investment and investment in inland transport in 1957, Mr. Dunnett showed that out of a total fixed investment of £3,920m. in Germany, the total investment in inland transport ,amounted to £769m.--£374m. on road vehicles and £176m. on roads. There was a surprising contrast with the relative figure for the United Kingdom, The investment in inland transport in this country was £708m., but the proportion spent on road vehicles was £545m., and only £38m. on roads.

Expressed as a proportion of the total consumer expenditure, transport and travel amounted to 5.4 per cent._ in 1948 and 8.4 per cent. in 1958. It was rational to expect that these proportions would grow in the future.

Choosing Schemes In dealing with the problem of expanded road programmes, Mr. Dunned said there was first the question of choosing between variouspossible schemes. Given finance, the proportion to be devoted to motorways, trunk roads or classified roads and urban works had first to be decided. At another level there had to be a choice among specific projects in different areas.. So far, there had been a concentration on routes carrying a preponderance of industrial traffic. The Ministry had " overload " data showing on which routes the burden fell most heavily.

The idea of a national road authority had been much canvassed. The Government had in the past retained direct responsibility for the construction of motorways and trunk roads, leaving the local highway authorities to deal with classified roads.

Mr. Dunnett could hardly conceive that the Government would yield this responsibility to another body without first requiring that it should maintain itself from revenue derived from user charges.

Tags

Organisations: Institute of Transport
People: L. I. Dunnett

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