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Ask silly questions . .
by Janus
MORE attention during the electricity dispute has been paid to selected and sometimes tragic cases of hardship than to the comprehensive and long-term effect upon trade and industry and therefore the general public. There may be a lesson here for road operators in their perennial altercations with the self-styled champions of amenity and the environment.
There is nothing these interests would enjoy more than a contest based on a comparison between the benefit of the lorry to the economy and its disadvantages to the community. Nobody apart from the rabid railway fanciers disputes the part played by the lorry in raising the standard and variety of living. Unfortunately, most people find no difficulty in keeping this idea in ,their mind simultaneously with a much stronger wish that the lorry would stay away from them. from their neighbourhood and from their favourite haunts.
GENERAL acclamation has greeted the new report from the Civic Trust. It consists for the most part of details of accidents and delays involving lorries in historic towns and villages and in narrow streets and lanes. An accumulation of such cases is well calculated to arouse consternation, although a statistician might be of the opinion that it proves very little. Whatever he might say, there would be no sympathy for any suggestion that the vehicles concerned were carrying vital supplies which could not be brought to their destination by any other means.
The report recommends that heavy lorries should be made to keep to special routes and that there should be interchange points outside towns, where goods which had to travel inwards could be transferred to smaller vehicles. These are comforting proposals, and they have been put forward previously. Apparently it has not been thought necessary to enquire whether they are any more practicable than the even more frequently repeated declaration of faith in the ability of the railways to handle the traffic.
Door-to-door transit and the use of all but the smallest containers would be frustrated by the need for transhipment on the periphery of a town. The extra expense would be considerable, apart from the brake on progress. A road system giving alternate routes built to a satisfactory standard round all the centres of population of any size would be welcome to road users in general as well as to the amenity organizations. Whether the cost of the new roads needed would be equally acceptable is another matter.
AS if to close this particular loophole, a further suggestion has been made of a cost benefit enquiry, perhaps conducted by Mr Christopher Foster's new Centre for Urban Economics, into the heavy goods vehicle. Once again the idea is not original, and it may be that operators should vigorously oppose it.
They will remember that, when the Transport Act 1968 started its life as a Bill, the Minister of Transport at the time, Mrs Barbara Castle, was strongly of the opinion that the operator of the heavy lorry was not paying in taxation his proper share of the cost of the roads. On the 'strength of, this opinion the Bill contained proposals, subsequently dropped, for substantial increases in the tax: There was said to be accumulating in the Ministry a mass of irrefutable evidence to prove Mrs Castle's point. By way of an appetizer, while all this evidence was being sorted out, the railways produced their own elegant proof of the proposition that: the operator of the heavier vehicles had contrived to become a public liability as well as a nuisance.
SUBSEQUENT controversy impelled the Ministry to publish the conclusions so far reached, which were completely different from those of the railways. They showed the heavy lorry paying in taxation 1.8 times its share of total road costs.
The concept of the haulier as a state pensioner is too good to abandon simply because it has been disproved. It will be revived continually in the hope that one of these days yet another enquiry will produce the result desired.
Even if this were to happen, operators are entitled to cast doubts on its relevance. The premise on which the calculations are based may be false. It is too hastily assumed that, because the problem can be stated in mathematical terms—that is to say, as a comparison between two sets of costs—it must be capable of an equally precise solution. It may come to be realized that the issues after all are not so simple.
There has to be a road system. Users should certainly contribute towards the cost; and taxation seems to provide a better method than the old device of tolls for collecting the dues. The assumption that payment ought to be exactly equated with use is hardly sufficient even if it could be given effect. The benefit to the community has to be taken into account.
0 NCE a start has been made along this road, experience has already shown that the factors in the complicated equations then found necessary can be varied to produce whatever final result is preferred. Even the supposed independence of the investigating body is no guarantee of the truth. Widely different answers will still be produced. It is reasonable to conclude that the fault lies with the question, which should never have been posed in the first place. SPECULATION about sharing the cost of motorways is particularly sterile. It is acknowledged that the motorways have been built to meet Britain's industrial and economic needs and would not be there but for the lorry. If the commercial vehicle has to take the blame, it should also have whatever credit is available. It would be a strange reflection on the national economy if the goods vehicle operators—and perhaps also the many motorists who use their cars for business purposes—were expected to pay for the motorways, which would then be available at no cost to the ordinary motorist.
In addition, as the enquiries into track costs invariably point out, the motorways have been constructed to higher and therefore more expensive standards than would be required if only light vehicles were to use them. It is absurd—although this is a familiar piece of reasoning—to conclude from this that the operators of the heavier vehicles should be called upon to pay the whole of the extra cost of a route which, had they not existed, would not have been built at all.
AT least as far as motorways are concerned, and perhaps when other principal roads are under consideration, a sensible survey would show the irrelevance of the references still being made
to the notorious American experiments
which are supposed to show that the heavy lorry causes—the figure has been quoted so
often that it has come to have almost magical qualities-160,000 times as much damage to the road surface as the private car. The strength of the arguments based on this single statistic may be gauged from a recent parliamentary answer in the House of Lords to the effect that the lifespan of carriageways designed for large volumes of heavy traffic will substantially exceed the eight years for which the Strensham to Lydiate section of the M5 has lasted. Presumably, if only cars had used this road it would have lasted for well over 1m years.
There is little point in the computation. What is really needed rather than yet another cost benefit analysis is an investigation from the first principles into the kind of enquiry that is likely to produce some kind of useful result. It may be found in the end that no enquiry is needed.