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Railways the key to EEC haulage
THREE BASIC attitudes to land transport exist among members of the EEC, explains Dr Jurgen Erdmenger, director, directorate-general for Transport, Commission of the European Communities, in his book The European Community Transport Policy {Gower; £14.50 — plus £1.45 post and packaging).
The Benelux countries and the peripheral members — the UK, Denmark, Greece and Republic of Ireland — primarily seek freedom of movement for road haulage and inland waterway companies in order to open up a large economic area for their transport operations.
West Germany and Italy, however, stress the need for harmonising the conditions of competition. This has the twin aim of protecting their own road haulage companies and their own national railways. France occupies an intermediate position. However, this book is subtitled "Towards a common transport policy." What about achieving just that?
Horst Seefeld, chairman of the European Parliament's committee on transport, in a foreword argues that it will not come about by a handful of officials busily planning in Brussels. "What is needed is stronger pressure from the general public for possible solutions," he says.
Dr Erdmenger explains the background to transport in the EEC, and has chapters on "Aims and programme" and "The method underlying the common transport policy." He devotes as much space to both sea and air as to inland transport.
From his table on the trends in passenger and goods traffic, he suggests we deduce the basic attitude of individual states to transport policy.
Private car traffic in the 19 years to 1986 increased dramatically. Only in Denmark and Germany did bus and coach traffic alter significantly: Denmark in creased from 3,400 million passenger-kilometres to 9,500 and Germany 53,200 to 69,300. Similarly rail passenger traffic was pretty steady, but France upped from 38,400 to 51,100 and Italy 27,505 to 42,140.
Goods traffic is measured in million tonne-kilometres. The The rail goods figures are much more stable: the biggest drop is around 3,000 in the UK to 20,448 and the biggest rise some 3,000 in France to 67,900.
So what about Dr Erdmenger's "pragmatic approach in practice"? The EEC Treaty said international carriage of goods by road between member states should be liberalised as far as possible.
"As far as the removal of the many authorisation and quota systems is concerned," he says, "the so-called First Directive has introduced a number of relaxations for certain types of transport operations, mostly those occurring in frontier areas.
In the course of the years, some 35 per cent of total goods transport by road between member states has been liberalised by the various amendments to this directive. It is the Community quota, which totalled some 4,000 authorisations in 1982, which is primarily responsible for permitting triangular traffic operations between the member states.
"But only about five per cent of the goods transported by road between member states are covered by the Community licences issued under this system.
"A major part of international road haulage within the Community is still subject to bilateral quotas. At least the adaptation of these quotas is now governed by common criteria and procedures."
The author talks of a small record of achievement by the EEC in this area and argues that it must be admitted that there is little point therefore in concentrating attention — "in an unbalanced way" — on liberalisation. He calls for more attention to road safety, environmental protection, energy supply, town and country planning and social and employment policies. And he reckons that unless the railways are helped financially at EEC level it will be impossible to make further progress in international road haulage.
Gower Publishing Company, Gower House, Croft Road, Aldershot, Hampshire.
A wee tram for the road
THIS JOURNAL has historically been an opponent of the tramcar. As a sound supporter of the cause of motorised commercial vehicles, it was happy to embrace the findings of the 1930 Royal Commission on Transport when it said the tram was an outmoded and offensive form of transport. Put to the test, that view might persist today among our thinkers.
But that does not mean we lack a soul. When a copy of The Glasgow Tramcar (Scottish Tramway Museum Society, £16.95 (home) £19.95 (overseas) arrived in the office, there were buds of nostalgia all set to bloom. It is a mighty-tome which is a worthy result of a lifetime's research by students of the Glasgow tram system, notably by Ian Stewart who edited the book and who provided some beautifully executed colour drawings of the vehicles.
Glasgow's tram system was Britain's last proper street network, and its demise in 1962 provoked a genuine sense of loss among citizens who had no knowledge or enthusiasts' sentiment about the vehicles as such.
Stewart and his team most certainly possess both, and have poured thousands of hours of work into amassing precise technical details of the electric trams operated from 1896 to 1962. That is no mean task as many of those vehicles clocked up several decades of life and often underwent drastic rebuilds.
Glasgow's Standard tram, first built in the 1890s and still being built thirty years later, was a classic of its age, and the services of an eminent architect for one stage of the reconstruction of the Standards ensured their blending with the city buildings.
Later vehicles, such as the 1937 Coronations and 1948 Cunarders, like most of the fleet built in the city's own tramcar works, helped keep Glasgow's fleet in the forefront of development of the tram.
The book is lavishly illustrated, in black and white and colour, and highly informative text is complemented by tabular details of each vehicle owned, from construction to destruction or, in the case of a sizeable number, preservation in Britain and abroad.
Perhaps The Glasgow Tramcar is not a book to be read from cover to cover like a novel, but anyone interested in the subject will derive hours of interest from dipping into the sections to gain further insight into a transport system which, in its time, was a model studied throughout the world.
Scottish Tramway Museum Society, PO Box 78, Glasgow G3 6ER, ALM I AM GLAD to see the Canadian bi-monthly Timeless Tales of Trucking appearing in better format — especially since we have provided a 1963-road test report by Ron Cater of a Mack/Northern 32-ton-gross tractor trailer as a reprint! 777 includes a Sell and Swap feature and is published by the Antique Truck Society of Canada (PO Box 97, Station "A", Rexdale, Ontario M9W 51(9).