Bird's Eye
Page 68
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ViewBY THE HAWK
TRTA vindicated
REG BROWN, secretary of London and Home Counties division of TRTA, regards the Greater London Council's recent report on road traffic (CM last week) as a "terrific vindication of the work of TRTA over the years". It is the first time, says Reg, that the lorry's real significance as an agent of prosperity has been officially recognized.
I gather that Reg Brown has reservations on one aspect of the report: he is not alone in feeling that attempts to control the use of private cars without some form of road pricing are doomed to failure. Perhaps the TRTA and other road transport organizations will soon be thinking of priority classes for private motorists! I've no doubt the Minister will be grateful for advice from any quarter on this thorny subject.
Missing Minister
DID you chance to see the ITV chat between David Frost and New York's Traffic Commissioner Barnes the other evening? It was very watchable television, even if nothing very startling emerged about the topic—London's traffic. But there was one significant psychological phenomenon that went unremarked.
David Frost asked how Mr. Barnes' relationship with our present Minister, Mrs. C., compared with his contacts with her predecessor. Our American Iriend immediately explained how well he used to get along with Ernest Marples.
Eh? Didn't we have a Transport Minister called Frazer, or Fraser, or something. . . ?
Six by Six Roving
DICTURED here is a rare bird indeed—a six-wheel-drive Land
Rover which four young men plan to drive on a trans-African expedition from Birmingham to Durban next February. They started with a normal petrol-engined station wagon version but when the original threesome grew to four they decided to add their own third axle and make it driven. Because of holiday commitments they left themselves with only six weeks to complete the conversion, which involved taking an extra propeller shaft into the transmission and modifying the existing gearbox. The Rover can still be used as a four-wheel-drive vehicle or can operate in high range or low range with six wheels driven.
The white body to reflect sun glare is set off by a Dayglo red roof to make it stand out in an emergency and the whole vehicle is fully equipped. John Baker, Graham Truman, Roy Wheale and Anthony Brown plan to follow the North African coastline, take ship through the Red Sea and then run through East Africa into South Africa.
Like Grandfather . .
EVERY year COMMERCIAL MOTOR makes an award to the most promising student at the College of Aeronautical and Automobile Engineering in Chelsea, London SW3. The 1966 award was presented last week at the annual prizegiving by William Swallow of Vauxhall Motors to John C. R. Dennis. The name rang an immediate bell and we asked the appropriate question. "Oh yes," he answered, "my grandfather was one of the original Dennis brothers."
I gather that John is now assistant to the managing director al Guildford. And if his impressive list of qualifications is afiYthing to go by we shall certainly be hearing more of this very able young man.
SOS via GPO
yOU are in desert country in the outback of Western Australia when your truck becomes bogged down in sand, What do you do? Well, according to the Leyland Journal, four men thus stranded climbed up a telegraph pole, broke a telephone insulator and cut a telephone wire on the main trunk phone route linking North-West Australia with Perth. The fault soon brought a postal linesman with four-wheel-drive vehicle and equipment to the scene.
The GPO might prove rather resentful if an operator tried the same thing here in Britain, but from what I hear from some lorry drivers of the state of roadside phone boxes that have beer savaged, we may yet be driven to it.
Congress goes Co-ordinated
AMOST unnoticed on this side of the Atlantic, the USA last month established a Department of Transportation, which Congress has approved some 30 years after such a measure was first mooted there—approval which has taken a fair amount ot pressure from the President.
It will be unnerving for some Britons to find the land of free enterprise and individual effort agreeing on a move which involve! co-ordination to a large degree, and whose joint urban studies sound remarkably like Mrs. Castle's conurbation schemes. But th( emphasis will remain in many ways on privately operated transpor and the US Under-secretary of Commerce for Transport has urge( reliance upon competition rather than regulation "to the greater possible extent consistent with the public interest". The new Department will control nearly 100,000 employees have a spending budget of about /2,000m. and will bring togethe many separate Federal organizations. One of the prime tasks wil be to co-ordinate transport on America's 3,620,457 miles of roads 230,000 miles of railways, 280,000 miles of airline routes an 25,000 miles of inland waterways. People in Britain sometime complain about buses that do not connect with trains but Americ. does things big: it can boast that not one of its major airports ha a direct rail link! Have ours?