FTA 'educates' the local
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authorities
A 28-PAGE illustrated guide to distribution methods and delivery vehicles is the latest development in the Freight Transport Association's campaign to keep local authorities informed about freight needs in the community.
The main aim of the booklet, Planning for Lorries, is to help the authorities understand the problems facing those responsible for the carriage and distribution of freight. Local authorities are now faced with wider traffic management powers and responsibilities than ever before — notably under the Dykes Act.
Copies of the booklet are being sent to all local authorities, and it is available from the FTA, price El. The Association is also running two seminars on urban freight planning, one in London and one in Manchester.
Planning for Lorries outlines distribution techniques, examines the transport needs of different sectors of industry and the community, and explains the effects of various traffic management methods. Photographs of vehicles making a wide variety of deliveries are accompanied by details of vehicle weight and size, so that local authority planners can be made familiar with current practices.
Special arrangements demanding purpose-built vehicles — eg a ramped van designed to take gar ments on wheeled racks — are illustrated, while appendices set out running costs and the transport-intensiveness of various industries. For example. transport costs are 90 per cent of the value of net output in the stone and slate quarrying industry, 35 per cent in milk and milk products and around 4 per cent in the footwear trade.
The booklet stresses the positive aspect of traffic managerneht designed to make the essential goods vehicle's task more efficient; at the press meeting to launch the booklet, in London on Monday, FTA president Bob Beckham and FTA director Hugh Featherstone agreed that the biggest single benefit — both to the freight operator and the local resident — would come from segrating through traffic from local traffic. In the extreme case, as much as 95 per cent of city-centre traffic was through traffic, and in few urban centres was the proportion less than 50 per cent.
They pointed out that London's Ringway 1 motorway would not only have taken much external through traffic off Lon: don's streets but would have routed the vast amount of London-generated "outward" industrial traffic to avoid the overcrowded radial routes.