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Vehicle increase not reduction needed

20th April 1973, Page 20
20th April 1973
Page 20
Page 20, 20th April 1973 — Vehicle increase not reduction needed
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

• If Britain was to prosper, it would need — and the self-styled environmentalists equally would need — an increase rather than a reduction in the number of heavy goods vehicles. This warning was given by Mr Noel Wynn (Robert Wynn and Sons Ltd, Newport, Mon, a former national chairman of the RHA and a member of the Association's eight-man executive board) at the annual dinner of the Association's Western area in Bristol last week.

Mr Wynn said that the most disturbing and disheartening feature of the controversy about heavy goods vehicles and the environment was that there was now a polarization of views and attitudes which, as in the case of any great issue of the day, would simply delay its eventual settlement.

Urged on by press and television, he continued, sides were taken, heroes or villains emerged and, as the conflict was sharpened, facts and realities went out of the window and the issue became confused with fantasies and engulfed in misplaced fervour.

Heavy goods vehicles were described absurdly as "juggernauts", said Mr Wynn. There were so-called environmentalists who emerged as crusaders determined to crush infidel hauliers: and there were such strange alliances as the Ramblers' Association, the Pedestrians' Association and the railway trade unions joining the crusade.

The environmental problems posed by heavy goods vehicles were not going to be reduced, he stressed, much less solved, by emotional demands to ban these vehicles, or by bland assertions that the goods could go by rail; or by exaggeration of the accidents in which goods vehicles were involved. They were not going to be solved by assumptions that many, if any, of the services of heavy goods vehicles could be dispensed with by a society which was intensely urbanized and highly industrialized.

The Department of the Environment was tackling the problems of lorries by numerous safety measures controlling lorry operation, by schemes for a national network of lorry parks and by a road-building programme with its emphasis on by-passing historical towns and picturesque villages. Unfortunately, it took such a long time to carry out the programme.

There were far too many towns which had waited and were waiting far too long, for by-passes which were obviously needed to relieve them, not only of the "through" passage of heavy goods vehicles but also of the horde of private cars which outnumbered them by 20 to one.


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