bird's eye
Page 53
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view by the Hawk • 0? Oh!
You imagine Applications and Decisions to be dull lists, perhaps? Not a bit of it. The Metropolitan traffic area publication, for instance, is a most interesting place for meeting a wonderful cross-section of the people who live, work or play in the swinging capital.
With time to spare you can play a guessing game with a standard question: "I wonder what he wants an operator's licence for?" For example, issue number 1519 carries an application from a W. Fittipaldi with an operating base at 40 Pall Mall, St James's, SW1.
Now the Royal Automobile Club, hushed gathering place of senior motorists, is a funny place to park a goods vehicle, don't you think? But when I probed I found that the vehicle will seldom be at home: as if you hadn't guessed, it turns out to be a racing car transporter which elder brother Wilson is operating for racing driver Emerson.
• Hercules unchained Even the young can have fun with As and Ds. If a pop group called The Faces ever springs to dazzling prominence on the charts it is a piece of one-upmanship to know that they have an operating base at 90 Wardour Street — and presumably something more imposing than the usual battered pop group Transit, or they wouldn't need an 0 licence.
There is tragedy as well as fascination hidden in those unprepossessing covers. How about this in a recent North Western edition:—
S teptoe and Sons. One vehicle, and one vehicle to be acquired.
Does this mean that the famous Hercules really has at last passed on to that great corral in the sky!
• Stargazing
Mind you, the traffic courts themselves are less exciting places than they were in the old days of carriers' licensing. The regular battle of wits between contesting advocates has almost disappeared and there is much less scope for pithy comment by the LAs.
However, the men on the bench do manage the odd quip now and again. One I met recently was amused at the attitude of an applicant who expressed his opinion of the 1968 Act in no uncertain terms and then rather courageously questioned the LA's right to ask for certain information to be produced.
have very wide-ranging powers in the terms of the Act," said the LA, "in fact, I can ask you to produce almost anything even your horoscope!"
• Cut-price solutions I'm not sure that the EC MT entourages and their ladies really grasped the playful English humour which new about their heads when the City of London gave them dinner in the Mansion House last week, though the natives enjoyed it.
First we had the locum Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Bellinger, disclaiming any novelty value in joining the EEC because, after all, we'd spent 400 years in that earlier Common Market run by the Romans. And he recalled that among the demonstrating antiMarketeers of those days was Queen Boadicea, whose scythe-equipped chariots exceeded the maximum permitted width and caused a serious traffic hazard.
"So even in the first century AD, it seems, lady drivers had highly individual ideas about traffic rules. We are not told whether a road safety committee reported on the problem, or a Council of Ministers passed any resolution on it."
• Nothing new
The "Boadicea solution" seemed to appeal to John Peyton; replying to the Lord Mayor, he suggested that it might be after all the best way out of the problem of reconciling vehicle dimensions.
Commenting that ordinary people spend a great deal of their time stationary in one type of vehicle or another, Mr Peyton also wondered whether they reflected during their delays upon "the total idiocy of those who make the arrangements of which they are the victims".
As if this were not enough breastbeating on behalf of his fellow Ministers and himself, he took up the Lord Mayor's expressed hope that the ECMT meeting had come up with some new transport ideas. Mr Peyton was aghast. If any of his colleagues in ECMT had a really new, original idea it would be regarded by the rest as highly dangerous.
Did I imagine it, or was there really a stunned international silence?
• By default
"Everyone in road haulage must be getting tired of hearing about the lorry menace, especially as the comments are so often illinformed, but prejudice has to be reckoned with It plays a big role in politics rightly, because reconciling prejudices is partly what democracy is about — and therefore impinges on a road haulier's life."
That perceptive summary is the introduction to one of the best articles I have yet read about road haulage and the environment: it appears in the current issue of
Freightway, the NFC journal, and is written by Richard Casement, who is transport correspondent of The Economist.
After showing up the anti-lorry brigade as having a rather muddled but nonetheless effective case, he concludes that "a lot of the fire could be taken out of the anti-lorry and environmentalists' lobby if the road haulage industry presented its excellent case more strongly".
How many more times does it have to be said befOre we see a really professional, concerted effort by the road transport industry?
• Dry run
When lying second to World Champion motorcycle racer Giacomo Agostini in the recent Isle of Man TT — and only eight miles from the finish — John Williams ran out of petrol. For a living he drives a 2000gal tanker for Texaco in the Cheshire area.